people well knew, in their respective neighborhoods, that many of these
had never in reality forsaken the ancient religion, consulting only the
policy of a time-serving conformity; and that some of them hardly
attempted or wished to conceal from their inferiors that they preserved
their fidelity. And then the substituted religion, while it came with a
great diminution of the pomp which is always the delight of the ignorant,
acknowledged,--proclaimed as one of its chief merits,--a still more fatal
defect for attracting converts from among beings whose ignorance had never
been suffered to doubt, till then, that men in ecclesiastical garb could
modify, or suspend, or defeat for them the justice of God; it proclaimed
itself unable to give any exemptions or commutations in matters of
conscience.

When such were the recommendations which the new mode of religion _not_,
and when the recommendation which it _had_ was simply, (the royal
authority set out of the question,) an offer of evidence to the
understanding _that it was true_, no wonder that many of a generation so
insensate through ignorance should never become its proselytes. But even
as to those who did, while it was a happy deliverance, as we have said, to
escape almost any way from the utter grossness of popery, still they would
carry into their better faith much of the unhappy effect of that previous
mental debasement. How should a man in the rudeness of an intellect left
completely ignorant of truth in general, have a luminous apprehension of
its most important division? There could not be in men's minds a
phenomenon similar to what we image to ourselves of Goshen in the
preternatural night of Egypt, a space of perfect light, defined out by a
precise limit amidst the general darkness.

Only consider, that the new ideas admitted into the proselyte's
understanding as the true faith, were to take their situation there in