He respects piety and devotion; he even supports
institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does
not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents
him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.
He is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because
his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with
an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of
feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.
"Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be
no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others
to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which
exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.
Pages:
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123