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Hence nothing rash or indigested, nothing unsuited to the duty of the church, will at any time be proposed therein, so as to give occasion for contests, janglings, or disputes, contrary to order or decency, but all things may be preserved in a due regard unto the gravity and authority of the rulers. 9th.
Thus the law has been confined, and drawn up into a narrow and inglorious study, and that which should be the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth remained in all the barbarism of the rudest times, whilst every other advanced by rapid steps to the highest improvement both in solidity and elegance; insomuch that the study of our jurisprudence presented to liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best authors, hardly anything but barbarous terms, ill explained, a coarse, but not a plain expression, an indigested method, and a species of reasoning the very refuse of the schools, which deduced the spirit of the law, not from original justice or legal conformity, but from causes foreign to it and altogether whimsical.
An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.
I shall not be sorry, however, to find that you are answered; not that I wish to accomplish, or seem rather to accomplish any end by a disorderly and indigested attempt at union; nor do I think this thing of itself so important as many do: still it is one which very much arrests the imagination, and excites strong devotional feeling; and I rather looked on it as leading to more important matters with Prussia itself.
I will not trouble my reader with the shortness of time in which I writ it, or the several intervals of sickness: they who think too well of their own performances, are apt to boast in their prefaces how little time their works have cost them, and what other business of more importance interfered; but the reader will be as apt to ask the question, why they allowed not a longer time to make their works more perfect, and why they had so despicable an opinion of their judges, as to thrust their indigested stuff upon them, as if they deserved no better.
Returned from Scotland in 1746, Prince Charles brought with him a head full of indigested romance, a heart rich in chimerical expectations. He now prided himself on being a plain hardy mountaineer. He took a line of his own; he concealed his measures from the spy-ridden Court of his father in Rome; he quarrelled with his brother, the Duke of York, when the Duke accepted a cardinal's hat.
That evil influence which carried me first away from my father's house, that hurried me into the wild and indigested notion of raising my fortune; and that impressed those conceits so forcibly upon me, as to make me deaf to all good advice, and to the entreaties and even the command of my father: I say, the same influence, whatever it was, presented the most unfortunate of all enterprises to my view; and I went on board a vessel bound to the coast of Africa; or, as our sailors vulgarly call it, a voyage to Guinea.
Such vague and multifarious reading could not teach me to think, to write, or to act; and the only principle that darted a ray of light into the indigested chaos, was an early and rational application to the order of time and place. But in the discussion of the first ages I overleaped the bounds of modesty and use.
"Writing," said Sir John, "to a certain degree is an art, or, if you please, a trade. He may, after all, if he want talents, produce a vapid and inefficient book; but possess what talents he may, he will, without knowledge, produce a crude and indigested one." Mr. Tyrrel, however, still insisted upon it, that in a Christian minister the lustre of learning is tinsel, and human wisdom folly.
No great names have come down to us from the priests of Babylon or Egypt. No one gained an individual reputation. The Chaldean and Egyptian priests may have furnished the raw material of observation to the Greeks, but the latter alone possessed the scientific genius by which indigested facts were converted into a symmetrical system. The East never gave valuable knowledge to the West.
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