9. Instilled in childhood.
There is nothing more ordinary than children's receiving into their minds propositions
(especially about matters of religion) from their parents, nurses, or those about them: which being insinuated into
their unwary as well as unbiassed understandings, and fastened by degrees, are at last (equally whether true or
false) riveted there by long custom and education, beyond all possibility of being pulled out again. For men, when
they are grown up, reflecting upon their opinions, and finding those of this sort to be as ancient in their minds as
their very memories, not having observed their early insinuation, nor by what means they got them, they are apt to
reverence them as sacred things, and not to suffer them to be profaned, touched, or questioned: they look on them
as the Urim and Thummim set up in their minds immediately by God himself, to be the great and unerring
deciders of truth and falsehood, and the judges to which they are to appeal in all manner of controversies.
