FALSE RELIGIONS. 401 



Let us, my dear William, take a brief survey of some of 

 the main doctrines of this religion ; they concern us so 

 nearly that it may be fatal to misunderstand them. 



' The invariable reply of the apostles of our Saviour 

 to that most important of all queries, "What shall 

 I do to be saved?" was, "Believe in the Lord Jesus 

 Christ/' Belief seems to be, if I may so speak, the 

 main condition of man's acceptance, but belief in what 

 or whom ? in a person who is at once God and Man, and 

 who thus, to the perfection of a Divine nature, adds the 

 feelings of a human heart. Now there is something 

 amazing in this, something which, for its exquisite fitness 

 to our moral and sentient constitution, is worthy the 

 conception of a God. Observe, my dear William, the 

 false religions of the world, and you will find that they 

 run into two opposite extremes. In the artificial re- 

 ligions which have been formed by the intellect of man, 

 God is represented as a mere abstraction of wisdom and 

 power. He is the Great First Cause of the philosopher, 

 and it is scarcely more possible for the human heart to 

 love Him as such, than it is for Him to love any of the 

 great second causes, such as the sun with its light and 

 heat, or the law of gravitation. And hence the coldness 

 and utter inefficacy of all such religions, whether known 

 under the name of philosophical Deism or Socinian 

 Christianity ; they are totally unfitted to the nature of 

 man. The religions of the other class are rather the off- 

 spring of passion than intellect; they arise in those 

 obscure and remote ages when unenlightened man 

 created his gods in his own image. What was Jupiter 

 or his son Hercules, or what their companions in the 

 court of Olympus, the Dianas, Venuses, or Minervas 

 with which the old poets have brought us acquainted, 

 but human creatures bearing the very mould and impres- 



VOL. i. 26 



