CHAPTER III. 431 where we first breathed, and think the better of a man for'being born near us. We entertain the best opinion of the person of our own party, and easily believe evil reports of persons of a different sect or faction. Our own sex, our kindred, our houses, and our very names, seem to have something good and desirable in them. We are ready to mingle all these with ourselves, and cannot bear to have others think meanly of them. So good an opinion have we of our own sentiments and prac- tices, that it is very difficult to believe what a reprover says of our conduct : and we are as ready to assent to all the language of flattery. We set up our own opinions in religion and philoso- phy as the tests of orthodoxy and truth ; and we are prone to fudge every practice of other men either a duty or a crime, which we think would' be a crime or a duty in us, though their circum- stances are vastly different from our own. This humour prevails sometimes to such a degree, that we would make our own taste and inclination the standard by which to judge of every dish of meat that is set upon the table, every book in a library, every employment, study and business of life, as well as every re- creation. It is from this evil principle of setting up self for a model what other men ought to be, that the antichristian spirit of impo- sition and persecution had its original : though there is no more reason for it than there was for the practice of that tyrant, who having a bed fit for his own site, was reported to stretch men of low stature upon the rack, till they were drawn out to the length of his bed ; and some add also, that he cut off the legs of any whom he found too long for it. It is also from a principle near a-kin to this, that we per- vert and strain the writings of many venerable authors, and espe- cially the sacred books of scripture, to make them speak our own sense. Through the influence which our own schemes or hypo- theses have upon the mind, we sometimes become so sharp- sight- ed ás to find these schemes in those places of scripture where the holy writers never thought of them, nor the Holy Spirit intended them. At other times, this prejudice brings such a dimness upon the sight, that we cannot read any thing that opposes our own scheme, though it be written as with sun- beams, and in the plain est language ;and perhaps we are in danger in such a case of Winking a little against the light. We ought to bring our minds free, unbiassed and teachable, to learn our religion from the word of God ; but we have gene- rally formed all the lesser as well as the greater points of oue religion beforehand, and then we read the prophets and apostle Only to pervert them to confirm our own opinions. Were it not for this influence of self, and a bigotry to our own tenets, we could hardly imagine that so many strange, absurd,, inconsistenti
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