vulgar sort do; nor do
they decry its mysteries, as Deists are in the habit of doing; nor, as
Socinians, and Unitarians, and Rationalists, do they attempt to reduce
it to a mere code of morals. They grant it to be the highest development
of humanity yet reached by the majority of the human race. The brute,
the savage, the polytheistic idolater, the star worshiper, the
monotheist, the Christian, are all, in their scheme, so many successive
developments of humanity in its upward progress. There is only one step
higher than Christianity, and that is Pantheism. Well knowing that
Christianity is diametrically opposed to their falsehoods, and that the
Bible, everywhere, teaches that the natural progress of man has ever
been down from a state of holiness to idolatry and barbarism, they have
yet the hardihood to profess respect for it, as a system of concealed
Pantheism, and to clothe their abominations in Scripture language. They
speak, for instance, of the "beauty of holiness in the mind, that has
surmounted every idea of a personal God;" and of "God dwelling in us,
and his love perfected in us," when they believe that he dwells as
really in every creature: in that hog, for instance. Then they will
readily acknowledge that the Bible is inspired. They _can accept_--that
is the phrase--they can accept the Book which denounces death upon those
fools who, "professing themselves to be wise, change the truth of God
into a lie, and worship and serve the creature more than the Creator,"
as merely a mystic revelation of the Pantheism which leaves man to
"erect everything into a God, provided it is none: sun, moon, stars, a
cat, a monkey, an onion, uncouth idols, sculptured marble; nay, a
shapeless trunk, which the devout impatience of the idolater does not
stay to fashion into the likeness of a man, but gives its apotheosis at
once." Oh, yes; they accept the Bible as inspired--a God inspired
Book--inasmuch as _every_ product of the human mind is a development of
Deity. The Bible, then, when we have the matter fully explained, is
quite on a level with Gulliver's Travels, or Emerson's Address to a
Senior Class of Divinity.

There is nothing, however, in this vast system of monstrosities, which
fills the soul of a Christian with such loathing and detestation, as to
hear Pantheists profess their veneration for the Lord Jesus, and claim
him as a teacher of Pantheism. If there is one object which they detest
with all their hearts, it is th