broad, they strove to make it narrow; and where it was
narrow, they strove to make it broad: by their solemn and superstitious
lies, they frightened and perplexed the good, while, by their lives of
ungodliness, they emboldened and encouraged the wicked.

It may not, at first sight, seem necessary that these two things should
go together; there might be, it seems, either the fault of making the
heart of the righteous sad, without that of strengthening the hands of
the wicked: or there might be the strengthening of the hands of the
wicked, without making sad the heart of the righteous. And so it
sometimes has been: there has been a wickedness which has not tried to
keep up superstition: there has been a superstition, the supporters of
which have not wilfully encouraged wickedness. Yet, although this has
been so, with respect to the intention of the parties concerned, yet in
their own nature, the tendency of either evil to produce the other is
sure and universal. We cannot exist without some influences of fear and
restraint, on the one hand, and without some indulgence of freedom, on
the other. God has provided for both these wants, so to speak, of our
nature; he has told us whom we should fear, and where we should be
restrained, and where, also, we may be safely in freedom: there is the
fruit forbidden, and the fruit which we may eat freely. But if the
restraint and the liberty be either of them put in the wrong place, the
double evil is sure to follow. Restrained in his lawful liberty,
debarred from the good and wholesome fruit of the garden, man breaks out
into a liberty which is unlawful; he eats of the forbidden fruit, whose
taste is death; or, surfeited with an unholy freedom, and let to run
wild in a space far too vast for his strength to compass, he turns
cravingly for that support to his weariness which a narrowed range would
afford him; and he limits himself on that very quarter in which alone he
might expatiate freely. Superstition, in fact, is the rest of
wickedness, and wickedness is the breaking loose of superstition.

But, however true this may be, are we concerned in it? First of all,
when we find an evil dwelt upon often in the Prophets, and find it dwelt
upon again by our Lord and his Apostles with no less earnestness, there
is, at least, a strong presumption, that an evil of this sort is nothing
local or passing, but that it is fixed in man's nature, and is apt to
grow up in all times, and in all countr