Hammon is an atheist, and it would require the same abilities to reconcile the two words was future, as to reconcile his principles with the common sense of mankind.[121]
The following passage, from Gregory's Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man, is remarkable for this error.
"Men have been taught that they did (do) God acceptable service, by abstracting themselves from all the duties they owed (owe) to society; and by inflicting on themselves the severest tortures which nature can support. They have been taught that it was (is) their duty," &c.
"And yet one would think that this was the principal use of the study of history."——Bolingbroke on Hist. letter 3.
A similar fault occurs in one of Mrs. Thale's letters to Dr. Johnson, Aug. 9, 1775.
"—Yet I have always found the best supplement for talk was writing."
So in Blackstone's Commentaries, book 1. chap. 7.
"It was observed in a former chapter, that one of the principal bulwarks of civil liberty, or, in other words, of the British constitution, was the limitation of the king's prerogative."