knows to distinguish the nature of authority; reason, which is bold in the affairs of men, and humble in its permitted intercourse with God; reason, as Fox and Hume, and all historians worthy the title, convince us, steps not out of its province when it interposes to rectify misleading records or historical assertions; and in no case is it more eminently required than in the history of the order of Jesus, which passion, interest, and ability have united to disfigure. What is meant by the allusion to _stern lights_ I am at a loss to conjecture. I am not much disposed, in a work of this kind, to go into verbal or rhetorical criticism; but when a man writes with such pompous and despotic decision as this author does, one has a right to expect of him, when he amuses himself with figurative language, a clear notion of what he aims at. When, therefore, he insinuates that such reasoners as Hume {44} and Fox are reprehensible for serving records of past ages like _stern lights_ of a vessel, instead of like modern moons to carriages (for moons evidently ran in the writer's head), we are puzzled between what he says and what he means. From his own words we are bound to take it for granted that he means to condemn reasoning, and to approve of a pertinacious adherence to records, however inconsistent and contradictory; whereas, by his intended simile, he blames the reasoners for making use of records; for, if stern lights must serve as a simile, records are certainly more analogous to them than to carriage moons, which are concurrent aids, that show the driver nothing but the way before him, and are not of the least use to those travellers who are coming after on the same road; stern lights, on the contrary, are intimations at sea, from those who go before to those who follow, of the track to be pursued. The truth, I believe, is, that the author does not know the use of stern lights, and imagines that mariners illuminate aft to amuse fishes in {45} the wakes of their ships. Records, no doubt, are moral, as ship lanthorns are physical lights to guide; but treachery or ignorance, in either, may mislead, in which case the seaman will consult his compass and the inquirer his reason[21]. {46}