ing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Here we meet with a serious drawback, a blind worship of all that is ancient. Whenever a grand and noble thought is expressed in words, picture, or marble, we are apt to lose sight of the divinity of the utterance and look upon the poet, painter, or sculptor as being divine, and bow down to and worship the product, the created, instead of the thought, the creator. This is the grave mischief which arises from a blind clinging to the fact, a tying of ourselves to the productions of past ages instead of creating for ourselves. Whenever we look upon a book as being perfect, whenever we blindly cling to it and refuse to go further, that book is a menace to our
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