loose and cunning Greek painted his Jupiter and celestial court as lewd and treacherous—the proud though noble Roman, as vicious, but as one who with his nod shook the heavens and the earth. Has not every nation sacrificed human victims to their false ideas of God?—The Philistines, the Druids, the Hindoos, the Carthaginians, the Romans sacrificed their citizens to their angry idols. Shall we then from these early and popular errors, argue that God is but man in vice? Certainly not: then why bring this as an argument to impugn doctrines no less consonant with reason than even the goodness of God?
Some will pretend, because these laws have had the sufferance of our ancestors, that we, bowing to their superior wisdom, should not presume to touch, what (from mere rottenness perhaps) would crumble at the approach of a meddling finger. According to this kind of doctrine, man should bow to the errors of childhood, and because, when a child, he learnt to read well, he should preserve as well as the reading the trembling at going in the dark along a passage or into a neighbouring room; for what are those ages when our ancestors lived, but as it were an infancy to our present boyhood, when we are to be occupied in rubbing off those smaller imperfections, which, though not displeasing in childhood, now disgrace the state entering into manhood. Those who absurdly maintain, as we have heard many, the perfect wisdom of our ancestors, injure instead of augmenting their reputation.—Let us give them that merit which certainly they deserved, of applying, according to the best of their judgment, a remedy to whatever evil appeared in the frame of our constitution; but do not let us pretend, that they either had an insight, almost infinite, into the causes and effects in the policy of law, or that they had a foresight, worthy of any being but man, that could enable them so to form their laws, that at one moment they might serve to stop a broken lane and at another the portal of the
