its requisitions, to address itself to
the weak-minded and ignorant, to be supported by sophistry and
imposture, and to contradict reason and exalt mere irrational faith; a
religion which impresses on the serious mind very distressing views of
the guilt and consequences of sin, sets upon the minute acts of the day,
one by one, their definite value for praise or blame, and thus casts a
grave shadow over the future; a religion which holds up to admiration
the surrender of wealth, and disables serious persons from enjoying it
if they would; a religion, the doctrines of which, be they good or bad,
are to the generality of men unknown; which is considered to bear on its
very surface signs of folly and falsehood so distinct that a glance
suffices to judge of it, and that careful examination is preposterous;
which is felt to be so simply bad that it may be calumniated at hazard
and at pleasure, it being nothing but absurdity to stand upon the
accurate distribution of its guilt among its particular acts, or
painfully to determine how far this or that story concerning it is
literally true, or what has to be allowed in candor, or what is
improbable, or what cuts two ways, or what is not proved, or what may be
plausibly defended; a religion such that men look at a convert to it
with a feeling which no other denomination raises except Judaism,
socialism, or Mormonism--namely, with curiosity, suspicion, fear,
disgust, as the case may be, as if something strange had befallen him,
as if he had had an initiation into a mystery, and had come into
communion with dreadful influences, as if he were now one of a
confederacy which claimed him, absorbed him, stripped him of his
personality, reduced him to a mere organ or instrument of a whole; a
religion which men hate as proselytizing, anti-social, revolutionary, as
dividing families, separating chief friends, corrupting the maxims of
government, making a mock at law, dissolving the empire, the enemy of
human nature, and a "conspirator against its rights and privileges"; a
religion which they consider the champion and instrument of darkness,
and a pollution calling down upon the land the anger of heaven; a
religion which they associate with intrigue and conspiracy, which they
speak about in whispers, which they detect by anticipation in whatever
goes wrong, and to which they impute whatever is unaccountable; a
religion, the very name of which they cast out as evil, and use simply
as a bad ep