All this would lead us to suspect that the doctrine of
private judgment, in its simplicity, purity, and integrity,--private
judgment, all private judgment, and nothing but private judgment,--is
held by very few persons indeed; and that the great mass of the
population are either stark unbelievers in it, or deplorably dark about
it; and that even the minority who are in a manner faithful to it, have
glossed and corrupted the true sense of it by a miserably faulty
reading, and hold, not the right of private judgment, but the private
right of judgment; in other words, their own private right, and no one's
else. To us it seems as clear as day, that they consider that they
themselves, indeed, individually can and do act on reason, and on
nothing but reason; that they have the gift of advancing, without bias
or unsteadiness, throughout their search, from premise to conclusion,
from text to doctrine; that they have sought aright, and no one else,
who does not agree with them; that they alone have found out the art of
putting the salt upon the bird's tail, and have rescued themselves from
being the slaves of circumstance and the creatures of impulse.
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