To urge antiquity alone, as a sufficient recommendation of any doctrine, is often the refuge of superstition driven to its last resource. And it is well known how much this plea is maintained by the Church of Rome, as a covert for all the errors, impositions, and pious frauds, that for centuries have banished purity and truth from her communion. The plea of antiquity is but a fallacious one at best; since error is very old as well as truth, and in every age of the church men have always called in the suffrage of their ancestors as a sort of sanction for their own blasphemies; imputing to antiquity a certain virtue to make error venerable, or to stamp a dignity on folly, merely because it may have happened to be folly before the flood. Equally inconclusive and fallacious too, are either the objections started against any doctrine, or the countenance sought in favor of it, merely because it may be new. People are apt, in most cases, to be strangely wedded to antiquity; insomuch, that a friendly effort to rescue them even from nonsense, or to liberate them from slavery, has been at different times construed into a dangerous innovation. When men have been habituated to an old track, they become in time so reconciled to it, that what with indolence and a stupid predilection in favor of antiquity, they discover an unwillingness to be driven out of it. And the man that has courage enough to make the attempt, does it often at his peril. The person that first declared there were any such beings as _antipodes_, was put to death as a monster of wickedness. The discovery was new; and the mere novelty was enough, in the opinion of a sage pope, to constitute him a heretic, and judge him worthy of death. Yet, it seems necessary to guard with proper caution against the pretensions of novelty. Men are often ambitious of making new discoveries in religion, as well as in other sciences. And when long established truth in the scriptures checks them in their bold attempts to advance any thing absolutely new, they will often put ingenuity upon the rack, at least, to devise some new refinement upon an old error, that they may set themselves at the head of a party, and rear their own consequence upon the ruins of truth and peace. A bigot of this class has more than once complained bitterly, that, “in the Church of England, there is nothing new left to be found out in religion; but that the 39 articles tell all.” As if religion were a fluctuating system, that requires to be changed and improved like fashions of a day.