reflecting Protestant; and then would recur the idea of its cost, as
relative to what that expenditure might really have done for Christianity
and the people. It absorbed in the construction, sums sufficient to have
supplied, costly as they would have been, even manuscript Bibles, in the
people's own language, (as a priesthood of truly apostolic character would
have taken care the Scriptures should speak,) to all the families of a
province; and in the revenues appropriated to its ministration of
superstition, enough to have provided men to teach all those families to
read those Bibles.

In all this, and in the whole constitution of the Grand Apostasy,
involving innumerable forms of abuse and abomination, to which our object
does not require any allusion, how sad a spectacle is held forth of the
people destroyed for lack of knowledge. If, as one of their plagues, an
inferior one in itself, they were plundered as we have seen, of their
worldly goods, it was that the spoil might subserve to a still greater
wrong. What was lost to the accommodation of the body, was to be made to
contribute to the depravation of the spirit. It supplied means for
multiplying the powers of the grand ecclesiastical machinery, and
confirming the intellectual despotism of the usurpers of spiritual
authority. Those authorities enforced on the people, on pain of perdition,
an acquiescence in notions and ordinances which, in effect, precluded
their direct access to the Almighty, and the Saviour of the world;
interposing between them and the Divine Majesty a very extensive,
complicated, and heathenish mediation, which in a great measure
substituted itself for the real and exclusive mediation of Christ,
obscured by its vast creation of intercepting vanities the glory of the
Eternal Being, and thus almost extinguished the true worship. But how
calamitous was such a condition!--to be thus intercepted from direct
intercourse with the Supreme Spirit, and to have the solemn and elevating