To temptations of this subtle insinuating kind, the life of men of learning seems above all others to be exposed. As they are themselves appointed the teachers of others, they very rarely have the dangers of their own state set before them; as they are, by their abstraction and retirement, secluded from the gaieties, the luxuries, and the pageantries of life, they are willingly persuaded to believe, that because they are at a great distance from the rocks on which conscience is most frequently wrecked, that, therefore, they sail with safety, and may give themselves to the wind, without a compass. The crimes, from which they are in danger, are not those from which the mind has been taught to shrink away with horrour, or against which the invectives of moral or theological writers have generally been directed; and, therefore, they are suffered to approach unregarded, to gain ground imperceptibly upon minds directed to different views, and to fix themselves at leisure in the heart, where perhaps they are scarcely discovered till they are past eradication.
To these causes, or to some of these, it must surely be imputed, that learning is found so frequently to fail in the direction of life; and to operate so faintly and uncertainly in the regulation of their conduct, who are most celebrated for their application and proficiency. They have been betrayed by some false security, to withhold their attention from their own lives; they have grown knowing without growing virtuous; and have failed of the wisdom which is the gift of the Father of lights, because they have thought it unnecessary to seek it with that anxiety and importunity, to which only it is granted; they have trusted to their own powers, and were "wise in their own conceits."
There is perhaps no class of men, to whom the precept given by the apostle to his converts, against too great confidence in their understandings, may be more properly inculcated, than those who are dedicated to the profession of literature; and are, therefore, necessarily advanced to degrees of knowledge above them who are dispersed among manual occupations, and the vulgar parts of life;
