Whether the religion for which the reformers suffered, "was from heaven or of men," is not our question; but whether it is not a religion of robust constitution, framed to endure, and to spread, and to vanquish the hearts of men? With the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in view, it is asked if Christianity be a system that must always lean upon ignorance, and craft, and despotism, and which, when those rotten stays are removed, must fail and be seen no more? Yet another species of trial was in store to give proof of the indestructibility and victorious power of Christianity. It remained to be seen whether, when the agitations, political and moral, that were consequent upon the great schism which had taken place in Europe had subsided, and when the season of slumber and exhaustion came on, and when human reason, strengthened and refined by physical science, and elegant literature, should awake fully to the consciousness of its powers; whether then the religion of the Bible could retain its hold of the nations; or at least of those of them that enjoyed, without limit, the happy influences of political liberty, and intellectual light. This was a sort of probation which Christianity had never before passed through. And what were the omens under which it entered upon the new trial of its strength? Were the friends of Christianity at that moment of portentous conflict awake, and vigilant, and stout-hearted, and thoroughly armed to repel assaults? The very reverse was the fact; for at the instant when the atheistical conspiracy made its long-concerted, well-advised and consentaneous attack, there was scarcely a pulse of life left in the Christian body, in any one of the Protestant states. The old superstitions had crawled back into many of their ancient corners. In other quarters the spirit of protestation against those superstitions had breathed itself away in trivial wranglings, or had given place to infidelity—infidelity aggravated by stalled hypocrisy. The Church of England, the chief prop of modern Christianity, was then, to a great extent, torpid, and fainting under the incubus, either of false doctrine, or of a secular spirit; at least it seemed incapable of the effort which the peril of the time demanded: few indeed of her sons were panoplied, and sound-hearted, as champions in such a cause should be. Within a part only of a small body of Dissenters, (for a part was smitten with the plague of heresy) and that part in great measure disqualified from free and energetic action by rigidities, and scruples, and divisions, was contained almost all the religious life and fervor anywhere to be found in Christendom.