artyr for them if but lighted. His
cousin in the opposite direction has found even the most meagre
naturalism too much for him, and avows himself a Pantheist.
L----, the son, you remember, of an independent minister, is
ready to go nobly to death in defence of the prerogatives of
his "apostolic succession"; and has not the slightest doubts that
he can make out his spiritual genealogy, without a broken link,
from the first Bishop of Rome, downwards!--though, poor fellow,
it would puzzle him to say who was his great-grandfather.
E----, you are aware, has long since joined the Church of Rome,
and has disclosed such a bottomless abyss of "faith," that whole
cart-loads of mediaeval fables, abandoned even by Romanists (who,
by the way, stand fairly aghast at his insatiable appetite), have
not been able to fill it. All the saints in the Roman Hagiography
cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. On the other
hand, his brother has signalized himself by an equal facility of
stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till
at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze
of transparent "spiritualism," that it makes you both shiver and
blush to look at him. Your old acquaintance P----, true to his
youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who
has the "charity which believeth all, things," though certainly
not that which "bareth all things," goes about apologizing for all
religious systems, and finding truth in every thing;--our beloved
Harrington, on the other hand, bewildered by all this confusion,
finds truth--in nothing.

Yet you must not imagine that our religious maladies are at present
more than sporadic; or that the great bulk of our population are at
present affected by them: they still believe the Bible to be the
revealed Word God. Should these diseases ever become epidemic, they
will soon degenerate into a still worse type. Many apostles of
Atheism and Pantheism amongst our classes say (and perhaps truly),
that this modern "spiritualism" is but a transition state. In that
case, you will have to recall, with a deeper meaning, the song of
Byron, which you told me gave you such anguish, as you paced the deck
on the evening in which lost sight of Old England,--"My native land,
night!"

I have sometimes mournfully asked myself, whether the world may not
yet want a few experiments as to whether it cannot get on better
without Christianity and the Bible; but I h