terously called _Theology_: but for devotional aids, for pious
meditations, for inspiring hymns, for purifying and glowing thoughts,
we have still to wait upon that succession of kindling souls, among
whom may be named with special honour David and Isaiah, Jesus and
Paul, Augustine, A Kempis, Fenelon, Leighton, Baxter, Doddridge,
Watts, the two Wesleys, and Channing.

Religion was created by the inward instincts of the soul: it had
afterwards to be pruned and chastened by the sceptical understanding.
For its perfection, the co-operation of these two parts of man is
essential. While religious persons dread critical and searching
thought, and critics despise instinctive religion, each side remains
imperfect and curtailed.

It is a complaint often made by religious historians, that no church
can sustain its spirituality unimpaired through two generations, and
that in the third a total irreligion is apt to supervene. Sometimes
indeed the transitions are abrupt, from an age of piety to an age of
dissoluteness. The liability to such lamentable revulsions is plainly
due to some insufficiency in the religion to meet all the wants of
human nature. To scold at that nature is puerile, and implies an
ignorance of the task which religion undertakes. To lay the fault
on the sovereign will of God, who has "withheld his grace" from the
grandchildren of the pious, might be called blasphemy, if we were
disposed to speak harshly. The fault lies undoubtedly in the fact,
that Practical Devoutness and Free Thought stand apart in unnatural
schism. But surely the age is ripe for something better;--for
a religion which stall combine the tenderness, humility, and
disinterestedness, that are the glory of the purest Christianity,
with that activity of intellect, untiring pursuit of truth, and strict
adherence to impartial principle, which the schools of modern science
embody. When a spiritual church has its senses exercised to discern
good and evil, judges of right and wrong by an inward power, proves
all things and holds fast that which is good, fears no truth, but
rejoices in being corrected, intellectually as well as morally,--it
will not be liable to be "carried to and fro" by shifting winds of
doctrine. It will indeed have movement, namely, a steady _onward_ one,
as the schools of science have had, since they left off to dogmatize,
and approached God's world as learners; but it will lay aside disputes
of words, eternal vacillations, mutual