nocent delight; and happy, also, all who, though not destined to see those distant times, have in any measure contributed to form and hasten them!

Plato, in a well-known passage of his Phædrus, describes Socrates as contending for the superiority of oral instruction, by representing books as silent. The inferiority of the writ ten word to the living voice is in many respects undeniable but surely it is more than compensated by the advantage of its diffusive and permanent character. Great as has been the influence of Socrates, he owes it almost entirely to the books he refused to write! and it might have been greater still, had he condescended to write some of his own.

But the chief glory of all human literature-taking it collectively is, that it is our pledge and security against the retrogradation of humanity; the effectual breakwater against barbarism; the ratchet in the great wheel of the world, which, even if it stand still, prevents it from slipping back. Ephemeral as man's books are, they are at least not so ephemeral as himself; and consign without difficulty to posterity what would otherwise never reach them. A good book is the Methuselah of these latter ages.

We must conclude, however, lest we should have reason to apply to ourselves the words of old Fuller: "But what do I, speaking against multiplicity of books in this age, who trespass in this nature myself? What was a learned man's compliment, may serve for my confession and conclusion. Multi mei similes hoc morbo laborant ut cùm scribere nesciant, tamen a scribendo temperare non possint.' Even as it is,

we fear that some of our readers will be disposed to say that we have illustrated the "vanity," without proving the "glory," of literature.

25

RIGHT OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT.*

THE metempsychosis of error is a curious phenomenon. Though not immortal, it transmigrates through many modes. of being before it is finally destroyed. Apparently dead, buried, rotten, consigned to dust and darkness so long ago, that the very volumes in which it lies entombed are wormeaten, and the controversies in which it seemingly perished no longer read, it often breathes and lives again after the lapse of centuries, and "revisits the glimpses of the moon -not usually, it is true, in the very form in which it disappeared, in that it would not be lightly tolerated again, but in a shape adapted to new times and circumstances; with an organization, so to speak, which qualifies it to exist in a different element of thought and feeling. The chrysalis becomes perhaps a gaudy butterfly, misleading into a foolish chase thousands of those overgrown boys of the human family, who, it may be, would have despised it in its original deformity.

At this none need wonder; for if error passes through many changes, it is because human nature is still the same.

* "Edinburgh Review," January, 1843.

1. Mémoire en Faveur de la Liberté des Cultes. Par ALEXANDRE VINET. 8vo. à Paris. 1828.

2. The Articles treated on in Tract XC. reconsidered, and their Interpretation vindicated; in a Letter to the Rev. R. W. Jelf, D. D., Canon of Christ Church. By the Rev. E. B. PUSEY, D. D. 8vo. Oxford. 1841.

1

In every successive age are reproduced minds with all the tendencies which have characterized those of the past; with the same affinities for special classes of error, or the same disposition to exaggerate and distort truth itself into substantial falsehood. Such minds may be, and usually are, modified by the age in which they live, the education to which they have been subjected, the circumstances under which they have been developed; but they exist, and with an idiosyncrasy so marked, that, even if they have never been stimulated by a knowledge of the theories of those who have erred, and been confuted before them, they often exhibit an invincible tendency to similar extravagances. What Thucydides has said of the parallelisms which may be perpetually expected in political history, is just as applicable to the history of opinions :- γιγνόμενα μὲν καὶ ἀεὶ ἐσόμενα ἕως ἂν ἡ αὐτὴ - ý φύσις ἀνθρώπων ᾖ, μᾶλλον δὲ, καὶ ἡσυχαίτερα, καὶ τοῖς εἴδεσι διηλλαyuéva. . . . . . Yet is there reason to hope well of the ultimate destinies of our race; and to believe that the progress towards the final triumph of Truth and Right is steady and certain, in spite of the alternate flux and reflux of the tide.

The remarks just made on the resuscitation of ancient error at distant intervals, and in new forms, have been signally illustrated in that great controversy, or rather compli cation of controversies, to which the discussion of what are called "High-Church Principles " has recently given rise and to none of the antique novelties (if we may use such an expression) commended to us by the advocates of those principles are they more applicable, than to the doctrines recently propounded by one and another of them on the subject of the "Right of Private Judgment." Of all the peculiarities of this modern-antique School, none, in our opin ion, is of graver import or of darker omen, than its opposition, more or less disguised, to this great principle.

Few, in the present day, would seek the restoration of the brutal, or rather diabolical, laws of ancient persecution, any more than they would, even if the choice were given them,

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breathe life into the bones of a Gardiner or a Bonner. To take those laws expressly under protection, in defiance both of reason and experience; in defiance of the arguments of such men as Taylor, Chillingworth, Bayle, Locke, and others scarcely less illustrious, and of the terrible condemnation supplied in the records of persecution itself, were the sheerest insanity. Whatever some may secretly wish, not only are hanging and burning for religious opinions abolished; but even the more 66 moderate forms" of persecution, as our ancestors facetiously called them, and which its sturdier advocates despised as poor, peddling arts, the thumbscrew, branding, the pillory, incarceration, banishment, — are quite out of date. Under these circumstances, any attempts to revive ancient error in relation to the "Right of Private Judgment must be very cautious; and such, with some exceptions which have equally moved our abhorrence and indignation, we have found them to be. Not only would expediency dictate moderation, if the public is to be induced to listen at all; but we trust that, in the vast majority of instances, even amongst men who cherish the most ultra "High-Church Principles," honor and conscience would alike recoil from the employment of the ancient methods under any modifications. How far, indeed, such men may sympathize with the views on which we shall presently animadvert, whether, though they do not at present avow it, they may not, as in other cases, have their esoteric doctrine, to which the public is not yet to be admitted, whether that reserve "which they advocate "in the communication of religious truth" be not operating here also, we have no means of judging. Our hope and belief is, that the greater part of those who question, in one way or another, the Right of Private Judgment," would not actually resort to any of the exploded forms of persecution. At all events, we shall not believe they would, except where they expressly tell us so. We flatter ourselves they would not find it so easy to throw off the spirit of their own age, as to apol

ogize for the excesses of the past; or to repress the best feelings of their hearts, as to quench the light of their understandings. We shall, accordingly, bring no indefinite charges against any body of men. The particular modifications of opinion to which we object shall be referred to their proper authors; and chapter and verse duly cited for the representations we may make of them. But whether they may be many or few who sympathize with the more reckless of the modern Propagandists of the doctrine of persecution, there is no reason to anticipate that they will be actually successful. They never can be, until they can convert the present into the past, or make the wheels of time roll backward. It does not follow, however, that their attempts can be safely neglected; or that their opinions are not sufficiently dangerous to justify severe animadversion. Their intrinsic falsity, absurdity, and inconsistency would be ample warrant for that. But when we reflect further, on the tendency of such opinions to confound and perplex the unthinking, to foster malignity of temper, to perpetuate the remnant of intolerance which still dwells amongst us, to endear to some spiteful minds the petty forms of persecution which are still within their reach, to make them hanker after the forbidden indulgences of an obsolete cruelty, it becomes a duty to denounce them. Nor is it less incumbent to expose those more plausible, and perhaps, on that account, more dangerous invasions of the "Right of Private Judgment," which would delude multitudes into the belief that, on the authority of fallible mortals like themselves, they may repress the voice of conscience, receive as true things which they do not believe to be so, and practise, as innocent, rites which they deem forbidden.

One would think it very superfluous at this time of day to define what is meant by the "Right of Private Judgment, or to guard these terms against misapprehension. One would imagine that any mistakes about the phrase, or the mode in which it is usually understood, could not be otherwise than wil