ous
consequences, that, if opinions touching upon religion occur which
the Reader condemns, he not only cannot sympathize with them, however
animated the expression, but there is, for the most part, an end put
to all satisfaction and enjoyment. Love, if it before existed, is
converted into dislike; and the heart of the Reader is set against
the Author and his book.--To these excesses, they, who from their
professions ought to be the most guarded against them, are perhaps
the most liable; I mean those sects whose religion, being from the
calculating understanding, is cold and formal. For when Christianity,
the religion of humility, is founded upon the proudest faculty of
our nature, what can be expected but contradictions? Accordingly,
believers of this cast are at one time contemptuous; at another, being
troubled, as they are and must he, with inward misgivings, they are
jealous and suspicious;--and at all seasons, they are under temptation
to supply by the heat with which they defend their tenets, the
animation which is wanting to the constitution of the religion itself.

Faith was given to man that his affections, detached from the
treasures of time, might be inclined to settle upon those of
eternity;--the elevation of his nature, which this habit produces
on earth, being to him a presumptive evidence of a future state of
existence; and giving him a title to partake of its holiness. The
religious man values what he sees chiefly as an 'imperfect shadowing
forth' of what he is incapable of seeing. The concerns of religion
refer to indefinite objects, and are too weighty for the mind to
support them without relieving itself by resting a great part of the
burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce between Man and his Maker
cannot be carried on but by a process where much is represented
in little, and the Infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite
capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion
and poetry; between religion--making up the deficiencies of reason by
faith; and poetry--passionate for the instruction of reason; between
religion--whose element is infinitude, and whose ultimate trust is
the supreme of things, submitting herself to circumscription, and
reconciled to substitutions; and poetry--ethereal and transcendent,
yet incapable to sustain her existence without sensuous incarnation.
In this community of nature may be perceived also the lurking
incitements of kindred error;--so that