But a far happier anticipation is with reason indulged; for it may well be believed that the same Benignant Influence which is to remove the covering of gross ignorance from the nations, shall, at the same moment, scatter the dimness that still hovers over the Church in its most favored home; and then, and under that influence, the fervors of Christian zeal may reach the height even of a seraphic energy, and yet without enthusiasm. SECTION VIII. SKETCH OF THE ENTHUSIASM OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. An intelligent Christian, fraught with scriptural principles in their simplicity and purity, but hitherto uninformed of Church history, who should peruse discursively the ecclesiastical writers of the age of Jerom, Ambrose, and Basil, would presently recoil with an emotion of disappointment, perplexity, and alarm. That within a period which does not exceed the reach of oral tradition, the religion of the apostles should have so much changed its character, and so much have lost its beauty, he could not have supposed possible. He has heard indeed of the corruptions of popery, and of the enormous abuses prevalent in "the dark ages;" and he has been told too, by those who had a special argument to prop, that the era of the secular prosperity of the church was that also of the incipient corruption of religion. But he finds in fact that there is scarcely an error of doctrine, or an absurdity of practice, ordinarily attributed to the popes and councils of later times, and commonly included in the indictment against Rome, which may not, in its elements, or even in a developed form, be traced to the writings of those whose ancestors, at the third or fourth remove only, were the hearers of Paul and John. But after the first shock of such an unprepared perusal of the fathers has passed, and when calm reflection has returned, and especially when, by taking up these early writers from the commencement, the progression of decay and perversion has been gradually and distinctly contemplated, then, though the disappointment will in great part remain, the appalling surmises at first engendered in the modern reader's mind, will be dispelled, and he will even be able to pursue his course of reading with pleasure, and to derive from it much solid instruction. Considerations such as the following will naturally present themselves to him in mitigation of his first painful impressions.