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. You
would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more
monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters
of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the
names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of
power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some
appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names;
to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs
by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.
Otherwise you will be wise historically,--a fool in practice. Seldom
have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes
of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are
discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes
a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle
of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new
organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad,
it continues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcase, or
demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourselves with ghosts and
apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with
all those who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think
they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under
colour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are
authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and
perhaps in worse.