intimately checks the attempt with absolute power, and knows how to set bounds to the most impudent folly of men.  Though vice has for many ages reigned with unbridled licentiousness, virtue is still called virtue; and the most brutish and rash of her adversaries cannot yet deprive her of her name.  Hence it is that vice, though triumphant in the world, is still obliged to disguise itself under the mask of hypocrisy or sham honesty, to gain the esteem it has not the confidence to expect, if it should go bare-faced.  Thus, notwithstanding its impudence, it pays a forced homage to virtue, by endeavouring to adorn itself with her fairest outside in order to receive the honour and respect she commands from men.  It is true virtuous men are exposed to censure; and they are, indeed, ever reprehensible in this life, through their natural imperfections; but yet the most vicious cannot totally efface in themselves the idea of true virtue.  There never was yet any man upon earth that could prevail either with others, or himself, to allow, as a received maxim, that to be knavish, passionate, and mischievous, is more honourable than to be honest, moderate, good-natured, and benevolent.

Sect.  LVII.  Reason in Man is Independent of and above Him.

I have already evinced that the inward and universal master, at all times, and in all places, speaks the same truths.  We are not that master:  though it is true we often speak without, and higher than him.  But then we mistake, stutter, and do not so much as understand ourselves.  We are even afraid of being made sensible of our mistakes, and we shut up our ears, lest we should be humbled by his corrections.  Certainly the man who is apprehensive of being corrected and reproved by that uncorruptible reason, and ever goes astray when he does not follow it, is not that perfect, universal, and immutable reason, that corrects him, in spite of himself.  In all things we find, as it were, two principles within us.  The one gives, the other receives; the one fails, or is defective; the other makes up; the one mistakes, the other rectifies; the one goes awry, through his inclination, the other sets him right.  It was the mistaken and ill-understood experience of this that led the Marcionites and Manicheans into error.  Every man is conscious within himself of a limited and inferior reason, that goes astray and errs, as soon as it gets loose from an entire subordination, and which mends its error no other way, but by returning under the yoke of another superior, universal, and immutable reason.  Thus everything within us argues an inferior, limited, communicated, and borrowed reason, that wants every moment to be rectified by another.  All men are rational by means of the same reason, that communicates itself to them, according to various degrees.  There is a certain number of wise men; but the wisdom from which they draw theirs, as from an inexhaustible source, and which makes them what they are, is but one.