Infidel Writers

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 13, 1864

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 that called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers in London what has become of all those 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, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.—Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.