We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary,
without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our
happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction,
drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and
infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine,
furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in Church and
State, and supplying the means of keeping alive or reviving dissensions
and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for
the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride,
ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal,
and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with
the same
"troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet."
These vices are the _causes_ of those storms. Religion, morals, laws,
prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the _pretexts_.
The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real
good. You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition by rooting out
of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If
you did, you would root out everything that is valuable in the human
breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and
instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates,
senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains.
Pages:
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473