f very equivocal
power: we cannot embrace one faith and reject another at the word of
command.

It is a curious question to decide how far punishments and rewards may
be made effectual to determine the religion of nations and generations
of men. They are often unsuccessful. There is a feeling in the human
heart, that prompts us to reject with indignation this species of
tyranny. We become more obstinate in clinging to that which we are
commanded to discard. We place our honour and our pride in the firmness
of our resistance. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."
Yet there is often great efficacy in persecution. It was the policy of
the court of Versailles that brought almost to nothing the Huguenots of
France. And there is a degree of persecution, if the persecuting party
has the strength and the inexorableness to employ it, that it is perhaps
beyond the prowess of human nature to stand up against.

The mind of the enquiring man is engaged in a course of perpetual
research; and ingenuousness prompts us never to be satisfied with the
efforts that we have made, but to press forward. But mind, as well as
body, has a certain vis inertiae, and moves only as it is acted upon by
impulses from without. With respect to the adopting new opinions, and
the discovery of new truths, we must be indebted in the last resort,
either to books, or the oral communications of our fellow-men, or to
ideas immediately suggested to us by the phenomena of man or nature. The
two former are the ordinary causes of a change of judgment to men:
they are for the most part minds of a superior class only, that are
susceptible of hints derived straight from the external world, without
the understandings of other men intervening, and serving as a conduit to
the new conceptions introduced. The two former serve, so to express it,
for the education of man, and enable us to master, in our own persons,
the points already secured, and the wisdom laid up in the great magazine
of human knowledge; the last imparts to us the power of adding to the
stock, and carrying forward by one step and another the improvements of
which our nature is susceptible.

It is much that books, the unchanging records of the thoughts of men in
former ages, are able to impart to us. For many of the happiest moments
of our lives, for many of the purest and most exalted feelings of the
human heart, we are indebted to them. Education is their province;
we derive from them