is for the coming golden ages. What I had to remark, for the present
brazen one, is, that in several provinces, as in Education, Polity,
Religion, where so much is wanted and indispensable, and so little can
as yet be furnished, probably Imposture is of sanative, anodyne nature,
and man's Gullibility not his worst blessing. Suppose your sinews of
war quite broken; I mean your military chest insolvent, forage all but
exhausted; and that the whole army is about to mutiny, disband, and cut
your and each other's throat,--then were it not well could you, as if
by miracle, pay them in any sort of fairy-money, feed them on coagulated
water, or mere imagination of meat; whereby, till the real supply came
up, they might be kept together and quiet? Such perhaps was the aim of
Nature, who does nothing without aim, in furnishing her favorite,
Man, with this his so omnipotent or rather omnipatient Talent of being
Gulled.

"How beautifully it works, with a little mechanism; nay, almost makes
mechanism for itself! These Professors in the Nameless lived with ease,
with safety, by a mere Reputation, constructed in past times, and then
too with no great effort, by quite another class of persons. Which
Reputation, like a strong brisk-going undershot wheel, sunk into the
general current, bade fair, with only a little annual re-painting on
their part, to hold long together, and of its own accord assiduously
grind for them. Happy that it was so, for the Millers! They themselves
needed not to work; their attempts at working, at what they called
Educating, now when I look back on it, fill me with a certain mute
admiration.

"Besides all this, we boasted ourselves a Rational University; in the
highest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind
furnished with much talk about Progress of the Species, Dark Ages,
Prejudice, and the like; so that all were quickly enough blown out into
a state of windy argumentativeness; whereby the better sort had soon to
end in sick, impotent Scepticism; the worser sort explode (_crepiren_)
in finished Self-conceit, and to all spiritual intents become dead.--But
this too is portion of mankind's lot. If our era is the Era of Unbelief,
why murmur under it; is there not a better coming, nay come? As in
long-drawn systole and long-drawn diastole, must the period of Faith
alternate with the period of Denial; must the vernal growth, the summer
luxuriance of all Opinions, Spiritual Representations and Cr