gment in the question in hand, shall
be entirely shut out, shall be killed, and fail to offer themselves to
my perceptions.

It is a curious circumstance which Pope, a man of eminent logical power
and acuteness, relates, that, having at his command in his youth a
collection of all the tracts that had been written on both sides in the
reign of James the Second, he applied himself with great assiduity
to their perusal, and the consequence was, that he was a Papist and
Protestant by turns, according to the last book he read(31).

(31) Correspondence with Atterbury, Letter IV.

This circumstance in the structure of the human understanding is well
known, and is the foundation of many provisions that occur in the
constitution of political society. How each man shall form his creed,
and arrange those opinions by which his conduct shall be regulated, is
of course a matter exclusively subjected to his own discretion. But,
when he is called upon to act in the name of a community, and to decide
upon a question in which the public is interested, he of necessity feels
himself called upon to proceed with the utmost caution. A judge on the
bench, a chancellor, is not contented with that sudden ray of mental
illumination to which an ingenuous individual is often disposed to yield
in an affair of abstract speculation. He feels that he is obliged to
wait for evidence, the nature of which he does not yet anticipate, and
to adjourn his decision. A deliberative council or assembly is aware of
the necessity of examining a question again and again. It is upon this
principle that the two houses of the English parliament are required to
give a first, a second and a third reading, together with various other
forms and technicalities, to the provision that is brought before them,
previously to its passing into a law. And there is many a fundamental
dogma and corner-stone of the sentiments that I shall emphatically call
my own, that is of more genuine importance to the individual, than to a
nation is a number of those regulations, which by courtesy we call acts
of parliament.

Nothing can have a more glaring tendency to subvert the authority of my
opinion among my fellow-men, than instability. "What went ye out into
the wilderness to see" said Jesus Christ: "a reed shaken with the wind?"
We ought at all times to be open to conviction. We ought to be ever
ready to listen to evidence. But, conscious of our human frailty, it
is seldom that