ns: public reason in its gradual progress separates
the savage from the civilized state. Without the one, men would resemble
wild beasts in their dens; without the other, they would be speedily
converted into hordes of barbarians or banditti. Sir Walter Scott, in
his zeal to restore the spirit of loyalty, of passive obedience and
non-resistance as an acknowledgment for his having been created a
Baronet by a Prince of the House of Brunswick, may think it a fine thing
to return in imagination to the good old times, "when in Auvergne
alone, there were three hundred nobles whose most ordinary actions were
robbery, rape, and murder," when the castle of each Norman baron was
a strong hold from which the lordly proprietor issued to oppress and
plunder the neighbouring districts, and when the Saxon peasantry
were treated by their gay and gallant tyrants as a herd of loathsome
swine--but for our own parts we beg to be excused; we had rather live
in the same age with the author of Waverley and Blackwood's Magazine.
Reason is the meter and alnager in civil intercourse, by which each
person's upstart and contradictory pretensions are weighed and approved
or found wanting, and without which it could not subsist, any more than
traffic or the exchange of commodities could be carried on without
weights and measures. It is the medium of knowledge, and the polisher of
manners, by creating common interests and ideas. Or in the words of a
contemporary writer, "Reason is the queen of the moral world, the soul
of the universe, the lamp of human life, the pillar of society, the
foundation of law, the beacon of nations, the golden chain let down from
heaven, which links all accountable and all intelligent natures in one
common system--and in the vain strife between fanatic innovation and
fanatic prejudice, we are exhorted to dethrone this queen of the world,
to blot out this light of the mind, to deface this fair column, to break
in pieces this golden chain! We are to discard and throw from us with
loud taunts and bitter execrations that reason, which has been the lofty
theme of the philosopher, the poet, the moralist, and the divine, whose
name was not first named to be abused by the enthusiasts of the French
Revolution, or to be blasphemed by the madder enthusiasts, the advocates
of Divine Right, but which is coeval with, and inseparable from the
nature and faculties of man--is the image of his Maker stamped upon him
at his birth, the understa