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LECTURE IV.
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believe that the highest reward of virtue and meditation consisted in a complete annihilation of the
soul?
Such arguments may tell in party warfare, though even there they have provoked fearful retaliation. Can that be a true religion, it has been answered, which consigned men of holy innocence to the flames, because they held that the Son was like unto the Father, but not the same as the Father, or because they would not worship the Virgin and the Saints? Can that be a true religion which screened the same nameless crimes behind the sacred walls of monasteries? Can that be a true religion which taught the eternity of punishment without any hope of pardon or salvation for the sinner, not penitent in proper time?
People who judge of religions in that spirit will never understand their real purport, will never reach their sacred springs. These are the excrescences, the inevitable excrescences of all religions. We might as well judge of the health of a people from its hospitals, or of its morality from its prisons. If we want to judge of a religion, we must try to study it as much as possible in the mind of its founder; and when that is impossible, as it is but too often, try to find it in the lonely chamber and the sick-room, rather than in the colleges of augurs and the councils of priests.
If we do this, and if we bear in mind that religion must accommodate itself to the intellectual capacities of those whom it is to influence, we shall be surprised to find much of true religion where we only expected degrading superstition or an absurd worship of idols.
