While contemplating in their infant state those notions and practices (of the third century, for example) which afterwards swelled into enormous evils, it is difficult not to view them as if they were loaded with the blame of their after issues; and then it is hard not to attribute to their originators and promoters the accumulated criminality that should be shared in small portions by the men of many following generations. But the individuals thus unfairly dealt by, far from forecasting the consequences of the sentiments and usages they favored, far from viewing them, as we do, darkened by the cloud of mischiefs that was heaped upon them in after times, saw the same objects bright and fair in the recommendatory gleam of a pure and a venerated age. The very abuses which make the twelfth century abhorrent on the page of history, were, in the fourth, fragrant with the practice and suffrage of a blessed company of primitive confessors. The remembered saints, who had given their bodies to the flames, had also lent their voice and example to those unwise excesses which at length drove true religion from the earth. Untaught by experience, the ancient church surmised not of the occult tendencies of the course it pursued, nor should be loaded with consequences which human sagacity could not well have foreseen. Each of the great corruptions of later ages took its rise, in the first, second, or third century, in a manner which it would be harsh to say was deserving of strong reprehension. Thus the secular domination exercised by the bishops, and at length supremely by the bishops of Rome, may be traced very distinctly to the proper respect paid by the people, even in the apostolic age, to the disinterested wisdom of their bishops in deciding their worldly differences. The worship of images, the invocation of saints, and the superstition of relics, were but expansions of the natural feeling of veneration and affection cherished towards the memory of those who had suffered and died for the truth. And thus, in like manner, the errors and abuses of monkery all sprang, by imperceptible augmentations, from sentiments perfectly natural to the sincere and devout Christian in times of persecution, disorder, and general corruption of morals. Again: human nature, which is far more uniform than may be imagined, when suddenly it is beheld under some new aspect of time and country, is also susceptible of much greater diversities of habit and feeling than those are willing to believe who have seen it on no side but one. This double lesson, taught by history and travel, should be well learned by every one who undertakes to estimate the merits of men that have lived in remote times, and under other skies.