authority; reason, which is bold in the
affairs of men, and humble in its permitted intercourse with God; reason,
as Fox and Hume, and all historians worthy the title, convince us, steps
not out of its province when it interposes to rectify misleading records or
historical assertions; and in no case is it more eminently required than in
the history of the order of Jesus, which passion, interest, and ability
have united to disfigure. What is meant by the allusion to _stern lights_ I
am at a loss to conjecture. I am not much disposed, in a work of this kind,
to go into verbal or rhetorical criticism; but when a man writes with such
pompous and despotic decision as this author does, one has a right to
expect of him, when he amuses himself with figurative language, a clear
notion of what he aims at. When, therefore, he insinuates that such
reasoners as Hume {44} and Fox are reprehensible for serving records of
past ages like _stern lights_ of a vessel, instead of like modern moons to
carriages (for moons evidently ran in the writer's head), we are puzzled
between what he says and what he means. From his own words we are bound to
take it for granted that he means to condemn reasoning, and to approve of a
pertinacious adherence to records, however inconsistent and contradictory;
whereas, by his intended simile, he blames the reasoners for making use of
records; for, if stern lights must serve as a simile, records are certainly
more analogous to them than to carriage moons, which are concurrent aids,
that show the driver nothing but the way before him, and are not of the
least use to those travellers who are coming after on the same road; stern
lights, on the contrary, are intimations at sea, from those who go before
to those who follow, of the track to be pursued. The truth, I believe, is,
that the author does not know the use of stern lights, and imagines that
mariners illuminate aft to amuse fishes in {45} the wakes of their ships.
Records, no doubt, are moral, as ship lanthorns are physical lights to
guide; but treachery or ignorance, in either, may mislead, in which case
the seaman will consult his compass and the inquirer his reason[21].

{46}

But to return from this digression to Rapin. We learn from him, that
Elizabeth herself, {47} whom no one will charge with over-tenderness,
reprobated the cruelties practised upon the catholics. "Meanwhile," says
he, "the queen sent for the judges of the realm, and sharply reproved