is refused under pretence that it is light or counterfeit, without any proof given either by the money scales, or by sounding the coin in dispute together with one of known goodness. We may carry the metaphor still farther. It is by no means a rare case, that the money is returned because it had a different sound from that of a counterfeit, the brassy blotches on which seemed to blush for the impudence of the silver wash in which they were inisled, and rendered the mock coin a lively emblem of a lie selfdetected. Still oftener does the rejection take place by a mere act of insolence, and the blank assertion that the candidate's money is light or bad, is justified by a second assertion that he is a fool or knave for offering it.

The second point of difference explains the preceding, and accounts both for the want of established door-keepers in the auditory of literature, and for the practices of those, who under the name of reviewers volunteer this office. There is no royal mintage for arguments, no ready means by which all men alike, who possess common sense, may determine their value and intrinsic worth at the first sight or sound. Certain forms of natural logic indeed there are, the inobservance of which is decisive against an argument; but the strictest adherence to them is no proof of its actual, though an indispensable condition of its possible, validity. In the arguer's own conscience there is, no doubt, a certain value, and an infallible criterion of it, which applies to all arguments equally; and this is the sincere conviction of the mind itself. But for those to whom it is offered, there are only conjectural marks; yet such as will seldom mislead any man of plain sense, who is both honest and observant.

These characteristics I have attempted to comprise in a previous part of this work,* and to describe them more at large in the essays that follow, on the communication of truth. If the honest warmth, which results from the strength of the particular conviction, be tempered by the modesty which belongs to the sense of general fallibility; if the emotions, which accompany all vivid perceptions, are preserved distinct from the expression of personal passions, and from appeals to them in the heart of others; if the reasoner asks no respect for the opinion, as his opinion, but only in proportion as it is acknowledged by that reason, which is common to all men; and, lastly, if he supports an * P. 41.-Ed.

opinion on no subject which he has not previously examined, and furnishes proof both that he possesses the means of inquiry by his education, or the nature of his pursuits, and that he has endeavored to avail himself of those means; then, and with these conditions, every human being is authorized to make public the grounds of any opinion which he holds, and of course the opinion itself, as the object of them. Consequently, it is the duty of all men, not always indeed to attend to him, but, if they do, to attend to him with respect, and with a sincere as well as apparent toleration. I should offend against my own laws, if I disclosed at present the nature of my convictions concerning the degree, in which this virtue of toleration is possessed and practised by the majority of my contemporaries and countrymen. But if the contrary temper is felt and shown in instances where all those conditions have been observed, which have been stated at full in the preliminary essays that form the introduction to this work, and the chief of which I have just now recapitulated; I have no hesitation in declaring that whatever the opinion may be, and however opposite to the hearer's or reader's previous persuasions, one or other of all of the following defects must be taken for granted. Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on which his own faith is built; which, therefore, neither is nor can be his own faith, though it may very easily be his imagined interest, and his habit of thought. In this case he is angry, not at the opposition to truth, but at the interruption of his own indolence and intellectual slumber, or possibly at the apprehension, that his temporal advantages are threatened, or at least the ease of mind, in which he had been accustomed to enjoy them. secondly, he has no love of truth for its own sake; no reverence for the divine command to seek earnestly after it, which command, if it had not been so often and solemnly given by revelation, is yet involved and expressed in the gift of reason, and in the dependence of all our virtues on its development. He has no moral and religious awe for freedom of thought, though accompanied both by sincerity and humility; nor for the right of free communication which is ordained by God, together with that freedom, if it be true that God has ordained us to live in society, and has made the progressive improvement of all and each of us to depend on the reciprocal aids, which directly or indirectly each supplies to all, and all to each. But if his alarm and his conse

quent intolerance, are occasioned by his eternal rather than temporal interests, and if, as is most commonly the case, he does not deceive himself on this point, gloomy indeed, and erroneous beyond idolatry, must have been his notions of the Supreme Being! For surely the poor heathen who represents to himself the divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and mercy, under multiplied and forbidden symbols in the powers of nature or the souls of extraordinary men, practises a superstition which (though at once the cause and effect of blindness and sensuality) is less incompatible with inward piety and true religious feeling than the creed of that man, who in the spirit of his practice, though not in direct words, loses sight of all these attributes, and substitutes instead of the adoptive and cheerful boldness, which our new alliance with God requires," a "servile and thrall-like fear."* Such fear-ridden and thence angry believers, or rather acquiescents, would do well to re-peruse the book of Job, and observe the sentence passed by the All-just on the friends of the sufferer, who had hoped, like venal advocates, to purchase the favor of God by uttering truths of which in their own hearts they had neither conviction nor comprehension. The truth from the lips did not atone for the lie in the heart, while the rashness of agony in the searching and bewildered complainant, was forgiven in consideration of his sincerity and integrity in not disguising the true dictates of his reason and conscience, but avowing his incapability of solving a problem by his reason, which before the Christian dispensation the Almighty was pleased to solve only by declaring it to be beyond the limits of human reason. Having insensibly passed into a higher and more serious style than I had first intended, I will venture to appeal to these self-obscurants, whose faith dwells in the land of the shadow of darkness, these

* Milton Of Reformation in England, B. i. sub initio. For in very deed, the superstitious man by his good-will is an atheist; but being scared from thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his fear: which fear of his as also his hope, fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal; and all the inward acts of worship issuing from the native strength of the soul, run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality. Hence men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter, and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the spirit.'-Ibid.--Ed.

papists without a pope, and protestants who protest only against all protesting; and will appeal to them in words which yet more immediately concern them as Christians, in the hope that they will lend a fearless ear to the learned apostle, when he both assures and labors to persuade them that they were called in Christ to all perfectness in spiritual knowledge and full assurance of understanding in the mystery of God. There can be no end without means: and God furnishes no means that exempt us from the task and duty of joining our own best endeavors. The original stock, or wild olive-tree of our natural powers, was not given us to be burned or blighted, but to be grafted on. We are not only not forbidden to examine and propose our doubts, so it be done with humility and proceed from a real desire to know the truth; but we are repeatedly commanded so to do; and with a most unchristian spirit must that man have read the preceding passages, if he can interpret any one sentence as having for its object to excuse a too numerous class, who, to use the words of St. Augustine, quærunt non ut fidem sed ut infidelitatem inveniant ;-such as examine not to find reasons for faith, but pretexts for infidelity.

ESSAY XII.

Such is the iniquity of men, that they suck in opinions as wild asses do the wind, without distinguishing the wholesome from the corrupted air, and then live upon it at a venture: and when all their confidence is built upon zeal and mistake, yet therefore, because they are zealous and mistaken, they are impatient of contradiction. JEREMY TAYLOR.*

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Ir," observes the eloquent bishop in the work, from which my motto is selected, "an opinion plainly and directly brings in a crime, as if a man preaches treason or sedition, his opinion is not his excuse. A man is nevertheless a traitor because he believes it lawful to commit treason; and a man is a murderer if he kills his brother unjustly, although he should think that he

* Epist. Dedicat. to the Liberty of Prophesying. Vol. vii. p. 409. Heber's edit.-Ed.

was doing God good service thereby. Matters of fact are equally judicable, whether the principle of them be from within or from without."*

To dogmatize a crime, that is, to teach it as a doctrine, is itself a crime, great or small as the crime dogmatized is more or less palpably so. "You say," said Sir John Cheke, addressing himself to the papists of his day, "that you rebel for your religion. First tell me, what religion is that which teaches you to rebel." As my object in the present section is to treat of tolerance and intolerance in the public bearings of opinions and their propagation, I shall embrace this opportunity of selecting the two passages, which I have been long inclined to consider as the most eloquent in our English literature, though each in a very different style of eloquence, as indeed the authors were as dissimilar in their bias, if not in their faith, as two bishops of the same church can well be supposed to have been. I think too, I may venture to add, that both the extracts will be new to a very great majority of my readers. For the length I make no apology. It was part of my plan to allot two essays of The Friend, the one to a selection from our prose writers, and the other from our poets; but in both cases from works that do not occur in our ordinary reading.

The following passages are both on the same subject ;--the first from Jeremy Taylor;-the second from Bishop Bedell.

1. The rise and progress of a controversy, from the speculative opinion of an individual, to the revolution or intestine war of a nation.

This is one of the inseparable characters of a heretic; he sets his whole communion and all his charity upon his article ; for to be zealous in the schism, that is the characteristic of a good man, that is his note of Christianity; in all the rest he excuses you or tolerates you, provided you be a true believer ; then you are one of the faithful, a good man and a precious, you are of the congregation of the saints, and one of the godly. All solifidians do thus; and all that do thus are solifidians, the church of Rome herself not excepted; for though in words she proclaims the possibility of keeping all the commandments; yet she dispenses easier with him that breaks them all, than with him that speaks one word against any of her articles, though but * Liberty of Proph. s. 13.-Ed.