site of
dignified, pleasant, or improving. They who are enamoured of 'the common
road,' unless handsomely paid for journeying thereon, must be slavish in
feeling, and willing submitters to every indignity sanctioned by custom,
that potent enemy of truth, which from time immemorial has been 'the law
of fools.'

Every day experience demonstrates the fallibility of majorities. It
palpably exhibits, too, the danger as well as the folly of presuming the
unpopularity of certain speculative opinions an evidence of their
falsity. A public intellect, untainted by gross superstition, can
nowhere be appealed to. Even in this favoured country, 'the envy of
surrounding nations and admiration of the world,' the multitude are
anything but patterns of moral purity and intellectual excellence. They
who assure us _vox populi_ is the voice of God, are fairly open to the
charge of ascribing to Him what orthodox pietists inform us exclusively
belongs to the Father of evil. If by 'voice of God' is meant something
different from noisy ebullitions of anger, intemperance, and fanaticism,
they who would have us regulate our opinions in conformity therewith are
respectfully requested to reconcile mob philosophy with the sober
dictates of experience, and mob law with the law of reason.

A writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ [15:1] assures us 'the majority of
every nation consists of rude uneducated masses, ignorant, intolerant,
suspicious, unjust, and uncandid, without the sagacity which discovers
what is right, or the intelligence which comprehends it when pointed
out, or the morality which requires it to be done.' And yet religious
philosophers are fond of quoting the all but universal horror of Atheism
as a formidable argument against that much misunderstood creed.

The least reflection will suffice to satisfy any reasonable man that the
speculative notions of rude, uneducated masses, so faithfully described
by the Scotch Reviewer, are for the most part grossly absurd and
consequently the reverse of true. If the masses of all nations are
ignorant, intolerant, suspicions, unjust, and uncandid, without the
sagacity which discovers what is right, or the intelligence which
comprehends it when pointed out, or the morality which requires it to be
done; who with the least shadow of claim to be accounted reasonable will
assert that a speculative heresy is the worse for being unpopular, or
that Atheism is false, and must be demoralising in its influence