light that is reflected from His works.  Out of this light, therefore, we should never go in our inquiries and reasonings about His nature, His attributes, and the order of His providence; and yet upon these subjects men depart the furthest from it—­nay, they who depart the furthest are the best heard by the bulk of mankind.  The less men know, the more they believe that they know.  Belief passes in their minds for knowledge, and the very circumstances which should beget doubt produce increase of faith.  Every glittering apparition that is pointed out to them in the vast wild of imagination passes for a reality; and the more distant, the more confused, the more incomprehensible it is, the more sublime it is esteemed.  He who should attempt to shift these scenes of airy vision for those of real knowledge might expect to be treated with scorn and anger by the whole theological and metaphysical tribe, the masters and the scholars; he would be despised as a plebeian philosopher, and railed at as an infidel.  It would be sounded high that he debased human nature, which has a “cognation,” so the reverend and learned Doctor Cudworth calls it, with the divine; that the soul of man, immaterial and immortal by its nature, was made to contemplate higher and nobler objects than this sensible world, and even than itself, since it was made to contemplate God and to be united to Him.  In such clamour as this the voice of truth and of reason would be drowned, and, with both of them on his side, he who opposed it would make many enemies and few converts—­nay, I am apt to think that some of these, if he made any, would say to him, as soon as the gaudy visions of error were dispelled, and till they were accustomed to the simplicity of truth, “Pol me occidistis.”  Prudence forbids me, therefore, to write as I think to the world, whilst friendship forbids me to write otherwise to you.  I have been a martyr of faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so in philosophy.

But there is another consideration which deserves more regard, because it is of a public nature, and because the common interests of society may be affected by it.  Truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, revelations of the Creator, inventions of the creature, dictates of reason, sallies of enthusiasm, have been blended so long together in our systems of theology that it may be thought dangerous to separate them, lest by attacking some parts of these systems we should shake the whole.  It may be thought that error itself deserves to be respected on this account, and that men who are deluded for their good should be deluded on.