Now, man’s nature is, as we know, diametrically opposite to all this:  and unable to escape from the conviction of Christian truth in some sense, he would bend his shrewd invention to the attempt of warping that stern truth to shapes more consistent with his idiosyncrasies.  A religious plan might be expected, which, in lieu of a difficult, holy spirituality, should exact easy, mere observances; to say a thousand Paters with the tongue, instead of one “Our Father,” from the heart; to exact genuflections by the score, but not a single prostration of the spirit; to write the cross in water on the forehead often-times, but never once to bear its mystic weight upon the shoulder.  In spite of self-denial, cleverly kept in sight by means of eggs, and pulse, and hair-cloth, to pamper the deluded flesh with many a carnal holiday; in contravention of a kingdom not of this world, boldly to usurp the temporal dominion of it all:  instead of the overwhelming incomprehensibility of an eternal doom, to comfort the worst with false assurance of a purgatory longer or shorter; that after all, vice may be burnt out; and who knows but that gold, buying up the prayers and superfluous righteousness of others, may not make the fiery ordeal an easy one?  In lieu of a God brought near to his creatures, infinite purity in contact with the grossest sin, as the good Physician loveth; how sage it seemed to stock the immeasurable distance with intermediate numia, cycle on epicycle, arc on arc, priest and bishop and pope, and martyr, and virgin, and saint, and angel, all in their stations, at due interval soliciting God to be (as if His blessed Majesty were not so of Himself!) the sinner’s friend.  How comfortable this to man’s sweet estimation of his own petty penances; how glorifying to those “filthy rags,” his so-called righteousness:  how apt to build up the hierarchist power; how seemingly analogous with man’s experience here, where clerks lay the case before commissioners, and commissioners before the government, and the government before the sovereign.

All this was entirely expectable:  and I can conceive that a deep Reasoner among the first apostles, even without such supernal light as “the Spirit speaking expressly,” might have so calculated on the probabilities to come, as to have written, long ago, words akin to these:  “In the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seductive doctrines, and fanciful notions about intermediate deities, ([Greek:  daimonion],) perverting truth by hypocritical departures from it, searing conscience against its own cravings after spiritual holiness, forbidding marriage, (to invent another virtue,) and commanding abstinence from God’s good gifts, as a means of building up a creature-merit by voluntary humiliation.”  At the likelihood that such “profane and old wives’ fables” should thereafter have arisen, might Paul without a miracle have possibly arrived.