Had the doctrine been but false,the task of exposing it would have been comparatively an easy one:but it was what is worse,unmeaning,and thence it came to require all these pains which I have been here bestowing on it:to what profit let the reader judge.
`Well then',(cries an objector)'the task you have set yourself is at an end;and the subject of it after all,according to your own representation,teaches nothing;according to your own shewing it is not worth attending to.Why then bestow on it so much attention?'
In this viewTo do something to instruct,but more to undeceive,the timid and admiring studentto excite him to place more confidence in his own strength,and less in the infallibility of great names:to help him to emancipate his judgment from the shackles of authority:to let him see that the not understanding a discourse may as well be the writer's fault as the reader's:to teach him to distinguish between shewy language and sound sense:to warn him not to pay himself with words:to shew him that what may tickle the ear,or dazzle the imagination,will not always inform the judgment:to shew him what it is our Author can do,and has done:and what it is he has not done,and cannot do:to dispose him rather to fast on ignorance than feed himself with error:to let him see that with regard to an expositor of the law,our Author is not he that should come,but that we may be still looking for another.`Who then',says my objector,`shall be that other?Yourself?No verily.My mission is at an end,when I have prepared the way before him.
FINIS
1.I add here the word `institutions',for the sake of including rules of Common Law,as well as portions of Statute Law.
2.Membra Condividnitul SAUND.Log.L.I.c.
46.
3.In practice,'the question of Law has commonly been spoken of as opposed to that of fact but this distinction is an accidental one.That a Law commanding or prohibiting such a son of action,has been established,is as much a fact,as that an individual action of that sort has been committed.The establishment of a Law may be spoken of as a fact,at least for the purpose of distinguishing from any consideration that may be offered as a reason for such Law.