t-Sea and Flame-
Sea with _its_ eternal interests, dwindle literally into Nothing;
my speech of it is--silence for the while. I will as soon think
of making Galaxies and Star Systems to guide little herring-
vessels by, as of preaching Religion that the Constable may
continue possible. O my Advanced-Liberal friend, this new second
progress, of proceeding 'to invent God,' is a very strange one!
Jacobinism unfolded into Saint-Simonism bodes innumerable blessed
things; but the thing itself might draw tears from a Stoic!--As
for me, some twelve or thirteen New Religions, heavy Packets,
most of them unfranked, having arrived here from various parts of
the world, in a space of six calendar months, I have instructed
my invaluable friend the Stamped Postman to introduce no more of
them, if the charge exceed one penny.

Henry of Essex, duelling in that Thames Island, near to Reading
Abbey, had a religion. But was it in virtue of his seeing armed
Phantasms of St. Edmund 'on the rim of the horizon,' looking
minatory on him? Had that, intrinsically, anything to do with
his religion at all? Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner
Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed
still to all souls of men;--which Inner Light shone here 'through
such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing
'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to
circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner
Light may shine, through the _less_ turbid media; the _fewer_
Phantasms it may produce,--the gladder surely shall I be, and not
the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced-
Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion
past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same
Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining--which
certainly the 'Phantasms' and the 'turbid media' were not
essential for! All religion was here to remind us, better or
worse, of what we already know better or worse, of the quite
_infinite_ difference there is between a Good man and a Bad; to
bid us love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the
other,--strive infinitely to _be_ the one, and not to be the
other. 'All religion issues in due Practical Hero-worship: He
that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a religion; he that
has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a succedaneum for salt, will
never find any religion, though you rose from the dead to preach