evidence
of treason or insanity. He who used them was a marked man, and liable to
find on the first oyster-shell his sentence of exile from the assemblage
of the faithful. The name of Goethe was as terrible as the sacred 'Om'
of the Brahmins; it was whispered with 'bated breath, and was generally
believed to be diabolical _per se_. In short, everything bearing the
stamp of Germany was a bit of sweet, forbidden lore. Travels in that
fog-land by dull old fogies, and simple outlines of its Philosophy by
divines high in rank, were obtained by stealth, and read in secret by
college-boys, with as much zeal as the 'Kisses' of Johannes Secundus or
the Epigrams of Martial. Even Klopstock's 'Messiah' became gilded with a
sort of delightful impropriety.

Disapprobation and distrust had merged into abuse and persecution.
Orestes A. Brownson, then drifting with the strong tide of the liberals,
published in 1840 a sort of pantheistically ending novel, entitled
_Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted_. The Rev. Dr. Bright, at
present editor of the Baptist _Examiner_, was at that tune a bookseller
of the firm of Bennett & Bright, and publisher of the _Baptist
Register_. When _Charles Elwood_ appeared, he ordered the usual number
of copies; but, discovering the nature of the book, made a Servetus of
the 'lot' by burning them up in the back-yard of his store. A funeral
pyre worthy the admiration and awe it must have excited.

The _Essays_ of Emerson were subsequently attacked furiously in the
_Princeton Review_ by Prof. Dod and Jas. W. Alexander. These gentlemen
gave to the world, as criticisms of Emerson and other writers, several
treatises on Pantheism, aiding the very cause they designed to destroy,
by disseminating among the religious public a statement of the primitive
Philosophy of the Vedas, and its reflection in Germany and America,
clearer than any that had yet appeared: a task for which their
scholarship and ability eminently fitted them. But in attacking German
Philosophy, both learned to respect that which was practically useful in
it. Prof. Dod left among his papers an unfinished translation of
Spinoza, and the lamented Dr. Alexander, in his admirable lectures on
literature to the students of Princeton College, recommended a perusal
of what Kant and other German metaphysicians had written on AEsthetics.
It is no reflection on the piety or sincerity of these sound divines and
ripe scholars that they found something good a