the
highest degree prosperous. Converts were multiplied throughout all
the provinces of the empire; and the ancient churches proving
insufficient for the accommodation of the increasing multitudes of
worshippers, _splendid edifices were erected in every city_, which
were filled with crowded congregations. But with this outward
appearance of success, the purity of faith and worship became
gradually corrupted; and, still more, the vital spirit of religion
suffered a melancholy decline. Pride and ambition, emulation and
strifes, hypocrisy and formality among the clergy, and superstitions
and factions among the people, brought reproach on the Christian
cause. In these circumstances the judgments of the Lord were
manifested, and the Church was visited with the severest persecution
to which it ever yet had been subjected.'

There are few more valuable chapters in Locke than the one in which he
traces some of the gravest errors that infest human life to a false
association of ideas. But of all his illustrations, employed to
exhibit in the true light this copious source of error, there is not
one half so striking as that furnished by the false association which
connects the holiness that can alone attach to the living and the
immortal, with earth, mortar, and stone, pieces of mouldering serge,
and bits of rotten wood. Nearly one half of the errors with which
Popery has darkened and overlaid the religion of the Cross, have
originated in this particular species of false association. The
superstition of pilgrimages, with all its long catalogue of crime and
suffering, inclusive of bloody wars, protracted for ages,---

'When men strayed far to seek
In Golgotha Him dead who lives in heaven,'--

the idolatry of relics, so strangely revived on the Continent in our
own times,--the allegorical will-worship embodied in stone and lime,
which Puseyism is at present so busy in introducing into the Church of
England, and which renders every ecclesiastical building a sort of
apocryphal temple, full, like the apocryphal books, of all manner of
error and nonsense,--a thousand other absurdities and heterodoxies
besides,--have all originated in this cause. True, such association is
most natural to man, and, when of a purely secular character,
harmless; nay, there are cases in which it may be even laudably
indulged. 'When I find Tully confessing of himself,' says Johnson,
'that he could not forbear at Athens to visit the walks a