But theology in modern times offers an unbounded field of toil to the student;—the toil of mere acquisition, and of critical research; for a familiar knowledge of three languages, at least, is indispensable to every man who would take respectable rank as a teacher of Christianity; especially to every one who aspires to distinction in his order; and some acquaintance with two or three other languages, is also an object of reasonable ambition to the theological student. And moreover, an accomplished expounder of Scripture must be well versed in profane and church history; nor may he be entirely ignorant of even the abstract and physical sciences. These multifarious pursuits, which are to be acquired compatibly with the discharge of the public duties of the pastoral office, assuredly furnish employment enough for the most active and the most industrious mind long beyond the period of college initiation. Nor are we to consider merely the natural influence produced upon the intellectual habits by these employments, in preventing that discursiveness of the inventive faculties which is a principal source of heresy; for its quality, not less than its quantity, is decidedly corrective of the propensity to generate novelties of opinion. Every one who has made the experiment well knows that the toils of learned acquisition have a direct tendency to impair the freshness and force of the intellectual constitution, to chill and cloud the imagination, and to break the elasticity of the inventive faculty; if not to blunt the keenness of the powers of analysis. Thus they indispose the mind to the wantonness of speculation, and impart to it rather the timidity, the acquiescence, the patience, which are proper to the submissive exposition of an authoritative rule of faith. Biblical learning, therefore, not only serves directly to dispel errors of opinion by throwing open the true sense of Scripture; but it contains within itself what might be termed a _physical_ preventive against heresy, which, if it be not always efficacious, is perceptibly operative. Nothing then can be more desirable than that public opinion should continue, as it now does, to demand erudition from the teachers of religion.