can be more absurd than to take opinions of the greatest moment, and such as concern us the most intimately, on trust; but there is no help against it in many particular cases.  Things the most absurd in speculation become necessary in practice.  Such is the human constitution, and reason excuses them on the account of this necessity.  Reason does even a little more, and it is all she can do.  She gives the best direction possible to the absurdity.  Thus she directs those who must believe because they cannot know, to believe in the laws of their country, and conform their opinions and practice to those of their ancestors, to those of Coruncanius, of Scipio, of Scaevola—­not to those of Zeno, of Cleanthes, of Chrysippus.

But now the same reason that gives this direction to such men as these will give a very contrary direction to those who have the means and opportunities the others want.  Far from advising them to submit to this mental bondage, she will advise them to employ their whole industry to exert the utmost freedom of thought, and to rest on no authority but hers—­that is, their own.  She will speak to them in the language of the Soufys, a sect of philosophers in Persia that travellers have mentioned.  “Doubt,” say these wise and honest freethinkers, “is the key of knowledge.  He who never doubts, never examines.  He who never examines, discovers nothing.  He who discovers nothing, is blind and will remain so.  If you find no reason to doubt concerning the opinions of your fathers, keep to them; they will be sufficient for you.  If you find any reason to doubt concerning them, seek the truth quietly, but take care not to disturb the minds of other men.”

Let us proceed agreeably to these maxims.  Let us seek truth, but seek it quietly as well as freely.  Let us not imagine, like some who are called freethinkers, that every man, who can think and judge for himself, as he has a right to do, has therefore a right of speaking, any more than of acting, according to the full freedom of his thoughts.  The freedom belongs to him as a rational creature; he lies under the restraint as a member of society.

If the religion we profess contained nothing more than articles of faith and points of doctrine clearly revealed to us in the Gospel, we might be obliged to renounce our natural freedom of thought in favour of this supernatural authority.  But since it is notorious that a certain order of men, who call themselves the Church, have been employed to make and propagate a theological system of their own, which they call Christianity, from the days of the Apostles, and even from these days inclusively, it is our duty to examine and analyse the whole, that we may distinguish what is divine from what is human; adhere to the first implicitly, and ascribe to the last no more authority than the word of man deserves.