ave lost their significance, rites which have ceased to edify,
doctrines which have degenerated into formulas, orthodoxy which has
become comparatively barren and profitless. It may represent a
passionate longing to escape from party differences and sectarian strife
into a higher, purer atmosphere, where the free Spirit of God bloweth
where it listeth. It often owes its origin to strong revulsion against
popular philosophies which limit all consciousness to mere perceptions
of the senses, or against the materialistic tendencies which find an
explanation for all mysteries in physical phenomena. It may result from
endeavours to find larger scope for reverie and contemplation, or fuller
development for the imaginative elements of religious thought. It may be
a refuge for spirits disgusted at an unworthy and utilitarian system of
ethics, and at a religion too much degraded into a code of moral
precepts. All these tendencies, varying in every possible degree from
the healthiest efforts after greater spirituality of life to the wildest
excesses of fanatical extravagance, may be copiously illustrated from
the history of enthusiasm. The writers of the eighteenth century were
fully alive to its dangers. It was easy to show how mystical religion
had often led its too eager, or too untaught followers into the most
mischievous antinomianism of doctrine and life, into allegorising away
the most fundamental grounds of Christianity, and into the vaguest
Pantheism. They could produce examples in abundance of bewildered
intellects, of 'illuminations' obscurer than any darkness, of religious
rapture, in its ambitious distrust of reason, lapsing into physical
agencies and coarse materialism. They could hold up, in ridicule or
warning, profuse illustrations of exorbitant spiritual pride, blind
credulity, infatuated self-deceit, barefaced imposture. It was much more
congenial to the prevalent temper of the age to draw a moral from such
perversions of a tone of feeling with which there was little sympathy,
than to learn a useful lesson from the many truths contained in it.
Doubtless, it is not easy to deal with principles which have been
maintained in an almost identical form, but with consequences so widely
divergent, by some of the noblest, and by some of the most foolish of
mankind, by true saints and by gross fanatics. The contemporaries of
Locke, Addison, and Tillotson, trained in a wholly different school of
thought, were ill-fitted to e