such tremendous consequences, that, if opinions touching upon religion
occur which the Reader condemns, he not only cannot sympathise with
them, however animated the expression, but there is, for the most part,
an end put to all satisfaction and enjoyment. Love, if it before
existed, is converted into dislike; and the heart of the Reader is set
against the Author and his book.--To these excesses, they, who from
their professions ought to be the most guarded against them, are perhaps
the most liable; I mean those sects whose religion, being from the
calculating understanding, is cold and formal. For when Christianity,
the religion of humility, is founded upon the proudest faculty of our
nature, what can be expected but contradictions? Accordingly, believers
of this cast are at one time contemptuous; at another, being troubled,
as they are and must be, with inward misgivings, they are jealous and
suspicious;--and at all seasons, they are under temptation to supply, by
the heat with which they defend their tenets, the animation which is
wanting to the constitution of the religion itself.

Faith was given to man that his affections, detached from the treasures
of time, might be inclined to settle upon those of eternity:--the
elevation of his nature, which this habit produces on earth, being to
him a presumptive evidence of a future state of existence; and giving
him a title to partake of its holiness. The religious man values what he
sees chiefly as an 'imperfect shadowing forth' of what he is incapable
of seeing. The concerns of religion refer to indefinite objects, and are
too weighty for the mind to support them without relieving itself by
resting a great part of the burthen upon words and symbols. The commerce
between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process where
much is represented in little, and the Infinite Being accommodates
himself to a finite capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity
between religion and poetry; between religion--making up the
deficiencies of reason by faith; and poetry--passionate for the
instruction of reason; between religion--whose element is infinitude,
and whose ultimate trust is the supreme of things, submitting herself
to circumscription, and reconciled to substitutions; and
poetry--ethereal and transcendent, yet incapable to sustain her
existence without sensuous incarnation. In this community of nature may
be perceived also the lurking incitements of kindred erro