Natural History of Enthusiasm

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Superstition—the creature of guilt and fear—is an evil almost as ancient as the human family. But Enthusiasm—the child of hope—hardly appeared on earth until after the time when...

This scriptural system of devotion stands opposed, then, to all those false sublimities of an enthusiastic pietism which affect to lift man into a middle region between heaven a...

But when, either by the refinements of rationalism—a gross misnomer—or by superstitious corruptions, the central facts of Christianity have become obscured, no middle ground rem...

Reason as well as faith justifies this doctrine, and demands that we deny independency to whatever is created; devoutly confessing that God is "all in all." In him by whom they...

The creed of the Christian is the fruit of exposition; no part of it is elaborated by processes of abstract reasoning; no part is furnished by the inventive faculties. To ascert...

The fields of error have been fully reaped and gleaned; nor shall aught that is new spring up on that field, the whole botany of which is already known and classified. It is onl...

A course somewhat less gratifying to the eagerness of enthusiastic spirits must be pursued, if the subject of the sacred enigma does not actually stand within our view; if it re...

And notwithstanding its many real, and many apparent irregularities, there is also a settled order of causes and effects in the human system, as well as in the material world. T...

Thwarted enthusiasm naturally generates impious petulance. If we encumber the Providence of God with unwarranted expectations, it will be difficult not so to murmur under disapp...

It remains, then, to ask, By what _special_ means has Christianity effected these ameliorations? and it will be found, that the power and success of that new principle of benevo...

The Christian philanthropist, if well instructed, dares not affect indifference to the promised reward, or pretend to be more disinterested than were the Apostles, who labored,...

While hundreds were fatally infatuated by this enthusiastic religion, the piety of thousands was more or less impaired by their mere admiration of it; and very few altogether es...

When the several circumstances above mentioned are duly considered, they will remove from candid minds almost every sensation of asperity or of contemptuous reprobation, towards...

The monastery was at once the place where the illusions of distempered brains were the most likely to abound, and where the frauds which naturally follow in the train of such il...

In the earlier period, though there might be much pretension to seclusion from the world, the monastery was in fact a house set on a hill in the midst of the Christian community...

Whether the religion for which the reformers suffered, "was from heaven or of men," is not our question; but whether it is not a religion of robust constitution, framed to endur...

Here once more the objector must be urged to select his alternative.—If it be granted that Christianity won this wide success by aid from heaven, then who will profess to believ...

Whenever the true and the false in matters of religion are brought into conflict, two things are necessary to secure the triumph of the better side, namely, in the first place,...

An expectation of this sort will, of course, be spurned by those (if there are any such) who, were they deprived of their darling sectarism, and robbed of their sinister prefere...