d, Scotland or Wales, I see myself surrounded
with a new people, all of whose characters are in a manner cast in one
mould, and all different from the citizens of the principal state and
from one another. We may go further than this. Not only nations,
but classes of men, are contrasted with each other. What can be more
different than the gentry of the west end of this metropolis, and the
money-making dwellers in the east? From them I will pass to Billingsgate
and Wapping. What more unlike than a soldier and a sailor? the children
of fashion that stroll in St. James's and Hyde Park, and the care-worn
hirelings, that recreate themselves, with their wives and their brats,
with a little fresh air on a Sunday near Islington? The houses of lords
and commons have each their characteristic manners. Each profession has
its own, the lawyer, the divine, and the man of medicine. We are all
apes, fixing our eyes upon a model, and copying him, gesture by gesture.
We are sheep, rushing headlong through the gap, when the bell-wether
shews us the way. We are choristers, mechanically singing in a certain
key, and giving breath to a certain tone.

Our religion, our civil practices, our political creed, are all
imitation. How many men are there, that have examined the evidences of
their religious belief, and can give a sound "reason of the faith that
is in them?" When I was a child, I was taught that there were four
religions in the world, the Popish, the Protestant, the Mahometan, the
Pagan. It is a phenomenon to find the man, who has held the balance
steadily, and rendered full and exact justice to the pretensions of each
of these. No: tell me the longitude and latitude in which a man is born,
and I will tell you his religion.

By education most have been misled;
So they believe, because they so were bred:
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.

And, if this happens, where we are told our everlasting salvation is at
issue, we may easily judge of the rest.

The author, with one of whose dicta I began this Essay, has observed,
"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the
earth abideth for ever." It is a maxim of the English constitution, that
"the king never dies;" and the same may with nearly equal propriety be
observed of every private man, especially if he have children. "Death,"
say the writers of natural history, "is the generator of life:"