We have said that when an important object is zealously pursued in the use of means proper for its attainment, a mere intensity or fervor of feeling does not constitute enthusiasm. If, therefore, prayer has a lawful object, whether it be temporal or spiritual, and is used in humble confidence of its efficiency, as a means of obtaining the desired boon or some equivalent blessing, there is nothing unreal in the employment; and therefore nothing enthusiastic. But there are devotional exercises, which, though they assume the style and phrases of prayer, appear to have no other object than to attain the immediate pleasures of excitement. The devotee is not in truth a _petitioner_; for his prayers terminate in themselves; and when he reaches the expected pitch of transient emotion, he desires nothing more. This appetite for feverish agitations naturally prompts a quest of whatever is exorbitant in expression or sentiment, and as naturally inspires a dread of all those subjects of meditation which tend to abate the pulse of the moral system. If the language of humiliation is at all admitted into the enthusiast's devotions, it must be so pointed with extravagance, and so swollen with exaggerations, that it serves much more to tickle the fancy than to affect the heart: it is a burlesque of penitence very proper to amuse a mind that is destitute of real contrition. That such artificial humiliations do not spring from the sorrow of repentance, is proved by their bringing with them no lowliness of temper. Genuine humility would shake the towering structure of this enthusiastic pietism; and, therefore, in the place of Christian humbleness of mind, there are cherished certain ineffable notions of self-annihilation, and self-renunciation, and we know not what other attempts at metaphysical suicide. If you will receive the enthusiast's description of himself, he has become, in his own esteem, by continued force of divine contemplation, infinitely less than an atom—a mere negative quantity—an incalculable fraction of positive entity! meanwhile the whole of his deportment betrays a self-importance that might be ample enough for a god.