magicians, vain theorists, prompted by ambition and superior native
ability to abuse the credulity of their fellow-mortals, which they did
with such success as to become their oracles, their dictators, or even
their gods. The multitude most naturally surrendered themselves to all
such delusions. If it may be conceived to have been possible that their
feeble and degraded reason, in the absence of divine light and of sound
human discipline, might by earnest exertion have attained in some small
degree to judge better that exertion was precluded by indolence, by the
immediate wants and unavoidable employments of life, by sensuality, by
love of amusement, by subjection, even of the mind, to superiors and
national institutions, and by the tendency of human individuals to fall,
if we may so express it, in dead conformity and addition to the lump.

The result of all these causes, the sum of all these effects, was, that
unnumbered millions of beings, whose value was in their intelligent and
moral nature, were, as to that nature, in a condition analogous to what
their physical existence would have been under a total and permanent
eclipse of the sun. It was perpetual night in their souls, with all the
phenomena incident to night, except the sublimity. While the material
economy, constituting the order of things which belonged to their temporal
existence, was in conspicuous manifestation around them, pressing with its
realities on their senses; while nature presented to them its open and
distinctly-featured aspect; while there was a true light shed on them
every morning from the sun; while they had constant experimental evidence
of the nature of the scene; and thus they had a clear knowledge of one
portion of the things connected with their existence--that portion which
they were soon to leave, and look back upon as a dream when one
awaketh;--all this while there was subsisting, present with them,
unapprehended except in faint and delusive glimpses, another order of
things involving their greatest interest, with no luminary to make that