Infidel Writers | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 17, 1875

Infidel Writers.

We have had writers of that description who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who, born within the last forty years has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers of London what has become of all these lights of the world. In as few years their few successors will go to the family vault of "all the Capulets."

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle reposing beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all they are other than the little, shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troblesome insects of the hour. —Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France.