phlet
in honor of her, and of the great undying principle she has so
gloriously vindicated? Why is he in this base, disloyal style, muttering
about priests, and Jesuits, and the horrors of nunneries, in solution of
the phenomenon, when he has the fair and ample form of Private Judgment
rising before his eyes, and pleading with him, and bidding him impute
good motives, not bad, and in very charity ascribe to the influence of
a high and holy principle, to a right and a duty of every member of the
family of man, what his poor human instincts are fain to set down as a
folly or a sin. All this would lead us to suspect that the doctrine of
private judgment, in its simplicity, purity, and integrity,--private
judgment, all private judgment, and nothing but private judgment,--is
held by very few persons indeed; and that the great mass of the
population are either stark unbelievers in it, or deplorably dark about
it; and that even the minority who are in a manner faithful to it, have
glossed and corrupted the true sense of it by a miserably faulty
reading, and hold, not the right of private judgment, but the private
right of judgment; in other words, their own private right, and no one's
else. To us it seems as clear as day, that they consider that they
themselves, indeed, individually can and do act on reason, and on
nothing but reason; that they have the gift of advancing, without bias
or unsteadiness, throughout their search, from premise to conclusion,
from text to doctrine; that they have sought aright, and no one else,
who does not agree with them; that they alone have found out the art of
putting the salt upon the bird's tail, and have rescued themselves from
being the slaves of circumstance and the creatures of impulse. It is
undeniable, then, if the popular feeling is to be our guide, that, high
and mighty as the principle of private judgment is in religious
inquiries, as we most fully grant it is, still it bears some similarity
to Saul's armor which David rejected, or to edged tools which have a bad
trick of chopping at our fingers, when we are but simply and innocently
meaning them to make a dash forward at truth.

Any tolerably serious man will feel this in his own case more vividly
than in that of any one else. Who can know ever so little of himself
without suspecting all kinds of imperfect and wrong motives in
everything he attempts? And then there is the bias of education and of
habit; and, added to the difficultie