is it likely that they would all at once discard this belief,
because there researches were unsuccessful? If they were to do this,
they would do it against all the rules of philosophizing, and against
the force of their own habits. I say, that analogical is a part of
philosophical reasoning, and that they would rather argue, that, as such
effects had been uniformly produced, so they would probably still be
produced, if their researches were crowned with success. The tendency
then of philosophical knowledge is far otherwise than has been supposed.
And it makes highly in favour of the study of these sciences, that those
who have cultivated them the most, such as Newton, and Boyle, and
others, have been found among the ablest advocates for religion.[55]

[Footnote 55: I by no means intend to say, that philosophy leads to the
religion called Christianity, but that it does to Theism, which is the
foundation of it.]

I come now, to the general arguments used by the Quakers against human
learning, the first of which is, that they who possess it are too apt to
reduce religion to reason, and to strip it of the influence of the
Spirit. But this is contrary, as a general position, to all fact. We
find no mention of this in history. The fathers of the church were the
most eminent for learning in their own days, and these insisted upon the
Influence of the Spirit in spiritual concerns, as one of the first
articles of their faith. The reformers, who succeeded these, were men of
extensive erudition also, and acknowledged the same great principle. And
nine-tenths, I believe, of the Christians of the present, day, among
whom we ought to reckon nine-tenths of the men of learning also, adopt a
similar creed.

Another general argument is, that learning is apt to lead to conceit and
pride, or to a presumed superiority of intellect, in consequence of
which men raise themselves in their own estimation, and look down upon
others as creatures of an inferior order of race. To this I may answer,
that as prodigies are daily produced in nature, though they may be but
as one to a hundred thousand when compared with the perfect things of
their own kind, so such phenomena may occasionally make their appearance
in the world. But as far as my own experience goes, I believe the true
tendency of learning to be quite the reverse. I believe the most learned
to be generally the most humble, and to be the most sensible of their
own ignorance. Men, in the c