And while thus the censure of a fellow-mortal meets no internal testimony to own its justice, this insensate self-complacency is undisturbed also on the side toward heaven. A mere philosopher, that should make little account of religion, otherwise than as capable of being applied to enforce and aggravate the sense of obligation with respect to rules of conduct, and would not, provided it may have this effect, care much about its truth or falsehood,--might be disposed to assert that the ignorant and debased part of the population, of this Christian and Protestant country, are but so much the worse for the riddance of some parts of the superstitions of former ages. He might allege, with plausibility, that the system which imposed so many falsehoods, vain observances, and perversions of moral principles, acknowledging nevertheless _some_ correct rules of morality, as an external practical concern, had the advantage of enjoining them, as far as it chose to do so, with the force of superstition, a stronger authority with a rude conscience than that of plain simple religion. That system exercised a mighty complexity and accumulation of authority, all avowedly divine; by which it could artificially augment, or rather supersede, the mere divine prescription of such rules, making _itself_ the authority and prescriber; and thus could infix them in the moral sense of the people with something more, or something else, than the simple divine sanction. Whereas, now when those superstitions which held the people so powerfully in awe, are gone, and have taken away with them that spurious sanction, there remains nothing to exert the same power of moral enforcement; since the people have not, in their exemption from the superstitions of their ancestors, come under any solemn and commanding effect of the true idea of the Divine Majesty. And it is undeniable that this is the state of conscience among them. The vague, faint notion, as they conceive it, of a being who is said to be the creator, governor, lawgiver, and judge, and who dwells perhaps somewhere in the sky, has not, to many of them, the smallest force of intimidation from evil, at least when they are in health and daylight. One of the large sting-armed insects of the air does not alarm them less. A certain transitory fearfulness that occasionally comes upon them, points more to the Devil, and perhaps (in times now nearly gone by) to the ghosts of the dead, than to the Almighty. It may be, indeed, that this feeling is in its ultimate principle, if it were ever followed up so far, an acknowledgment of justice and power in God, reaching to wicked men through these mysterious agents; who though intending no service to him, but actuated by dispositions of their own, malignant in the greatest of them, and supposed inauspicious in the others, are yet carrying into effect his hostility. But it is little beyond such proximate objects of apprehension that many minds extend their