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evidence of treason or insanity. He who used them was a marked man, and liable to find on the first oyster-shell his sentence of exile from the assemblage of the faithful. The name of Goethe was as terrible as the sacred 'Om' of the Brahmins; it was whispered with 'bated breath, and was generally believed to be diabolical _per se_. In short, everything bearing the stamp of Germany was a bit of sweet, forbidden lore. Travels in that fog-land by dull old fogies, and simple outlines of its Philosophy by divines high in rank, were obtained by stealth, and read in secret by college-boys, with as much zeal as the 'Kisses' of Johannes Secundus or the Epigrams of Martial. Even Klopstock's 'Messiah' became gilded with a sort of delightful impropriety. Disapprobation and distrust had merged into abuse and persecution. Orestes A. Brownson, then drifting with the strong tide of the liberals, published in 1840 a sort of pantheistically ending novel, entitled _Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted_. The Rev. Dr. Bright, at present editor of the Baptist _Examiner_, was at that tune a bookseller of the firm of Bennett & Bright, and publisher of the _Baptist Register_. When _Charles Elwood_ appeared, he ordered the usual number of copies; but, discovering the nature of the book, made a Servetus of the 'lot' by burning them up in the back-yard of his store. A funeral pyre worthy the admiration and awe it must have excited. The _Essays_ of Emerson were subsequently attacked furiously in the _Princeton Review_ by Prof. Dod and Jas. W. Alexander. These gentlemen gave to the world, as criticisms of Emerson and other writers, several treatises on Pantheism, aiding the very cause they designed to destroy, by disseminating among the religious public a statement of the primitive Philosophy of the Vedas, and its reflection in Germany and America, clearer than any that had yet appeared: a task for which their scholarship and ability eminently fitted them. But in attacking German Philosophy, both learned to respect that which was practically useful in it. Prof. Dod left among his papers an unfinished translation of Spinoza, and the lamented Dr. Alexander, in his admirable lectures on literature to the students of Princeton College, recommended a perusal of what Kant and other German metaphysicians had written on AEsthetics. It is no reflection on the piety or sincerity of these sound divines and ripe scholars that they found something good a
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