The class of minds that crave instruction for its own sake must always be very small; and it is this class alone that will read books in spite of their lack of imaginative power. Authors have no right to complain that their wise books lie unread by the multitude, if they persist in overlooking the nature of the human mind, and addressing themselves to what they think it ought to be instead of what it really is. They expatiate admiringly upon the simplicity and vividness of the style of Herodotus, and upon the classic taste of the Athenian public in appreciating him; and then, forgetting that the public of our own day are quick to admire the same traits, turn to their desks and write their histories as unlike as possible to him whom they have been praising. The same repulsive want of Imagination too often characterizes Theology and Metaphysics, and prevents mankind from receiving the instruction from works on these topics that they need. In the early days of man's history, Religion and Philosophy addressed themselves to the Imagination, and then the people listened to their teachings; but gradually these heaven-born teachers turned more and more away from Imagination and towards Thought,--lost themselves in abstractions, dried up, withered, and changed into Theology and Metaphysics; and then the people turned wearily away from their words; and were they to blame? They wanted bread, and only stones were given to them. The multitude would not have followed the Lord, and listened with admiring wonder to his instructions, had they not been addressed to the Imagination. Infinite Wisdom clothed itself in parables, that the people might be instructed, and the people thronged to hear. The truths of Philosophy and Religion are of an interest more universal to humanity than the truths of all other science, for the first is to know one's self, and the second to know one's God; and yet the majority of teachers cover them with such a body of technicalities and abstractions, that it is vain for the mass of mankind to endeavor to penetrate to the soul within. If the clergy of the Protestant Church would spend more strength in illustrating the Infinite Wisdom contained in the parables of the Lord, and less in amplifying the abstractions of St. Paul, they would gather around them bands of listeners far more numerous and more devout than those that now attend their ministrations. It was one of the grand mistakes of that Church, at its first separation from the Romish, that, in its terror of the worship of material images, it passed into the opposite extreme of the worship of abstractions. This is one reason why Protestantism has made no advance in Europe since the death of the first Reformers, and why there is so little vital religion among the races by whom it was adopted.