Lectures on Witchcraft Author:Charles Wentworth Upham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: they were shipwrecked; ? and while we grieve to see them eating the bitter fruits of their own vices and crimes, we can seize the benefits of their experience wi... more »thout paying the price at which they purchased it. In the desire which every man feels to leam the history, and be instructed by the example of his predecessors, and in the accompanying disposition, with the means of carrying it into effect, to transmit a knowledge of himself and his own times to his successors, we discover the wise and admirable arrangement of a providence, which removes the worn out individual to a better country, but leaves the acquisitions of his mind, and the benefit of his experience, as an accumulating and common fund, for the use of his posterity ? which has secured the continued renovation of the race, without the loss of the wisdom of each generation. These considerations suggest a much more adequate and accurate definition of history, than the celebrated one proposed by Boling- broke ? 'Philosophy teaching by example.' They inform us that history is rather theinstrument by which the results of the great experiment of human life are collected and transmitted from age to age: speaking through the records of history, all past generations become the instructors of the present. Since this is the true and proper design of history, it assumes an exalted station among the branches of human knowledge. Every community that aspires to become intelligent and virtuous, should cherish it. Institutions for the promotion and diffusion of useful information, should have special reference to it. And all people should be induced to Jook back to the days of their forefathers, to be warned by their errors, instructed by their wisdom, and stimulated in the career of improvement, by the example of their virtu...« less