eir judgments loads them to go on freely in the same path
in which they have walked so long, here and there it may be departing
from it where they find a better line, but going on towards the same
object, and generally in the same direction?

What has been the experience of my life,--the constantly observing the
natural union between sense and modesty; the perfect compatibility of
respect for instruction with freedom of judgment; the seeing how Nature
herself teaches us to proportion the implicitness of our belief to our
consciousness of ignorance: to rise gradually and gently from a state of
passively leaning, as it were, on the arm of another, to resting more
and more of our weight on our own limbs, and, at last, to standing
alone, this has perpetually exemplified our relations, as individuals,
to the Church. Taught by her, in our childhood and youth, under all
circumstances; taught by her, in the great majority of instances,
through our whole lives; never, in any case, becoming so independent of
her as we do in riper years, of the individual instructor of our youth;
she has an abiding claim on our respect, on our deference, on our
regard: but if it should be, that her teaching contained any thing at
variance with God's word, we should perceive it more or less clearly,
according to our degrees of knowledge; we should trust or mistrust our
judgment, according to our degree of knowledge; but in the last resort,
as we suppose that even a young boy might be sure that his book was in
error, in the case of a manifest false print, so there may be things so
certainly inconsistent with Scripture, that a common Christian may be
able to judge of them, and to say that they are like false prints in his
lesson, they are manifest errors, not to be followed, but avoided. So
far he may be said to judge of his teacher; but not the less will he
respect and listen to her authority in general, unless she has herself
made the slightest error ruinous to her authority by claiming to be in
all points, great or small, alike infallible.

Men crave a general rule for their guidance at all times, and under all
circumstances; whereas life is a constant call upon us to consider how
far one general rule, in the particular case before us, is modified by
another, or where one rule should be applied, and where another. To
separate humility from idolatry, conscience from presumption, is often
an arduous task: to different persons there is a different be