future and invisible; they amply indulge the imagination and fancy, and are full of delineations calculated to gratify man’s most natural curiosity;—­this takes under its special patronage those virtues which man is least likely to love or cultivate, and which men in general regard as pusillanimous infirmities, if not vices; they patronize the must energetic passions,—­the passions which made the demigods and heroes of antiquity.  I am not saying which is the belief in these respects; I am only saying that human nature appears more true to itself in the last.  And so notorious is all this, that the corruptions of Christianity, as years rolled on, have ever been to assimilate it to the other religions of the earth; to abate its spirituality; to relax its austere code of morals; to commute its proper claims for external observances; to encumber its ritual with an infinity of ceremonies; and, above all, to uncover the future and invisible, on which it left a veil, and add a purgatory into the bargain!  Thus, whether contrasted with other religions or with its corrupted self, Christianity does not seem a religion which human nature would be pleased to invent.

Again, is it like the other religious products of human nature, in daring to aspire to universal dominion, and that too founded on moral power alone?  Never, till Christianity appeared, had such an imagination ever entered the mind of man!  Other religions were national affairs; their gods never dreamed of such an enterprise as that of subduing all nations.  They were naturally contented with the country that gave them birth, and the homage of the race that worshipped them.  They were, when not themselves assailed, very tolerant, and did the civil thing by all other gods of all other nations, and were even content to expire with great propriety (they usually did so) with the political extinction of the race of their votaries!  Christianity alone adopts a different tone,—­“Go ye, and preach the Gospel to all nations.”—­and declares, not only that it will reign, but that none other shall.  It will not endure a rival; it will not consent to have a statue with the mob of the Pantheon.  Whether this ambition—­call it pride and folly, if you will, as you well may if the thing be merely human—­was likely to suggest itself to man, considering the local and national character of other religions, and the apparent hopelessness of any such enterprise, I have my doubts.  Arrogance it may be; but it is not such arrogance as is very natural to man.

These, I said, were amongst a few of the things in which I must say I thought the theory of Christianity very unlike that of any religion human nature was likely to invent.