the mass of vain and false ones, which will, like noxious weeds, infest
minds left in ignorance, are not _permitted_ by those bad associates to do
their duty. Weak by being few, insulated, unsupported, and dwelling among
vicious neighbors, they not only cannot perform their own due service, but
are liable to be seduced to that of the evil principles whose company they
are condemned to keep. The _conjunction_ of truths is of the utmost
importance for preserving the genuine tendency, and securing the
appropriate efficacy, of each. It is an unhappy "lack of knowledge" when
there is not enough to preserve, to what there is of it, the honest
beneficial quality of knowledge. How many of the follies, excesses, and
crimes, in the course of the world, have taken their pretended warrant
from some fragment of truth, dissevered from the connection of truths
indispensable to its right operation, and in that detached state easily
perverted into coalescence with the most pernicious principles, which
concealed and gave effect to their malignity under the falsified authority
of a truth.

There were many and melancholy exemplifications of all we have said of
ignorance, in the conduct of that ancient people at present in our view.
Doubtless a sad proportion of the iniquities which, by their necessary
tendency and by the divine vindictive appointment, brought plagues and
destruction upon them, were committed in violation of what they knew. But
also it was in no small part from blindness to the manifestation of truth
and duty incessantly confronting them, that they were betrayed into crimes
and consequent miseries. This is evident equally from the language in
which their prophets reproached their intellectual stupidity, and from the
surprise which they sometimes seem to have felt on finding themselves
involved in retributive suffering, for what they could not conceive to be
serious delinquencies. It appeared as if they had never so much as dreamed
of such a-consequence; and their monitors had to represent to them, that