ence over the depths of darkness that are
in man; if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attained
to. Such things were and are in man; in all men; in us too.

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan
religion: mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane
man ever did believe it,--merely contrived to persuade other men, not
worthy of the name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty
to protest against this sort of hypothesis about men's doings and
history; and I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in
reference to Paganism, and to all other _isms_ by which man has ever
for a length of time striven to walk in this world. They have all had
a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and
dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced
decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but
quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was
not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure
precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this. It
seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth
to any faith even in savage men. Quackery gives birth to nothing;
gives death to all things. We shall not see into the true heart of
anything, or if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we do not
reject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions, with
which our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep
them out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere is the
born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind of
truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr
Turner's _Account of his Embassy_ to that country, and see. They have
their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down
always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some
belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is
a _Greatest_ Man; that _he_ is discoverable; that, once discovered, we
ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is
the truth of Grand Lamaism; the 'discoverability' is the only error
here. The Thibet priests have methods of their own of discovering what
Man is Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. Bad methods: but are
they so much worse than our methods,--of understanding him to be
always the eldest born of a certain genealogy? Ala