of enthusiasm.[481]

The eighteenth century was indeed an age when sober reason would hear of
no competitor, and whose greatest outburst of religious zeal
characteristically took its name from the well-ordered method with which
it was organised. It will not, however, be inferred that enthusiasm, as
the word was then commonly understood, scarcely existed. On the
contrary, the vigour and constancy of the attack points with sufficient
clearness to the evident presence of the enemy. In fact, although the
more exaggerated forms of mysticism and fanaticism have never
permanently thriven on English soil, there has never been an age when
what may be called mystical religion has not had many ardent votaries.
For even the most extravagant of its multiform phases embody an
important element of truth, which cannot be neglected without the
greatest detriment to sound religion. Whatever be its particular type,
it represents the protest of the human soul against all that obscures
the spirituality of belief. But of all the accidents and externals of
religion, there is not one, however important in itself, which may not
be made unduly prominent, and under such circumstances interfere between
the soul and the object of its worship. It will be readily understood,
therefore, upon how great a variety of grounds that protest may be
based, how right and reasonable it may sometimes be, but also how easily
it may itself run into excess, and how quickly the understanding may
lose its bearings, when once, for fear of the abuse, it begins to
dispense with what was not intended to check, but to guide and regulate
the aspirations of the Spirit. Mystical and enthusiastical religion,
whether in its sounder or in its exaggerated and unhealthy forms, may be
a reaction against an over-assertion of the powers of reason in
spiritual matters and questions of evidence, or against the undue
extension, in subjects too high for it, of the domain of 'common sense;'
or it may be a vindication of the spiritual rights of the uneducated
against the pretensions of learning; or an assertion of the judgment and
conscience of the individual against all tyranny of authority. It may be
a protest against excessive reverence for the letter of Holy Scripture
as against the Spirit which breathes in it, against all appearance of
limiting inspiration to a book, and denying it to the souls of living
men. It may express insurrection against all manner of formalism, usages
which h