and from idolaters into Christians. They are not troubled with doubts
of its authenticity or its divinity; with talk of various readings and
discordant manuscripts; with subtle theories for proving that its
miracles are legends, or its history myths, or with any other of
the infinite vagaries of perverted learning. Neither are they
perplexed with the assurances of those who tell them that, though
divine, the Bible is, in fact, a most dangerous book, and who would
request them, in their new-born enlightenment, to be pleased to shut
their eyes, and to return to a religion of ceremony quite as absurd
and almost as cruel as the polytheism they have renounced. I imagine
you and your little flock in the Sabbath stillness of those mountains
and green valleys, of which you give me such pleasant descriptions,
exhibiting a specimen of a truly primitive Christianity; I imagine
that the peace within is as deep as the tranquillity without.

Yet I know it cannot be; for you and your flock are men,--and that
one word alone suffices to dissolve the charm. You and they have
cares, and worse than cares, which make you like all the rest of
the world; for guilt and sorrow are of no clime, and the "happy
valley" never existed except in the pages of Rasselas. You are,
doubtless, plagued by every now and then finding that some
half-reclaimed cannibal confesses that he has not quite got over
his gloating recollections of the delicacies of his diabolical
cuisine; or that fashionable converts turn with a yearning heart,
not to theatres and balls, but to the "dear remembrance" of the
splendors 'of tattoo and amocos; or that some unlucky wretch who
has not mastered the hideous passions of his old paganism has almost
battered out the brains of a fellow disciple in a sudden paroxysm
of anger; or that some timid soul is haunted with half-subdued
suspicions that some great goggle-eyed idol, with whose worship his