One of the chief advantages of study is, that it enfranchises the mind from those prejudices that disturb life. How many, and what agonizing torments have been caused by those which are associated with false ideas of religion.[46] After those great calamities in the dark ages which destroyed the traces of the sciences and arts, men, pursued by terror, seemed to imagine that they constantly saw malevolent spirits flying among the clouds or wandering in the depth of woods. The sound of strong wind and thunder came to their ear as the voice of infernal divinities; and, prostrate with terror, they sought to appease their angry gods by bloody sacrifices. In process of time, a small number of men, enlightened by observation, dared to raise the veil by degrees, and succeeded in dissipating these terrors by tracing the seeming prodigies to some of the simplest laws of physics. The phantoms of superstition vanished, and, in the light of reason, revealed a just and beneficent Divinity presiding over obedient nature. We think, in our pride, that an immense interval separates us from those times of disaster, ignorance and alarm. How many of our kind, unhappy by their intellectual weakness, still tremble before the jealous and implacable god of their imaginations, who enjoins hatred and wrath; and punishes even the errors of opinion by the most horrible torments. The man who is exempt from prejudices is alone capable of prostrating himself before the Divinity from a feeling of love, and whose prayer, alike confident and resigned, is addressed to his noble attributes of power, justice and clemency. There are other errors which study dispels. The student who is charmed with communion with the muses, does not consume his best years in gloomy intrigues; nor do you meet him pressing forward in the path which ambition has traced. The Greeks, fertile in significant allegories, supposed the same divinity to preside over the sciences and wisdom. The habit of living in converse with the noblest works of mind and art, produces elevation of soul; and he who has an elevated mind must be intrinsically good and happy. Exempt from the weaknesses of vanity, free from the tumultuous passions, he cultivates the noble and generous virtues for the pleasure of practising them. Disdaining a mass of objects of desire which disturb the vulgar, he offers a small mark to misery. Should adversity strike him, he has resources so much the more sure, as he finds them in himself. No one can ever taste the full charm of letters and the arts, except in the bosom of retirement. If he reads and meditates only for the pursuit of fame, amusements change to labors. If we propose to enter the lists, outstrip rivals, and direct a party, we are soon agitated with little passions, but great inquietudes. Heaven, sternly decreeing that no earthly felicity shall be unalloyed, has placed a thirst for celebrity as a drawback upon the love of study.