emonies usurp the place of, and rise superior to, the very sentiments of which in their origin they were the expressions and the signs. In such states of society, of which history affords us several remarkable instances, ceremonious religions have prevailed; and besides, an infinity of reverences towards his earthly superiors, man has been burdened with a still heavier load of religious formalities. The priesthood, indeed, who put themselves forward as the appointed and necessary mediators between God and man have ever had an interest in multiplying, or at least in upholding these formalities, as making the approach towards God the more difficult, and their services, in consequence, the more necessary. The founders of new religions and new sects have generally satisfied their own reason, and at the same time recommended themselves to favor, by denouncing the greater part of prevailing forms as burdensome and unnecessary, absolving from their observance, and declaring God to be most accessible, if not only accessible, to the unassisted prayers of faithful solitary saints. But in all these new sects, a new priesthood presently arises, who soon become as great sticklers for forms and ceremonies as any of their predecessors. 4. In barbarous warlike nations, God is represented under the image of a bloody tyrant, jealous of his authority to the last degree and implacable in his enmities, to be appeased only by the most abject submission, even the sacrifice by his worshippers of their children or themselves. Through the conservative influences above pointed out, and notwithstanding great changes of manners, such notions, in communi ties which have become stationary, may continue to survive for an indefinite period. Thus in India, even at the present day, God the destroyer has ten times as many votaries as either God the preserver, or God the creator. As nations have made a greater progress in civilization, they have given the Deity a milder character. He has been conceived of as a chieftain indulgent to his clansmen, a king beneficent to his subjects, even as a father careful of his children. Yet everywhere the popular mind, in which the sentiment of benevolence has been yet but very imperfectly developed, has dwelt more upon the power than the goodness of God; and the very theologians who have insisted most upon God's infinite benevolence have, in general, insisted still more upon what they call his infinite justice. They cease, indeed, to represent him as demanding the sacrifice of human victims; they claim instead the sacrifice, less bloody but not less dreadful, of man's reason, man's pleasures, even moral sentiment itself; since holding that morality is nothing but obedience to the commands of God, they hold that there is no moral law which the command of God may not dispense with, and set aside. As humanity increases, that mystic-idealism begins to spread, which considers God less as a person, and more as a personification of the sentiment of benevolence; humanity deified. ; humanity deified. As this idea gains ground, the rigor of religious duties is greatly relaxed, and the ascetic notion of the sinfulness of pleasure falls into disgrace even with mystic moralists. 5. From the very dawn of science, a controversy, L emonies usurp the place of, and rise superior to, the very sentiments of which in their origin they were the expressions and the signs. In such states of society, of which history affords us several remarkable instances, ceremonious religions have prevailed; and besides, an infinity of reverences towards his earthly superiors, man has been burdened with a still heavier load of religious formalities. The priesthood, indeed, who put themselves forward as the appointed and necessary mediators between God and man have ever had an interest in multiplying, or at least in upholding these formalities, as making the approach towards God the more difficult, and their services, in consequence, the more necessary. The founders of new religions and new sects have generally satisfied their own reason, and at the same time recommended themselves to favor, by denouncing the greater part of prevailing forms as burdensome and unnecessary, absolving from their observance, and declaring God to be most accessible, if not only accessible, to the unassisted prayers of faithful solitary saints. But in all these new sects, a new priesthood presently arises, who soon become as great sticklers for forms and ceremonies as any of their predecessors. 4. In barbarous warlike nations, God is represented under the image of a bloody tyrant, jealous of his authority to the last degree and implacable in his enmities, to be appeased only by the most abject submission, even the sacrifice by his worshippers of their children or themselves. Through the conservative influences above pointed out, and notwithstanding great changes of manners, such notions, in communi ties which have become stationary, may continue to survive for an indefinite period. Thus in India, even at the present day, God the destroyer has ten times as many votaries as either God the preserver, or God the creator. As nations have made a greater progress in civilization, they have given the Deity a milder character. He has been conceived of as a chieftain indulgent to his clansmen, a king beneficent to his subjects, even as a father careful of his children. Yet everywhere the popular mind, in which the sentiment of benevolence has been yet but very imperfectly developed, has dwelt more upon the power than the goodness of God; and the very theologians who have insisted most upon God's infinite benevolence have, in general, insisted still more upon what they call his infinite justice. They cease, indeed, to represent him as demanding the sacrifice of human victims; they claim instead the sacrifice, less bloody but not less dreadful, of man's reason, man's pleasures, even moral sentiment itself; since holding that morality is nothing but obedience to the commands. of God, they hold that there is no moral law which the command of God may not dispense with, and set aside. As humanity increases, that mystic-idealism begins to spread, which considers God less as a person, and more as a personification of the sentiment of benevolence; humanity deified. As this idea gains ground, the rigor of religious duties is greatly relaxed, and the ascetic notion of the sinfulness of pleasure falls into disgrace even with mystic moralists. 5. From the very dawn of science, a controversy, which yet remains pending, necessarily arose between the philosophers and the mystics. The philosophers by their study of nature, by which term they designate the entire phenomena of which men are cognizant, always have been, and always will be, led to perceive and to acknowledge that there is and must be, a Cause of nature, an inscrutible, incomprehensible, infinite Cause of the existence, order, and progression of the universe; a Cause behind all those causes which observation will ever be able to demonstrate. They perceived that it was the idea of such a Cause personified, and mixed up with many fanciful notions and absurd traditions, in which popular religious opinions originated. That Cause, therefore, they called, God; and while the mystics only asserted, on the faith of tradition and testimony, that God did exist, and had been seen in dreams and visions, and by the corporeal eye, the philosophers undertook to prove that God must exist. It is to them that the theologians are indebted for all their arguments both those a priori and those a posteriori, for the being of a God. But the very same observation of nature which led the philosophers to conceive of God as an inscrutable, incomprehensible, infinite Cause, obliged them to reject those popular notions which represented this Cause under the image of a person, and the laws of nature as his volitions, volitions which men might influence and might change. They perceived that this theory did not correspond with the phenomena. They had discovered, that the laws of nature are fixed, immutable, and totally beyond the power of |