Let me go on a step farther still.  It has been my happiness to retain, in after years, my intercourse with many of those who were formerly my pupils; to know them when their minds have been matured, and their education, in the ordinary sense of the term, completed.  Is not the relation between us altered then still more?  Is it incompatible with true respect and regard, that they should now judge still more freely, in those very points, I mean, in which heretofore they had received my instructions all but implicitly? that on points of scholarship and criticism, they should entirely think for themselves?  Or does this thinking for themselve mean, that they will begin to question all they had ever learnt? or sit down to forget purposely all their school instructions, and make out a new knowledge of the ancient languages for themselves?  Who does not know, that they whose minds are most eager to discern truth, are the very persons who prize their early instruction most, and confess how much they are indebted to it; and that the exercise of their judgments loads them to go on freely in the same path in which they have walked so long, here and there it may be departing from it where they find a better line, but going on towards the same object, and generally in the same direction?

What has been the experience of my life,—­the constantly observing the natural union between sense and modesty; the perfect compatibility of respect for instruction with freedom of judgment; the seeing how Nature herself teaches us to proportion the implicitness of our belief to our consciousness of ignorance:  to rise gradually and gently from a state of passively leaning, as it were, on the arm of another, to resting more and more of our weight on our own limbs, and, at last, to standing alone, this has perpetually exemplified our relations, as individuals, to the Church.  Taught by her, in our childhood and youth, under all circumstances; taught by her, in the great majority of instances, through our whole lives; never, in any case, becoming so independent of her as we do in riper years, of the individual instructor of our youth; she has an abiding claim on our respect, on our deference, on our regard:  but if it should be, that her teaching contained any thing at variance with God’s word, we should perceive it more or less clearly, according to our degrees of knowledge; we should trust or mistrust our judgment, according to our degree of knowledge; but in the last resort, as we suppose that even a young boy might be sure that his book was in error, in the case of a manifest false print, so there may be things so certainly inconsistent with Scripture, that a common Christian may be able to judge of them, and to say that they are like false prints in his lesson, they are manifest errors, not to be followed, but avoided.  So far he may be said to judge of his teacher; but not the less will he respect and listen to her authority in general, unless she has herself made the slightest error ruinous to her authority by claiming to be in all points, great or small, alike infallible.