abilities more promising.

While I view the advances which are making in the knowledge of the
arts and sciences, with the pleasure of which you speak, I am
apprehensive that the propensity "to chain down the human mind to its
present attainments, and thereby prevent all further improvements,"
relative to moral truth, may have its rise in a principle, which, so
far from being inimical to man, is, in its general tendency,
incalculably beneficial. No desire is entertained to justify all the
zeal and all the means which are employed to prevent the free exercise
of the human mind, in its researches after divine knowledge, and to
retard the influx of that light which would prove unfavourable to
doctrines which have little more than prescription for their support;
but it seems reasonable to make a proper distinction between what may
be called a salutary principle in the human mind, and a wrong
application or an erroneous indulgence of it. The principle referred
to, inclines us not only to hold in the highest veneration any
improvements which we have made, but also to retain such acquisitions
in their purity. Now it is believed that what you complain of, has its
rise from the foregoing causes, and is nothing more than a wrong or an
erroneous indulgence of a natural desire which in its general tendency
is advantageous. Nothing is more incident to man, than to misapply his
desires, and to overate his reasonable duty. But it is at the same
time believed that a remedy of such defects which should consist in
the destruction of those principles which are improperly acted on,
would be worse than the disorder. And now the thought strikes me, that
the way by which we account for the improprieties which have just been
traced up to their causes, will as charitably account for what seems
to incite you to aim a fatal stroke at a fabric which has its
foundation in the immovable principles of our moral nature, and which,