“I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions, which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by public worship.  I believe them all good, so long as men serve God fittingly in them.  The essential worship is the worship of the heart.  God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to him.  In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time infects even the gravest things, when we do them too often.  Since acquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am overwhelmed by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what pertains to its author.  When I approach the moment of consecration, I collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, ’Who art thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?’"[347]

A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful solvent of every system of exclusive dogma.  If the one essential to true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to virtue in this world or to bliss in the next.  No better answer has ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant, but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.  “Then no other study will be possible but that of religion:  hardly shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in what faith he ought to have lived.”  The superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar’s profession, as well as those of the Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of assault, lay in this fact.  The latter only revolted and irritated all serious