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.
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