78 NEW ENGLAND FANATICISM. [CHAP. V. 



there have never been wanting interpreters of prophecy, who 

 have confidently assigned some exact date, and one near at hand, 

 for the millennium. Your Faber on the Prophecies, and the 

 writings of Croly, and even some articles in the Quarterly Re 

 view, helped for a time to keep up this spirit here, and make it 

 fashionable. But the Millerite movement, like the recent exhi 

 bition of the Holy Coat at Treves, has done much to open men s 

 minds ; and the exertions made of late to check this fanatical 

 movement, have advanced the cause of truth.&quot; He then went 

 on to describe to me a sermon preached in one of the northeast 

 ern townships of Massachusetts, which he named, against the Mil 

 lerite opinions, by the minister of the parish, who explained the 

 doubts generally entertained by the learned in regard to some of the 

 dates of the prophecies of Daniel, entered freely into modern con 

 troversies about the verbal inspiration of the Old and New Tes 

 tament, and referred to several new works, both of German, 

 British, and New England authors, which his congregation had 

 never heard of till then. Not a few of them complained that 

 they had been so long kept in the dark, that their minister must 

 have entertained many of these opinions long before, and that he 

 had now revealed them in order to stem the current of a popular 

 delusion, and for expediency, rather than from the love of truth. 

 &quot; Never,&quot; said they, &quot; can we in future put the same confidence 

 in him again.&quot; 



Other apologists observed to me, that so long as a part of the 

 population was very ignorant, even the well-educated would occa 

 sionally participate in fanatical movements ; &quot; for religious en 

 thusiasm, being very contagious, resembles a famine fever, which 

 first attacks those who are starving, but afterward infects some 

 of the healthiest and best-fed individuals in the whole communi 

 ty.&quot; This explanation, plausible and ingenious as it may ap 

 pear, is, I believe, a fallacy. If they who have gone through 

 school and college, and have been for years in the habit of lis 

 tening to preachers, become the victims of popular fanaticism, it 

 proves that, however accomplished and learned they may be, 

 their reasoning powers have not been cultivated, their under 

 standings have not been enlarged, they have not been trained in 



