4JO THE ADVANTAGES OF HUMILITY SECT. Iv: What is it but the over-weening conceit of our being wiser and better than others that renders us constantly so tenacious ofall our opinions, anddeaf to all further enqui- ries and reasonings? What is it makes us set up for dicta- tors to the world with so much frontless assurance, and fix our own sentiments as a test and standard of truth ? All the learned sciences and the affairs of common life, trade and politics, mechanic arts, poesy and morals, are the daily subjects of these infallible declaimers, both at the table, and the coffee- house, and in private visits, and yet more eminently at the tavern: There indeed the wine brightens every idea into truth, it raises the courage and the voice together, and establishes every man triumphant in his own opinion. The vain creature knows all things. But one would think that the sacred and sublime to- pics of religion should be treated with a more doubtful and ingenuous modesty ; especially where the holy wri- ters themselves are not very express and positive in their determinations. One would think there should be some abatements to our confidence, and that we might some- times speak with a holy fear and suspicion of our under- standings in points of the most abstruse and divine argu- ment, where wise and good men have often been divided. Alas for our pride and folly ! ror our wretched igno- rance and our shameful-conceit ! Let Mr. Baxter, who was a man of great sagacity and a wise observer of hu- man nature, set it before us in this admirable tetrastic, wherein the verses are superior to many of their neigh- bours. We crowd about a little spark, Learnedly striving in the dark, Never more bold than when most blind, And werun fastest when the truth's behind." But we are generally too wise to tread one step back again, though it be to lay hold on the truth which we have out-run in our haste to assurance. We have some- times found it in ourselves and observed it in others that the firmness of a pretended orthodoxy has not been al- ways derived from light and evidence. Want of humility in the heart is too often the reason why we have no want of confidence in our opinions, whether they be true or false. The boldest and most peremptory assertions are
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