2. Reasonableness of the inquiry
It may properly be a subject of wonder that the arguments, which are brought to justify a custom such as war, receive so little investigation.
It must be a studious ingenuity of mischief that could devise a practice more calamitous or horrible; and yet it is a practice of which it rarely occurs to us to inquire into the necessity, or to ask whether it cannot be or ought not to be avoided.
In one truth, however, all will acquiesce:
that the arguments in favour of such a practice should be unanswerably strong.
Let it not be said
- that the experience and the practice of other ages have superseded the necessity of inquiry in our own;
- that there can be no reason to question the lawfulness of that which has been sanctioned by forty centuries;
- or that he who presumes to question it is amusing himself with schemes of visionary philanthropy.
“There is not, it may be,” says Lord Clarendon, “a greater obstruction to the investigation of truth, or the improvement of knowledge, than the too frequent appeal and the too supine resignation of our understanding to antiquity.”
Whosoever proposes an alteration of existing institutions will meet, from some men, with a sort of instinctive opposition,
which appears to be influenced by no process of reasoning, by no considerations of propriety or principles of rectitude,
which defends the existing system because it exists, and which would have equally defended its opposite if that had been the oldest.
“Nor is it out of modesty that we have this resignation, or that we do, in truth, think those who have gone before us to be wiser than ourselves –
we are as proud and as peevish as any of our progenitors - but it is out of laziness; we will rather take their words than take the pains to examine the reason they govern themselves by.”
To those who urge objections from the authority of the ages, it is, indeed, a sufficient answer to say that they apply to every long continued custom.
Slave dealers urged them against the friends of the abolition, Papists urged them against Wickliffe and Luther, and the Athenians probably thought it a good objection to an apostle that “he seemed to be a setter forth of strange gods.”