nearly those very same encompassing circumstances of internal barbarism
which had been so perfectly commodious to the superstition recently
dwelling there; and that which had been favorable and adapted in the
utmost degree, that which had afforded much of the sustenance of life, to
the false notions, could not but be most adverse to the development of the
true ones. These latter, so environed, would be in a condition too like
that of a candle in the mephitic air of a vault. The newly adopted
religion, therefore, of the uncultivated converts from popery, would be
far from exhibiting, as compared with the renounced superstition, a
magnitude of change, and force of contrast, duly corresponding to the
difference between the lying vanities of priestcraft and a communication
from the living God. The reign of ignorance combined with imposture had
fixed upon the common people of the age of the Reformation, and of several
generations downward, the doom of being incapable of admitting genuine
Christianity but with an excessively inadequate apprehension of its
attributes;--as in the patriarchal ages a man might have received with
only the honors appropriate to a saint or prophet, the visitant in whom he
was entertaining an angel unawares. Happy for both that ancient
entertainer of such a visitant, and the ignorant but honest adopter of the
reformed religion, when that which they entertained rewarded them
according to its own celestial quality, rather than in proportion to their
inadequate reception. We may believe that the Divine Being, in special
compassion to that ignorance to which barbarism and superstition had
condemned inevitably the greater number of the early converts to the
reformed religion, did render that faith beneficial to them beyond the
proportion of their narrow and still half superstitious conception of it.
And this is, in truth, the consideration the most consolatory in looking
back to that tenebrious period in which popery was slowly retiring, with a
protracted exertion of all the craft and strength of an able and veteran
tyrant contending to the last for prolonged dominion.