THE MOKAL PHILOSOFIIY CIIAIK. 219 



and applied to nations gives a lecture instant effect. "Whatever be 

 the true history of all idolatry (Bryant's or others), still the mind 

 operated strongly, and there was not a passive transmission. The 

 impersonalizing of imagination might be expatiated on here, for it 

 was only alluded to in this respect in the Lectures on Imagination. 

 I wish to see stated an opinion as to the power of religion in the 

 ancient world, i. e., in Egypt and Greece, among men in general. 

 Something of the same kind, whatever it was, must have existed 

 and still must exist in Christian countries among the ordinary peo- 

 ple, especially in ignorant and bigoted forms of the faith. The 

 image- worship of Catholics is, T presume, susceptible of the holiest 

 emotions of an abstract piety ; certainly of the tenderest of a human 

 religion, and in grosser and narrower minds, of almost every 

 thought that formed the faith of an ancient heathen. Many saints, 

 intercessors, priests, etc., I mean no abuse of the Catholic faith, for 

 I regard the doctrines of penitence and absolution and confession 

 as moral doctrines, and I wish you would so consider them in an 

 instructive letter. The burden of guilt is fatal, and relief from it 

 may often restore a human soul to virtue. Confession to a friend, 

 to one's own soul, to an elder brother, to a father, to a holy, old, 

 white-haired man (in short, the best view of it), is surely a moral 

 thing, and, as such, ought to be described. Our religious feelings, 

 when justly accordant with the best faith, may be opposite, but 

 true : the simple, austere worship of a Presbyterian, and the richer 

 one of an Episcopalian, and the still more pompous sanctities of 

 Popery. There are deep foundations, and wide ones too, in the 

 soul, on which manifold religions may be all established in truth. 

 We are now speaking not on the question of bestness, but as to 

 fact. Surely the astronomer may worship God in the stars and the 

 manifest temple of heaven, as well as a Scotch elder in a worm-eaten 

 pew, in an ugly kirk of an oblong form, sixty by forty feet ; yet the 

 elder is a true man and pure. Sacraments in glorious cathedrals, 

 or upon a little green hillside, which I myself have seen, but cannot 

 describe, as you could do, who have never seen it ;* and, above all, 

 funerals ; the English service, so affecting and sublime, and the 

 Scotch service, silent, wordless, bare, and desolate— dust to dust in 

 the speechless, formless sorrow of a soul. In that endless emana- 



* lie had. however, if I am not mistaken, described such a scene with exquisite fidelity, in 

 Peter's Letters, vol. iii., p. 75. 



