We have histories of almost everything that the earth contains, or ever has contained--of kings, and bloody battles; (almost inseparable from kings;) of republics, and domestic anarchy; (inseparable from republics;) of laws, rents, prices; (Tooke has despatched prices;) of churches, sects, religions; of society--that grand, strange, unaccountable compound of evil and good; where men's vices and virtues, ever at war, are made mutually to counteract each other, and bring about an equilibrium balanced on a hair; always vibrating, sometimes terribly deranged, but ever returning to its poise. But, thank Heaven! we have not absolutely histories of everything; and, amongst others, we have not a history of opinion. The world, however, is a strange place; the men and women in it, strange creatures; and the man who would sit down to write a true history of opinions, showing how baseless are those most fondly clung to, how absurd are those most reverently followed, how wicked are some of those esteemed most holy, would, in any country, and in any age, be pursued and persecuted till he were as dead as the carrion on which feeds the crow; nay, long after his miserable bones were as white as an egg-shell. I am even afraid of the very assertion; for the world is too vain, and too cowardly, to hear that any of its opinions are wrong; and we must swim with the stream, if we would swim at all. There is one thing, indeed, to be said, which justifies the world, although it is not the ground on which the world acts--that he who would upset the opinions established, were he ten times wiser than Solon, or Solomon either, would produce a thousand evils where he removed one. It is an old coat that will not bear mending; and the wearer is, perhaps, right to fly at every one who would peck it. Moreover, there is _primâ facie_, very little cause to suppose that he who would overthrow the notions which have been entertained, with slight modifications, by thousands of human beings through thousands of years, is a bit more wise, enlightened, true, or virtuous, than the rest; and I will fairly confess, that I have never yet seen one of these moral knights-errant who did not replace error by error, folly by folly, contradiction by contradiction, the absurdities of others by absurdities of his own. Nay, more; amongst all who have started up to work a radical change in the opinions of mankind, I have never heard but of one, the universal adoption of whose views, in their entirety, would have made the whole race wiser, better, and happier. He was God as well as man. Men crucified him; and, lest the imperishable truth should condemn them, set to work to corrupt his words, and pervert his doctrines, within a century after he had passed from earth. Gnostics, monks, priests, saints, fathers, all added or took away; and then they closed the book, and sealed it with a brazen clasp.