ce to
his fellow-creatures, was really much more respectful to his Maker, and a
great deal manlier and more to his credit, than if he had yielded the
whole matter, and pretended that men had not rights as well as duties.
The same logic which had carried him to certain conclusions with
reference to human nature, this same irresistible logic carried him
straight on from his text until he arrived at those other results, which
not only astonished his people, as was said, but surprised himself. He
went so far in defence of the rights of man, that he put his foot into
several heresies, for which men had been burned so often, it was time, if
ever it could be, to acknowledge the demonstration of the argumentum ad
ignem. He did not believe in the responsibility of idiots. He did not
believe a new-born infant was morally answerable for other people's acts.
He thought a man with a crooked spine would never be called to account
for not walking erect. He thought if the crook was in his brain, instead
of his back, he could not fairly be blamed for any consequence of this
natural defect, whatever lawyers or divines might call it. He argued,
that, if a person inherited a perfect mind, body, and disposition, and
had perfect teaching from infancy, that person could do nothing more than
keep the moral law perfectly. But supposing that the Creator allows a
person to be born with an hereditary or ingrafted organic tendency, and
then puts this person into the hands of teachers incompetent or
positively bad, is not what is called sin or transgression of the law
necessarily involved in the premises? Is not a Creator bound to guard
his children against the ruin which inherited ignorance might entail on
them? Would it be fair for a parent to put into a child's hands the
title-deeds to all its future possessions, and a bunch of matches? And
are not men children, nay, babes, in the eye of Omniscience?--The
minister grew bold in his questions. Had not he as good right to ask
questions as Abraham?

This was the dangerous vein of speculation in which the Reverend Doctor
Honeywood found himself involved, as a consequence of the suggestions
forced upon him by old Sophy's communication. The truth was, the good
man had got so humanized by mixing up with other people in various
benevolent schemes, that, the very moment he could escape from his old
scholastic abstractions, he took the side of humanity instinctively, just
as the Father of the Fai