Religion under any of its aspects, revealing or consoling--religion in connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when _self_-evoked by a person of earnest nature, not imposed from without by the necessities of monastic life, not caught as a contagion from the example of friends that surround you, argues some 'vast volcanic agency' moving at subterraneous depths below the ordinary working mind of daily life, and entitled by its own intrinsic grandeur to ennoble the curiosity (else a petty passion) which may put questions as to its origin. In any case of religion arising, as a spontaneous birth, in the midst of alien forces, it is inevitable to ask for its _why_ and its _whence_. Religion considered as a sentiment of devotion, as a yearning after some dedication to an immeasurable principle of that noblest temple among all temples--'the upright heart and pure,' or religion, again, as the apprehension of some mighty synthesis amongst truths dimly perceived heretofore amidst separating clouds, but now brought into strict indissoluble connection, proclaims a revolution so great that it is otherwise not to be accounted for than as the breaking out of a germ of the supernatural in man as a seed from a hitherto barren soil. Sin is that secret word, that dark _aporreton_ of the human race, undiscoverable except by express revelation, which having once been laid in the great things of God as a germinal principle, has since blossomed into a vast growth of sublime ideas known only to those nations who have lived under the moulding of Scriptural truth--and comprehending _all_ functions of the Infinite operatively familiar to man. Yes, I affirm that there is no form through which the Infinite reveals itself in a sense comprehensible by man and adequate to man; that there is no sublime agency which _compresses_ the human mind from infancy so as to mingle with the moments of its growth, positively none but has been in its whole origin--in every part--and exclusively developed out of that tremendous mystery which lurks under the name of sin. Yes, I affirm that even in its dreams every Christian child is invested by an atmosphere of sublimity unknown to the greatest of Pagan philosophers: that golden rays reach it by two functions of the Infinite; and that these, in common with those emanations of the Infinite that do not settle upon the mind until mature years, are all projections--derivations or counterpositions--from the obscure idea of sin; could not have existed under any previous condition; and for a Pagan mind would not have been intelligible. _Sin._--It is not only that the Infinite arises as part of the entire system resting on sin, but specifically from sin apart from its counterforces or reactions, viz., from sin as a thing, and the only thing originally shadowy and in a terrific sense mysterious.