Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/182

162 judging, and should be quite sure that he sees the error of what he rejects and the benefit of what he introduces. This commonplace consideration settled me in my seat, and kept even my more heedless youth in check from burdening my shoulders with so heavy a load as to make myself a surety for knowledge of such importance, and from venturing, in this matter, what in sound discretion I could not venture to do in the simplest of those matters in which I had been instructed, and in which rashness of judgement does no harm. For it seemed to me very wrong to seek to subject public and fixed constitutions and usages to the instability of a private opinion (private judgement has only a private jurisdiction), and to undertake with respect to divine laws what no government would suffer with respect to human laws, which, although human reason has much more connection with them, yet are they sovereign judges of their judges, and the greatest ability serves but to explain and extend the accepted use of them, not to divert it and innovate upon it. If sometimes divine providence has overridden the rules to which it has necessarily subjected us, it is not for us to dispense with them: those are strokes of the divine hand which we must not imitate, but admire; and extraordinary cases, marked with a designed and special warranting of the sort of miracles which it offers us as evidence of its omnipotence, far above our methods and our powers, and which it is folly and impiety to try to reproduce — paths, not for our feet, but for us to contemplate with amazement; acts belonging to the part it plays, not to us. Cotta protests very fitly: Quum de religione agitur, T. Coruncanium, P. Scipionem, P. Scævolam, pontifices maximos, non Zenonem aut Cleanthem aut Chrysippum sequor.