religious systems, and finding truth in every thing;--our beloved
Harrington, on the other hand, bewildered by all this confusion,
finds truth--in nothing.

Yet you must not imagine that our religious maladies are at present
more than sporadic; or that the great bulk of our population are at
present affected by them: they still believe the Bible to be the
revealed Word God. Should these diseases ever become epidemic, they
will soon degenerate into a still worse type. Many apostles of
Atheism and Pantheism amongst our classes say (and perhaps truly),
that this modern "spiritualism" is but a transition state. In that
case, you will have to recall, with a deeper meaning, the song of
Byron, which you told me gave you such anguish, as you paced the deck
on the evening in which lost sight of Old England,--"My native land,
night!"

I have sometimes mournfully asked myself, whether the world may not
yet want a few experiments as to whether it cannot get on better
without Christianity and the Bible; but I hope England is not
destined be the laboratory.

I almost envy your happier lot I picture to myself your
unsophisticated folks, just reclaimed from the grossest barbarism
and idolatry, receiving the simple Gospel (as it ought to be
received) with grateful wonder, as Heaven's own method of making man
wise and happy; reverencing the Bible as what it is,--an infallible
guide through this world to a better; "a light shining in a dark
place." They listen with unquestioning simplicity to its disclosures,
which find an echo in their own hearts, and with a reverence which
is due to a volume which has transformed them from savages into men,