Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/390

 and cloisters, and excluded all the cares and pleasures of the world, and when they have spent a great part of their lives in study and meditation, at last, perhaps, deliver their opinions, as learned men will generally do, with diffidence and fear.

Happy would it be for the present age if men were now thus distrustful of their own abilities. They would not then adopt opinions, merely because they wish them to be true, then defend what they have once adopted, warm themselves into confidence, and then rest satisfied with the pleasing consciousness of their own sincerity. We should not then see men, not eminent for any superiour gifts of nature, or extraordinary attainments, endeavouring to form new sects, and to draw the world after them. They may, indeed, act with an honest intention, and so far with sincerity, but certainly without that caution which their inexperience ought to suggest, and that reverence for their superiours, which reason, as well as the laws of society, requires. They seem, even when considered with the utmost candour, to have rather consulted their own imaginations, than to have asked for the old paths, where is the good way. It is, therefore, proper in this place that I should endeavour,

into antiquity, or of asking for the "old paths."
 * To evince the reasonableness of searching

A contempt of the monuments and the wisdom of antiquity, may justly be reckoned one of the reigning follies of these days, to which pride and idleness have equally contributed. The study of antiquity is laborious; and to despise what we cannot, or will not understand, is a much more expeditious way to reputation. Part of the disesteem into which their writings are now fallen, may indeed be ascribed to that exorbitant degree of veneration, in which they were once held by blindness and superstition. But there is a mean betwixt idolatry and insult, between weak credulity and total disbelief. The ancients are not infallible, nor are their decisions to be received without examination; but they are at least the determinations of