We have said that the prevailing characteristic of these semi-philosophers is the love of contradicting whatever to the majority of men seems a simple and intelligible truth. We will give two very short instances of this spirit of contradiction. We need not say that they are religious men, or that the want of piety in the world is their frequent subject of animadversion. "I was surprised just now," says one of the brothers, "to see a cobweb round a knocker: for it was not on the gate of heaven." You would suppose, therefore, that a man could not be too earnest in knocking at this gate that it might be opened to him. But this is what all the religious world is saying, and to float with the stream would be intolerable. It is discovered, therefore, that the religious world make of salvation, of the entrance into heaven, a matter of too much _personal interest_. "Catholic religion has wellnigh been split up into personal, so that the very idea of the former has almost been lost; _and it is the avowed principle of what is called the Religious World that every body's paramount, engrossing duty is to take care his own soul_." (P. 194.) What is called the Religious World world be a little surprised to hear itself censured by the archdeacon on such a ground as this. Our next, which is very brief, is a still more striking instance of this contradictious and exclusive spirit. "The glories of their country,"--he is speaking of the ancient Greeks,--"inspired them with enthusiastic patriotism; and an aristocratical religion--(_which, until it was supplanted by a vulgar philosophy_, was revered in spite of all its errors)--gave them," &c. It was a "vulgar philosophy" that doubted of the truth of Paganism! It is, at all events, a very commonplace philosophy at the present day which discredits the gods of Olympus, and is therefore to be spoken of with due contempt. Instead of being intelligible and vulgar, how much better to wrap up our Christian philosophy in a style as rare and curious, and undecipherable, as the hieroglyphic cerements of an Egyptian mummy! "The precepts of Christianity are holy and imperative; its mysteries vast, undiscoverable, unimaginable; and, what is still worthier of consideration, these two limbs of our religion are not severed, or even laxly joined, but, after the workmanship of the God of nature, so 'lock in with and over-wrap one another' that they cannot be torn asunder without rude force. _Every mystery is the germ of a duty: every duty has its motive in a mystery. So that if I may speak of these things in the symbolical language of ancient wisdom, every thing divine being circular, every right thing human straight--the life of the Christian may be compared to a chord, each end of which is supported by the arc it proceeds from and terminates in._" (P. 214.)