It belongs not at all to our subject to attempt a confutation of this, the most strange of the many corruptions which Christianity has undergone; our part is merely to exhibit against the system the charge of delusion or enthusiasm; and this charge needs no other proof than the plain statement that, whereas Christianity recognizes the actual mechanism of human nature, and appeals to the moral sentiments, and urges motives of every class, and labors to enhance the sense of responsibility, and authenticates the voice of conscience, Antinomianism, with indurated arrogance, spurns all such sentiments, and substitutes nothing in their room but bare speculations; and these speculations are all of a kind to cherish the selfish deliriums of luxurious contemplation. But to take a course like this, is, whatever may be the subject in question, the part of an enthusiast. Whoever, in any such manner, cuts himself off from the common sympathies of our nature, and makes idiot sport of the energies of moral action, and has recourse, either to a jargon of sophistries, or to trivial evasions, when other men act upon the intuitions of good sense, and rebuts every idea that does not minister gratification either to fancy or to appetite, such a man must be called an enthusiast, even though he were at the same time—if that were possible—a saint. * * * * * We have spoken of the enthusiasm of mysticism. But there is also an enthusiasm of simplification. The lowest intellectual temperature, not less than the highest, admits extravagance, and sometimes even admits it more; for warmth and movement are less unnatural in the world of matter or of mind, than congelation: what so grotesque as the coruscations of frost? If the reasoning faculty had not its imaginative impulse, the sciences would never have moved a step in advance of the mechanic arts; much less would the high theorems of pure mathematics, or the abstruse principles of metaphysics, have been known to mankind. But if this natural and useful impulse be irregular and excessive, it becomes the spring of errors. Yet the perfection of science, and its general diffusion in modern times, operate so effectually to keep in check that propensity to absurd speculation of which the elements are always in existence, that if we are in search of specimens of this species of intellectual disease, we must expect to meet with them only without the pale of education, and among the self-taught philosophers of workshops, who sometimes amuse the hour of stolen leisure in digesting systems of the universe, other than the one which is demonstrated in our universities.