first among the causes by which nations have risen to refinement, knowledge, and power, or been retained in, or plunged into ignorance and barbarism. It has steeled them for the atrocities of war, or disposed them for the milder arts and joys of peace; it has coiled around them the serpent folds of the chain of vassalage, or beamed the heavenly light of liberty; and has been, according to the spirit of its institutions, the glory or the ruin of mightiest empires.

There are four classes of men, aiming at some sort of sway over others, who have always, by their conduct, given evidence of their vivid perception of the vast influence of religion on society, and who have eagerly grasped it as a machine to effect their purposes.

1. Legislators have invoked its aid to sanction their institutions when in infancy, to second them in operation, and make up by public veneration for their weakness when declining by antiquity, The learned and acute, though often paradoxical, author of the Divine Legation of Moses, has done much towards proving that Moses was the only lawgiver of all antiquity who did not enforce his edicts by connecting with them some explicit reference to a future state of rewards and punishments. Generally they pretended to a divine revelation. The original laws of Egyptians, Athenians, Spartans, Romans, Chinese, Peruvians, Goths, Arabians, and many other nations, were

all, according to their authors, inspired by some guardian god or gods. They pretended acquaintance with the gods: the fact was, they knew human nature.

2. The poet aims at power, as well as the lawgiver, though of a different kind. He would controul the hearts of men; reign in their imaginations; command their tears; win their smiles; and enjoy a transient immortality in their me mory and praises. The earliest poetry was that of devotion. Harps were first strung in honour of gods; and even the drama itself, in Greece, was but a gorgeous sacrifice. Its revival was similar to its origin, and is traced to the mysteries which monks performed on Church festivals, in which they united the effect of decoration and exhibition with that of poetry, describing the creation of the world, or the crucifixion and resurrection of the Redeemer. The great majority of poets have employed religion in attempting to reach that empire over the feelings of which they are so ambitious.

3. Orators have usually had recourse to similar means for a similar purpose. The great pleaders of antiquity, whose names are identified with this art, frequently used religion to play on the passions of their auditors. We commonly find it introduced in those speeches which are recorded to have had the greatest effect. The most sceptical have employed it for impression in their eloquence. In later days we have had splendid

declamations, and successful ones too, about the throne and the altar, from some who cared about the throne but for the sake of its trappings, and worshipped at no altars but those raised to their own interest or vanity.

4. Impostors of various classes, pretended prophets, priests, pontiffs, conquerors, have done homage to the power of religion over society by appealing to it in the breasts of the multitudes whom they have cajoled, or plundered, or trampled under foot. Infidelity has sometimes lurked in lawn, and chuckled at its gains beneath the triple crown. In many instances, besides that of Mahomet, has fanaticism sharpened the sword of conquest. So much art is not wasted in counterfeiting trifles. Such men would not have cared for the name of religion, had it not been a passport to power, wealth, or fame.

The effects of religion, true or false, are chiefly produced by two means. It influences the mind by the belief of its creed, and the habits by its institutions and observances. Both are usually employed, although in very different proportions. The religions of ancient Egypt, of Hindostan, of Greece, and in a less degree Mahometanism, had more of ceremony than of faith: Christianity has more of faith than of ceremony, which indeed it employs but little, if at all. In Judaism they are combined, but ceremony seems to preponderate. Popery is a religion of ceremony compared with

Protestantism. In general, we may observe that religions of ceremony prevail with the ignorant; those of faith with the intelligent: these combine with fixedness and slavery; those with change, liberty, and improvement. The philosophers, whose names raise Greece so high, had a religion of their own, of free speculation, which led them on to glorious truths and high excellence, while the mass of their countrymen seemed another race. The prayers, five times in a day, and frequent ceremonies of the Turks, have had no inconsiderable effect in keeping down their national character, and throwing them so far behind that Europe, whose proudest states they might have rivalled. Could the natives of Hindostan be, by some miracle, transformed into Christians, and the distinction of castes and all their other debasing institutions obliterated, where would be their feebleness, their subjection to foreigners, and all that now makes them a property and not a people?

The religion of ceremony tends to reduce man to a mere machine; a puppet, bowing before altars, fingering beads, walking in procession, and kneeling to images. The fire of intellect, being unfed, wastes and expires. The character becomes devoid of that consistency and elevation which can only result from understanding and believing great moral principles. Establishment, repose, and antiquity, often make the ceremonial

part of a system preponderate over the intellectual. The military faith of predestination was most conspicuous in Mahometanism, while associated with energy; and its ritual became elevated, as the character of its votaries sunk into feebleness. The affinity of the Mosaic Institutions to that class of religions which has the least favourable operation on human improvement, appears at first inconsistent with their divine origin. The fact is explained by a reference to their design, which was not to bring the Jews to an advanced state of knowledge, but to make them the keepers of the records of revelation, and the worship of the One God, till the coming of Christ. The ritual was a thorny fence around the pure religion of the patriarchs. By rendering the Jewish character nearly stationary, two great advantages were gained for mankind. Revelation was securely preserved at a period when the world was so debased that extension would have led to its total loss and afterwards, when it was proffered to the nations, the inferiority of its guardians was a pledge of its divinity.

There is another species of religion, which neither exercises the intellect upon important truth, nor governs life by prescribed ceremonies, but appeals to the imagination. It peoples caves, woods, rivers, mountains, with tutelary deities, to whom it not only gives " a local habitation and a name," but paints their forms and tunes their