Long before the time when ecclesiastical narratives of supernatural occurrences assume a character decidedly suspicious, or manifestly faithless, the great facts of Christianity had, with a large class of persons, and especially with the recluses, become the objects of day-dream contemplation, and formed rather the furniture of a theatre of celestial machinery, than the exciting causes of simple faith, and hope, and joy. The divine glories, the brightness of the future life, the history and advocacy of the Mediator, the agency of angels, and of demons, were little else, to many, than the incentives of intellectual intoxication. When once this misuse of religious ideas had gained possession of the mind, it brought with it an irresistible prurience, asking for the marvellous, just as voluptuousness asks for the aliments of pleasure. This demand will be peculiarly importunate among those who have to uphold their faith in the front of a gainsaying world; and who would much rather confound the scoffer by the blaze of a new miracle, than convince him by an argumentative appeal to an old one. The first step towards the pseudo-miraculous is taken without doing any violence to conscience, and little even to good sense; provided that opinions of a favoring kind are generally prevalent. Good, and even judicious men, might be so under the influence of the imagination as to have their sleep hurried with visions, and their waking meditations quickened by unearthly voices; and might complacently report such celestial favors to greedy hearers, without a particle of dishonest consciousness.[9] Thus the taste for things extraordinary was at once cherished and powerfully sanctioned by the example of men eminently wise and holy. Then, with an inferior class of men, the progression from illusions, real and complete, to such as were in part aided by a little spontaneity and contrivance, and which, though somewhat unsatisfactory to the narrator, were devoured without scruple by the hearer, could not be difficult. The temptation to produce a commodity so much in demand was strong; often too strong for those whose moral sense had been debilitated by an habitual inebriety of the imagination. Another step towards religious fraud was more easily taken than avoided, when it was eagerly looked for by open-mouthed credulity, and when the church might cheaply and securely be glorified, and Gentilism triumphantly confuted. The plain ground of Christian integrity having once been abandoned, the shocks of a downward progress towards the most reprehensible extreme of deception were not likely to awaken remorse.