poils a good work in his
own century, in order that another man, as yet unborn, may not have the
opportunity of bringing it happily to perfection in the next. He may
seem to the world to be nothing else than a bold champion for the truth
and a martyr to free opinion, when he is just one of those persons whom
the competent authority ought to silence; and, though the case may not
fall within that subject-matter in which that authority is infallible,
or the formal conditions of the exercise of that gift may be wanting, it
is clearly the duty of authority to act vigorously in the case. Yet its
act will go down to posterity as an instance of a tyrannical
interference with private judgment, and of the silencing of a reformer,
and of a base love of corruption or error; and it will show still less
to advantage, if the ruling power happens in its proceedings to evince
any defect of prudence or consideration. And all those who take the part
of that ruling authority will be considered as time-servers, or
indifferent to the cause of uprightness and truth; while, on the other
hand, the said authority may be accidentally supported by a violent
ultra party, which exalts opinions into dogmas, and has it principally
at heart to destroy every school of thought but its own.

Such a state of things may be provoking and discouraging at the time, in
the case of two classes of persons; of moderate men who wish to make
differences in religious opinion as little as they fairly can be made;
and of such as keenly perceive, and are honestly eager to remedy,
existing evils,--evils, of which divines in this or that foreign country
know nothing at all, and which even at home, where they exist, it is not
every one who has the means of estimating. This is a state of things
both of past time and of the present. We live in a wonderful age; the
enlargement of the circle of secular knowledge just now is simply a
bewilderment, and the more so, because it has the promise of continuing,
and that with greater rapidity, and more signal results. Now these
discoveries, certain or probable, have in matter of fact an indirect
bearing upon religious opinions, and the question arises how are the
respective claims of revelation and of natural science to be adjusted.
Few minds in earnest can remain at ease without some sort of rational
grounds for their religious belief; to reconcile theory and fact is
almost an instinct of the mind. When then a flood of facts, ascertai