luminary, whose beams lost their brightness in pervading it to reach the
popular mind, and came with the faintness of an obscured and tedious dawn.

A long time there lingered enough of night for the evil spirit of popery
to be at large and in power, not abashed, as Milton represents the Evil
Angel on his being surprised by the guardians of paradise. Rather the case
was that the vindicator itself of truth and holiness, the true Lucifer,
shrunk at the rencounter and defiance of the old possessor of the gloomy
dominion. The Reformation was not empowered to speak with a voice like
that which said, "Let there be light--and there was light." Consider what,
on its avowed national adoption in our land, were its provisions for
acting on the community, and how slow and partial must have been their
efficacy, for either the dissipation of ignorance in general, or the
riddance of that worst part of it which had thickened round the Romish
delusion, as malignant a pestilence as ever walked in darkness. There was
an alteration of formularies, a curtailment of rites, a declaration of
renouncing, in the name of the church and state, the most palpable of the
absurdities; and a change, in some instances of the persons, but in very
many others of the professions merely, of the hierarchy. Such were the
appointments and instrumentality, for carrying an innovation of opinions
and practices through a nation in which the profoundest ignorance and the
most inveterate superstition fortified each other. And we may well imagine
how fast and how far they would be effective, to convey information and
conviction among a people whose reason had been just so much the worse,
with respect to religion at least, as it had not been totally dormant; and
who were too illiterate to be ever the wiser for the volume of inspiration
itself, had it been in their native language, in every house, instead of
being scarcely in one house in five thousand.

Doubtless some advantage was gained through this change of institutions,