rehead often-times, but
never once to bear its mystic weight upon the shoulder. In spite of
self-denial, cleverly kept in sight by means of eggs, and pulse, and
hair-cloth, to pamper the deluded flesh with many a carnal holiday; in
contravention of a kingdom not of this world, boldly to usurp the
temporal dominion of it all: instead of the overwhelming
incomprehensibility of an eternal doom, to comfort the worst with false
assurance of a purgatory longer or shorter; that after all, vice may be
burnt out; and who knows but that gold, buying up the prayers and
superfluous righteousness of others, may not make the fiery ordeal an
easy one? In lieu of a God brought near to his creatures, infinite
purity in contact with the grossest sin, as the good Physician loveth;
how sage it seemed to stock the immeasurable distance with intermediate
numia, cycle on epicycle, arc on arc, priest and bishop and pope, and
martyr, and virgin, and saint, and angel, all in their stations, at due
interval soliciting God to be (as if His blessed Majesty were not so of
Himself!) the sinner's friend. How comfortable this to man's sweet
estimation of his own petty penances; how glorifying to those "filthy
rags," his so-called righteousness: how apt to build up the hierarchist
power; how seemingly analogous with man's experience here, where clerks
lay the case before commissioners, and commissioners before the
government, and the government before the sovereign.

All this was entirely expectable: and I can conceive that a deep
Reasoner among the first apostles, even without such supernal light as
"the Spirit speaking expressly," might have so calculated on the
probabilities to come, as to have written, long ago, words akin to
these: "In the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving
heed to seductive doctrines, and fanciful notions about intermediate
deities, ([Greek: daimonion],) perverting truth by hypocritical
departures from it, searing conscience against its own cravings after
spiritual holiness, forbidding marriage, (to invent another virtue,) and
commanding abstinence from God's good gifts, as a means of building up a
creature-merit by voluntary humiliation." At the likelihood that such
"profane and old wives' fables" should thereafter have arisen, might
Paul without a miracle have possibly arrived.

Yet again: take another view. The Religion of Christ, though intended
to be universal in some better era of this groaning earth, was