, and Creeshna, and Juggernaut; heavenly kings,
heavenly queens, triune deities, earth-born gods, heaven-born prophets,
apotheosized monarchs, demon-enlightened philosophers, saints, angels,
devils, ghosts, apparitions, and sorceries! But, worse than these sounds
which but stun the ear and confound the intellect, what sights, oh!
human kind! appal the heart! The rivers of earth run blood! Nation set
against nation! Brother against brother! Man against the companion of
his bosom! and that soft companion, maddened with the frenzy of insane
remorse for imaginary crimes? fired with the rage of infatuated bigotry,
or subdued to diseased helplessness and mental fatuity, renounces
kindred, flies from social converse, and pines away a useless or
mischievous existence in sighings and tremblings, spectral fears,
uncharitable feelings and bitter denunciations! Such are thy doings,
oh! religion! Or, rather, such are thy doings, oh! man! While standing
in a world so rich in sources of enjoyment, so stored with objects of
real inquiry and attainable knowledge, yet shutting thine eyes, and,
worse, thine heart, to the tangible things and sentient creatures around
thee, and winging thy diseased imagination beyond the light of the sun
which gladdens thy world, and contemplation of the objects which are
here to expand thy mind and quicken the pulses of thy heart!... I will
pray ye to observe how much of our positive misery originates in our
idle speculations in matters of faith, and in our blind, our fearful
forgetfulness of facts--our cold, heartless, and, I will say, _insane_
indifference to visible causes of tangible evil, and visible sources of
tangible happiness. Look to the walks of life, I beseech ye--look into
the public prints--look into your sectarian churches--look into the
bosoms of families--look into your own bosoms, and those of your fellow
beings, and see how many of our disputes and dissensions, public
and private--how many of our unjust actions--how many of our harsh
judgments--how many of our uncharitable feelings--spring out of our
ignorant ambition to rend the veil which wraps from our human senses the
knowledge of things unseen, and from our human faculties the conception
of causes unknown? And oh! my fellow beings! do not these very words
_unseen_ and _unknown_, warn the enthusiast against the profanity of
such inquiries, and proclaim to the philosopher their futility? Do they
not teach us that religion is no subject