5 
rities which deface the disk of learning will be acknowledged 
as a benefactor, and hailed as a good and faithful servant in 
the cause. 
Moreover this is an age of which the tendency is not 
as formerly to meet a novel proposition with a contempt¬ 
uous denial, or its author with ap accusation of atheism, in¬ 
timacy with the father of Evil, or the yet more heinous offence 
of heresy; and expose him to the hemlock^, the dungeon, or 
the stake. The custom of denouncing and descrying innova¬ 
tions, as such, no longer reigns despotic. We arc no longer 
oppressed by a bigoted veneration for “ the wisdom of our 
ancestorsit is received ^vith a deferential respect, and regard¬ 
ed in relation to the lights by which they were niuminated. 
New doctrines and inventions are submitted to dispassionate 
investigation before they are wholly condemned; if found to 
bear the tests applied, they are readily approved and adopted, 
if not in the land in which they originate, in some more con¬ 
genial spot, amongst some more liberal spirits; and are made 
fulcra on which a thousand anxious minds rest their levers to 
propel into a fuller growth the germ from wliich they have 
sprung. 
The dignified modesty of true learning is conscious that 
it is only by slow and painful steps that man has been 
able to evolve and eliminate those portions of knowledge with 
which he has been allowed to make himself acquainted; and 
while it will not siiffer the self-sufficiency of ignorance to dic¬ 
tate that which reason must repel, it \n\\ not allow the arro¬ 
gance of sciolism to assert that nothing has been left for the 
present generation to acquire. 
Not only on such abstract grounds, but for reasons of 
a more particular nature is the occasion ' favourable. One 
J Humanity must mourn, and the Muse of History must blush, \Nhile 
the names of Socrates, Galileo, Faust, More, Servetus, &c., stand on record; 
and the persecutions of the Christians hy the fierce Nero, the cruel 
Domitian, the virtuous Trajan, the just Adrian, the pious Antonine, the 
ambitious Severus, and the indiscriminate fmy of Maximiii, Hecius, 
Valerian, Diocletian, Maiiminian, Galefius, &c., and of each other by . 
Rut let not the wounded bleed afresh. 
A 3 
