Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS AND OTHER PAPERS. BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY AUTHOR OF 'CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER,' ETC. ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. ON CHRISTIANITY AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT PROTESTANTISM ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY JUDAS ISCARIOT ON HUME'S ARGUMENT AGAINST MIRACLES CASUISTRY GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS ON CHRISTIANITY, AS AN ORGAN OF POLITICAL MOVEMENT. [1846.] FORCES, which are illimitable in their compass of effect, are often, for the same reason, obscure and untraceable in the steps of their movement. Growth, for instance, animal or vegetable, what eye can arrest its eternal increments? The hour-hand of a watch, who can detect the separate fluxions of its advance? Judging by the past, and the change which is registered between that and the present, we know that it must be awake; judging by the immediate appearances, we should say that it was always asleep. Gravitation, again, that works without holiday for ever, and searches every corner of the universe, what intellect can follow it to its fountains? And yet, shyer than gravitation, less to be counted than the fluxions of sun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footsteps of Christianity amongst the political workings of man. Nothing, that the heart of man values, is so secret; nothing is so potent. It is _because_ Christianity works so secretly, that it works so potently; it is _because_ Christianity burrows and hides itself, that it towers above the clouds; and hence partly it is that its working comes to be misapprehended, or even lost out of sight. It is dark to eyes touched with the films of human frailty: but it is 'dark with excessive bright.'[Footnote: 'Dark with excessive bright.' _Paradise Lost_. Book III.] Hence it has happened sometimes that minds of the highest order have entered into enmity with the Christian faith, have arraigned it as a curse to man, and have fought against it even upon Christian impulses, (impulses of benignity that could not have had a birth except in Christianity.) All comes from the labyrinthine intricacy in which the _social_ action of Christianity involves itself to the eye of a contemporary. Simplicity the most absolute is reconcilable with intricacy the most elaborate. The weather--how simple would appear the laws of its oscillations, if we stood at their centre! and yet, because we do _not_, to this hour the weather is a mystery. Human health--how transparent is its economy under ordinary circumstances! abstinence and cleanliness, labor and rest, these simple laws, observed in just proportions, laws that may be engrossed upon a finger nail, are sufficient, on the whole, to maintain the equilibrium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectify