ling, gaining acquaintance with the
various classes of the community, coming into contact with the principles
and modes of thought of various parties, interests, and races, their
views, aims, habits and manners, their religious creeds and forms of
worship,--gaining experience how various yet how alike men are, how
low-minded, how bad, how opposed, yet how confident in their opinions; all
this exerts a perceptible influence upon the mind, which it is impossible
to mistake, be it good or be it bad, and is popularly called its
enlargement.

And then again, the first time the mind comes across the arguments and
speculations of unbelievers, and feels what a novel light they cast upon
what he has hitherto accounted sacred; and still more, if it gives in to
them and embraces them, and throws off as so much prejudice what it has
hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its
imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression
of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free
to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, when it
does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it
will, that "the world is all before it where to choose," and what system
to build up as its own private persuasion; when this torrent of wilful
thoughts rushes over and inundates it, who will deny that the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it one
of the gods, with a sense of expansion and elevation,--an intoxication in
reality, still, so far as the subjective state of the mind goes, an
illumination? Hence the fanaticism of individuals or nations, who suddenly
cast off their Maker. Their eyes are opened; and, like the
judgment-stricken king in the Tragedy, they see two suns, and a magic
universe, out of which they look back upon their former state of faith and
innocence with a sort of contempt and indignation, as if they were then
but fools, and the dupes of imposture.

On the other hand, Religion has its own enlargement, and an enlargement,
not of tumult, but of peace. It is often remarked of uneducated persons,
who have hitherto thought little of the unseen world, that, on their
turning to God, looking into themselves, regulating their hearts,
reforming their conduct, and meditating on death and judgment, heaven and
hell, they seem to become, in point of intellect, different beings from
what they were.