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They may succeed well and even become eminent in some one branch of business, but they do not reason soundly upon every subject, and therefore are very liable to be led astray by the force of their own imagination, and fall into gross errors. They are the foam and the spray, that rise upon the surface of the stream to bubble and flash and disappear.
At best there is no perfection in the human mind. Every one has failings and imperfections. The soundest and most reliable often show their weak sides, and the man who is very wise in some things, often shows himself a fool in something else. He may be a very learned divine but a very poor mechanic, he may be a great politician, yet a poor moralist, or he may know how to get and keep money, and yet know very little of anything else. Therefore it is wrong to suppose that because an individual holds a respectable position in some department of business he is equally reliable in everything else.
To sound well informed minds, in their calm reasoning moments, departed spirits never make their appearance, and if all men were of this class we should hear no more of the self exhumed corpses dancing upon their graves in winding sheets. Frightful spectres would cease to visit the bedrooms of innocent females at the solemn hour of midnight, and every pretence to intercourse with the Spirits of the dead would be regarded as it should be, as an impious falsehood. The Roman priests not being always satisfied with the responses of the good deities declared, that if God would not communicate his secrets to men, it was perfectly right to seek information of the devil. Hence many of their oracular deities were of that class. But
