idels. In truth, many of them seem to have no ideas. Their phrases
are not vehicles of ideas, but substitutes for them. If they hear the
ideas which their phrases did once signify, expressed ever so plainly in
other language, they do not recognise them, and instantly suspect the
man who utters them of unsoundness in the faith, and apply to him all
the abusive terms of ecclesiastical reproach. For such the common pulpit
jargon is the convenient refuge of ignorance, idleness and prejudice.

6. Speaking of certain kinds of religious books, Mr. Foster calls them
an accumulation of bad writing, under which the evangelical theology has
been buried, and which has contributed to bring its principles into
disfavor. He adds: A large proportion of religious books may be
sentenced as bad on more accounts than their peculiarity of dialect. One
has to regret that their authors did not revere the dignity of their
religion too much to surround it and choke it with their works. There is
quite a multitude of books which form the perfect vulgar of religious
authorship,--a vast exhibition of the most inferior materials that can
be called thought, in language too grovelling to be called style. In
these books you are mortified to see how low religious thought and
expression _can_ sink; and you almost wonder how the grand ideas of God
and Providence, of redemption and eternity, the noblest ideas known, can
shine on a human mind, without imparting some small occasional degree of
dignity to its train of thought. You can make allowances for the great
defects of private Christians, but when men obtrude their infinite
littleness and folly on the public in books, you can hardly help
regarding them as inexcusable. True, many of those worthless and
mischievous books are evermore disappearing, but others as bad, or but
little better, take their places. Look where you will you will meet with
them. What estimate can a man have of Christianity who receives his
first impressions of it from such books?

7. There are other religious books that are tolerable as to style, but
which display no power or prominence of thought, no living vigor of
expression; they are flat and dry as a plain of sand. They tease you
with the thousandth repetition of common-places, causing a feeling of
unspeakable weariness. Though the author is surrounded with rich
immeasurable fields of truth and beauty, he treads for ever the same
narrow track already trodden into dust.

8. The