sentiment of devotion flung downward, on objects to some of which even the
most superstitious could hardly pay homage without a sense of degradation.

It was, again, a disastrous thing to be under a directory of practical
life framed for the convenience of a corrupt system; a rule which enjoined
many things wrong, allowed a dispensation from nearly everything that was
right, and abrogated the essential principle and ground-work of true
morality. Still again, it was an unhappy thing, that the consolations in
sorrow and the view of death should either be too feeble to animate, or
should animate only by deluding. And it was the consummation of evil in
the state of the people of those dark ages, it was, emphatically to be
"destroyed," that the great doctrines of redemption should have been
essentially vitiated or formally supplanted, so that multitudes of people
were betrayed to rest their final hopes on a ground unauthorized by the
Judge of the world. In this most important matter, the spiritual
authorities might themselves be subjects of the fatal delusion in which
they held the community; and well they deserved to be so, in judicial
retribution of their wickedness in imposing on the people, deliberately
and on system, innumerable things which they knew to be false.

We have often mused, and felt a gloom and dreariness spreading over the
mind while musing, on descriptions of the aspect of a country after a
pestilence has left it in desolation, or of a region where the people are
perishing by famine. It has seemed a mournful thing to behold, in
contemplation, the multitude of lifeless? forms, occupying in silence the
same abodes in which they had lived, or scattered upon the gardens,
fields, and roads; and then to see the countenances of the beings yet
languishing in life, looking despair, and impressed with the signs of
approaching death. We have even sometimes had the vivid and horrid picture
offered to our imagination, of a number of human creatures shut up by