fpoilt or damaged ftuff with all the ftraw and ftraw-like matter near it, first into flame and the next moment into afhes. The fire dies away, the ashes are scattered on all the winds, and what began in worthleffness ends in nothingness. Such are the evil, that is, the casual confequences of the fame promulgation. It argues a narrow or corrupt nature to lose fight of the general and lafting confequences of rare and virtuous energy, in the brief accidents, which accompanied its first movements - to set lightly by the emancipation of the human reafon from a legion of devils, in our complaints and lamentations over the loss of a herd of swine! The Cranmers, Hampdens, and Sidneys, — the counsellors of our Elizabeth, and the friends of our other great deliverer, the third William, — is it in vain, that these have been our countrymen ? Are we not the heirs of their good deeds? And what are noble deeds but noble truths realized? As Proteftants, as Englishmen, as the inheritors of so ample an estate of might and right, an estate so ftrongly fenced, so richly planted, by the finewy arms and dauntless hearts of our forefathers, we of all others have good caufe to trust in the truth, yea, to follow its pillar of fire through the darkness and the desert, even though its light should but fuffice to make us certain of its own presence. If there be elsewhere men jealous of the light, who prophefy an excess of evil over good from its manifestation, we are entitled to afk them, on what experience they ground their bodings? Our own country bears no traces, our own history contains no records, to justify them. From the great æras of national illumination we date the commencement of our main national advantages. The tangle of delufions, which ftifled and distorted the growing tree, have been torn away; the parafite weeds, that fed on its very roots, have been plucked up with a falutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the conftant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious, unhazardous, labours of the industrious though contented gardener—to prune, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the flug and the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the confcientious hardihood of our predeceffors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the bleffings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. That the very terms, with which the bigot or the hireling would blacken the first publishers of political and religious truth, are, and deserve to be, hateful to us, we owe to the effects of its publication. We ante-date the feelings in order to criminate the authors of our tranquillity, opulence, and fecurity. But let us be aware. Effects will not, indeed, immediately dif appear with their causes; but neither can they long continue without them. If by the reception of truth in the spirit of truth, we became what we are; only by the retention of it in the same spirit, can we remain what we are. The narrow feas that form our boundaries, what were they in times of old? The convenient highway for Danish and Norman pirates. What are they now? Still but "a fpan of waters." Yet they roll at the base of the inifled Ararat, on which the ark of the hope of Europe and of civilization rested! Even fo doth God protect us, if we be Virtuous and wife. Winds blow and waters roll, WORDSWORTH. ESSAY X. I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do fharpeft juftice on them as malefactors. For books are not abfolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that foul was whofe progeny they are; nay, they do preferve as in a vial the pureft efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as thofe fabulous dragon's teeth and being fown up and down may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unless warinefs be used, as good almoft kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who deftroys a good book, kills reafon itfelf, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burthen to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treafured up on purpose to a life beyond life. : MILTON's Speech for the liberty of unlicenfed printing. HUS far then I have been conducting a cause between an individual and his own mind. Proceeding on the conviction, that to man is entrusted the nature, not the refult, of his actions, I have prefuppofed no calculations; I have prefumed no forefight. Introduce no contradiction into thy own consciousness. Acting, or abftaining from action, delivering or withholding thy thoughts, whatfoever thou doeft, do it in fingleness of heart. In all things, therefore, let thy means correspond to thy purpose, and let the purpose be one with the purport. To this principle I have referred the supposed individual, and from this principle folely I have deduced each particular of his conduct. As far, therefore, as the court of conscience extends,—and in this court alone I have been pleading hitherto―I have won the cause. It has been decided, that there is no juft ground for apprehending mischief from truth communicated confcientiously, that is, with a ftrict obfervance of all the conditions required by the conscience ;— that what is not fo communicated, is falfehood, and that to the falfehood, not to the truth, must the ill confequences be attributed. Another and altogether different cause remains now to be pleaded; a different cause, and in a different court. The parties concerned are no longer the well-meaning individual and his conscience, but the citizen and the state-the citizen, who may be a fanatic as probably as a philosopher, and the state, which concerns itself with the conscience only as far as it appears in the action, or ftill more accurately, in the fact; and which must determine the nature of the fact not merely by a rule of right formed from the modification of particular by general confequences,—not merely by a principle of compromise, that reduces the freedom of each citizen to the common measure in which it becomes compatible with the freedom of all; |