SERMON IV.

ON THE RESPECT DUE TO ANTIQUITY.

Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein."--JEREMIAH vi. 16.

IT has been well said by Lord Bacon, that the antiquity of past ages is the youth of the world-and therefore it is an inversion of the right order, to look for greater wisdom in some former generation than there should be in our present day. "The time in which we now live," says this great philosopher, "is properly the ancient time, because now the world is ancient; and not that time which we call ancient, when we look in a retrograde direction, and by a computation backward from ourselves." There must be a delusion, then, in that homage which is given to the wisdom of antiquity, as if it bore the same superiority over the wisdom of the present times, which the wisdom of an old does over that of a young man. When we speak of the wisdom of any age, we mean the wisdom which at that period belongs to the collective mind of the species. But it is an older species at present than it was in those days, called by us, the days of antiquity. It is now both more venerable in years, and carries a greater weight of experi

ence. It was a child before the flood; and if it have not yet become a man, it is nearer to manhood now than it was then. Therefore, when reviewing the notions and the usages of our forefathers we, instead of casting off the instructions of a greater wisdom than our own, may, in fact, be putting away from us childish things. It is in vain to talk of Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle. Only grant that there may still be as many good individual specimens of humanity as before; and a Socrates now, with all the additional lights which have sprung up in the course of intervening centuries to shine upon his understanding, would be a greatly wiser man than the Socrates of two thousand years ago. It is therefore well, in the great

master of the New Philosophy, to have asserted the prerogative, and in fact the priority, of our present age; that to it belongs a more patriarchal glory than to all the ages of all the patriarchs; that our generation is a more hoary-headed chronicler, and is more richly laden with the truths and the treasures of wisdom, than any generation which has gone before it the olden time, wherewith we blindly associate so much of reverence, being indeed the season of the world's youth, and the world's inexperience; and this our modern day being the true antiquity of the world.

But, however important thus to reduce the deference that is paid to antiquity; and with whatever grace and propriety it has been done by him who stands at the head of the greatest revolution in Philosophy-we shall incur the danger of running into most licentious waywardness, if we receive not

the principle, to which I have now adverted, with two modifications.

You will better conceive what these modifications are, by just figuring to yourself two distinct books, whence knowledge or wisdom may be drawn-one the book of the world's experience, the other, the book of God's revelation; the one, therefore, becoming richer, and more replete with instruction every day, by the perpetual additions which are making to it; the other, being that book from which no man can take away, neither can any man add there

unto.

Our first modification, then, is, that though, in regard to all experimental truth, the world should be wiser now than it was centuries ago, this is the fruit not of our contempt or our heedlessness in regard to former ages, but the fruit of our most respectful attention to the lessons which their history affords. In other words, as we are only wiser because of the now larger book of experience which is in our hands, we are not so to scorn antiquity, as to cast that book away from us; but we are to learn from antiquity, by giving the book our most assiduous perusal, while, at the same time, we sit in the exercise of our own free and independent judgment over the contents of it. Although we listen not to antiquity, as if she sent forth the voice of an oracle, yet we should look with most observant eye to all that antiquity sets before us. She is not to be the absolute mistress of our judgment, but still she presents the best materials on which the judgment of man can possibly be exercised. The only reason, truly, why the present age should be wiser

than the past, is, that it stands on that higher van tage ground which its progenitor had raised for it. But we should never have reached the vantage ground, if, utterly heedless of all that has gone before, we had spurned the informations and the science of previous generations away from us. The man of three-score should not be the wiser of his age, did a blight come over his memory, to obliterate all the experience and all the acquisitions of his former years. The very remembrance of his follies makes him wiser-and thus it is, that every ucceeding race gathers a new store of instruction, not from the discoveries alone, but also from the devious absurdities and errors of all the races that had preceded it. The truth is, that an experiment may be as instructive by its failure as by its success in the one case serving as a beacon, and in the other as a guide; and so from the very errors and misgivings of former days might we gather, by the study of them, the most solid and important accessions to our wisdom. We do right in not submitting to the dictation of antiquity; but that is no cause why we should refuse to be informed by her

for this were throwing us back again to the world's infancy, like the second childhood of him. whom disease had bereft of all his recollections. Still we reserve the independence of our own judg ment, while we take this retrospective survey, and ask for the old paths, and so compare them together as to separate the right from the wrong, and fix at length on the good way. And so, again, in the language of Bacon, "Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon,