hurt, or
ought to hurt, our plain, cool, honest English common-sense. A true
Englishman does not like to say more than he feels; and the more he
feels, the more he likes to keep it to himself, instead of parading it
and talking of it before men. Still waters run deep, he holds; and he is
right for himself; only he must not judge others, or think that because
he cannot speak to God in such passionate language as St Augustine, who
was an African, a southern man, with much stronger feelings than we
Englishmen usually have, that therefore St Augustine, or those who copy
him now, do not really feel what they say. But, nevertheless, plain
common-sense people, such as most Englishmen are, are afraid of this
enthusiastical religion. They say, We do not pretend to feel this
rapturous love to God, how much-soever we may reverence Him, and wish to
keep His commandments; and we do not desire to feel it. For we see that
people who have talked in this way about God have been almost always
monks and nuns; or brain-sick, disappointed persons, who have no natural
and wholesome bent for their affections. And even though this kind of
religion may be very well for them, it is not the religion for a plain
honest man who has a wife and family and his bread to earn in the world,
and has children to provide for, and his duty to do in the State as well
as in the Church. And more, they say, these enthusiastic, rapturous
feelings do not seem to make people better, and more charitable, and more
loving. Some really good and charitable people say that they have these
feelings, but for all that we can see they would be just as good and
charitable without the feelings, while most persons who take up with this
sort of religion are not the better for it. They do not control their
tempers; they can be full,--as they say,--of love and devotion to God one
minute, but why are they the next minute peevish, proud, self-willed,
harsh and cruel to those who differ from them? Their religion does not
make them love their neighbours. In old times (when persecution was
allowed), it made them, or at least allowed them, to persecute, torment,
and kill their neighbours, and fancy that by such conduct they did God
service; and now it tempts them to despise their neighbours--to look on
every one who has not these strange, intense feelings which they say they
have, as unconverted, and lost, and doomed to everlasting destruction.