y of the leaders of the eighteenth
century anti-Christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed
their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that
Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good.

It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often
feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this
sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and
all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think
no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in
possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent
burden.

"God has two families of children on this earth," says Francis W.
Newman,[32] "the once-born and the twice-born," and the once-born he
describes as follows: "They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a
Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful
harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The
same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies: they do not
look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own
imperfections: yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for
they hardly think of themselves AT ALL. This childlike quality of
their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for
they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom
the parent trembles: in fact, they have no vivid conception of ANY of
the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God consists.[33] He is
to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his
character, not in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and
harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own
hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but
melt them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward
disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have a
certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their
simple worship."

[32] The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp.
89, 91.

[33] I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think
that she "could always cuddle up to God."

In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow
in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by
minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism