These, and other considerations, which will present themselves to a candid and intelligent mind, cannot but remove much of the embarrassment and disrelish that are likely to attend a first converse with ancient divinity. And the pious reader will proceed with heartfelt satisfaction to collect evidence of the fact, which some modern sophists have so much labored to obscure, that the rudiments, at least, of revealed religion, as now understood by the mass of Christians, were then firmly held by the body of the Church. And he will rejoice also to meet with not less satisfactory proofs of the energy and intenseness of practical Christianity among a large number of those who made profession of the name. Nevertheless, after every fair allowance has been made, and every indulgence given to diversity of circumstance, and after the errors and disgraces of our own times have been placed in counterpoise to those of the ancient church, there will remain glaring indications of a deep-seated corruption of religious sentiment, leaving hardly a single feeling proper to the Christian life in its purity and simplicity. It is not heresy, it is not the denial of the principal scriptural doctrines, that is to be charged on the ancient church; the body of divinity held its integrity. Nor is it the want of heroic virtue that we lament. But a transmutation of the objects of the devout affections into objects of _imaginative delectation_ had taken place, had rendered the piety of a numerous class purely fictitious, had tinged, more or less, with idealism, the religious sentiments of all but a few, and had opened the way by which entered at length, the dense and fatal delusions of a superstition so gross as hardly to retain a redeeming quality. Not a few of the Christians of the third century, and multitudes in the fourth and fifth, especially among the recluses, having lost the forcible and genuine feeling of guilt and danger, proper to those who confess themselves transgressors of the divine law, and in consequence become blind to the real purport of the Gospel, fixed their gaze upon the ideal splendors of Christianity, were smitten with the phase it presents, of beauty, of sublimity, of infinitude, of intellectual elevation, were charmed with its supposed doctrine of abstraction from mundane agitations; and found within the sphere of its revelations unfathomable depths, where vague meditation might plunge and plunge with endless descents. Fascinated, deluded, and still blinded more by the deepening shades of error, they forgot almost entirely the emotions of a true repentance, and of a cordial faith, and of a cheerful obedience; and in the rugged path of gratuitous afflictions, and unnatural mortifications, pursued a spectral resemblance of piety, unsubstantial and cold as the mists of night.