ction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for
patronage, and "pays his court" to her.... He describes nothing so well
as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more
familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the
stars.... The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of
abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the _want of genuine
emotion_. He sees Virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists
and storms of earth: he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with
this world in her left hand and the other world in her right; but we
never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists--in
the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his
fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little
daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal
triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the
sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the
details of ordinary life.

In these essays there are various indications of her religious opinions,
and those of a decided character. In that on Dr. Cumming, she has this word
to say of the rationalistic conception of the Bible:

He seems to be ignorant, or he chooses to ignore the fact, that there
is a large body of eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the
Hebrew and Christian scriptures as a series of historical documents, to
be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, and that
an equally large number of men, who are not historical critics, find
the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the scriptures, opposed to
their profoundest moral convictions.

This statement is suggestive of her position on religious subjects:

The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired system,
believe that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the saving but
the educating of men's souls, the creating within them of holy
dispositions, the subduing of egoistical pretensions, and the perpetual
enhancing of the desire that the will of God--a will synonymous with
goodness and truth--may be done on earth. But what relation to all this
has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian in
the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which S