It was long before any of the outward professors of Christianity had the hardihood to question their authority: they knew that the whole Christian world considered this book as the standard by which their doctrines were to be tested, and whenever their inclinations, or their vices, impelled them to actions contrary to the pure and obvious meaning of gospel ordinances, they sought to veil their aberrations by the perversion of the book itself. The man of the world found in it so many restraints upon his ambition and fancied enjoyments, that it is not surprising that he should be anxious to avail himself of every pretence to enlarge its boundaries and relax the rigour of his bonds. In this struggle, many of the priesthood were his faithful coadjutors, for they too felt the uneasiness of the straightened path prescribed to them, and that the pure Christian doctrines and principles could afford no field for the indulgence of their vanity by pompous declamation, or for the display of a superiority of mind by subtile disquisition: all was simple and practical, such as fishermen could teach and herdsmen understand. Then began that system of mysticising and allegorising the Scriptures, a practice which accorded so well with the lively and subtle characters of the modern Greeks, that every priest became a mystagogue, and the pulpit a chair of theological alchymy, from which men were taught "how to reduce divinity to the maxims of the laboratory, explain morality by sal sulphur and mercury, and allegorize the Scripture itself, and the sacred mysteries thereof, into the Philosopher's Stone."[18] Footnote 18: Locke. Hence the Scriptures became as one of the sibylline books of Paganism, to be opened by the priests alone, for they only could explain the oracles of God; and they acted with more consistency than you have done, by endeavouring to conceal them from the view of the laity; for if they are indeed such as _you_ have described, and _they_ have strove to make them, they ought not only to be concealed from the view of young beginners in religion, but prohibited to all but the initiated. Thus was the simplicity of the Christian religion deformed, and the understandings of men subdued by an ambitious priesthood. They knew that gravity and meekness were the attributes and best ornaments of a gospel minister, and while pride and the spirit of domination reigned within them uncontrolled, they sought, by a sanctimonious exterior and affected humility, to prolong their sway; and we find the most imperious of the Roman pontiffs, when treading on the necks of kings, subscribing himself the servant of the servants of God.