Surely it is true that even as Art too often gilds sensuality, and renders it attractive to souls otherwise above its influence, so Knowledge must open new roads to temptation, and take off from sin that strangeness and horror which is one of the best safeguards of the soul. The old jest of the confessor, who asked the penitent whether he did such and such dishonest tricks, and received the reply, “No, Father; but I will do them next time,” was only a fable of one form of the mischief of knowledge; and that not the most fatal form either. To know how to do wrong is one small step towards doing it. To know that scores and hundreds and thousands of people, in all lands and ages, have done the same wrong, is a far larger encouragement to the timidity of guilt. Not only is it dangerous to know that there is a descent to Avernus, but specially dangerous to know that it is easy and well trodden. Dr. Watts was injudicious, to say the least of it, to betray to children that the way to perdition is a “Broad road, where thousands go,” which, moreover, “Lies near, and opens fair.” Better let people suppose that it has become quite grass-grown and impassable. Many offences, such as drunkenness, debauchery, swindling, adulteration, and false weights, are diseases propagated, chiefly, if not solely, like small-pox by direct infection conveyed in the knowledge that A, B, C, and D do the same things. David was not so far wrong to be angry; and divines need not be so anxious to excuse him for being so, when he saw the “wicked” flourishing “like green bay-trees.” Such sights are, to the last degree, trying and demoralizing.