The aspect of religion, when thus amalgamated with the enthusiasm or the superstitions of a country, is always in accordance with the direction which that enthusiasm has taken, or with the peculiar cast of these superstitions, or with the nature of the circumstances and events by which they were modified or produced. These last (circumstances and events) must be regarded as primary agents in this process of amalgamation; and they may be divided into three distinct classes. In the first are great political convulsions, which agitate and unsettle the minds of whole communities. In every period of the history of every country, there exists a certain quantum of superstition and enthusiasm--a certain proportion of the men who see visions and dream dreams; but in times of quiet, when every visionary has his own distinct province assigned to him by some little chance peculiar to himself, the quantum is variously directed; and thus, flowing in a thousand obscure channels, it can have no marked effect on the body of a people. But it is not thus in times of convulsion, when all men look one way, are interested in the same events, and direct their energies on the same objects. The quantum, swollen in bulk by the workings of these storms of the people, flows also in one channel; and thus, to a force increased in all its details, there is added a collective impetus. Hence its overmastering power. No one acquainted with English history need be reminded of those times of the Commonwealth, in which, through an atmosphere of lightning and tempest, whole hordes of visionaries gazed on what they deemed a still brighter, but more placid future, and called each one on his own little sect to rejoice in the prospect. And the first French Revolution was productive of similar effects. I need not refer to the singular interest elicited in our own country among the humbler people by the wild predictions of Brothers, or to the many soberer dreamers who were led, by the general excitement and portentous events of the period, to interpret amiss a surer word of prophecy. No one intimate enough with human nature to recognise its impulses and passions in their various disguises of belief and opinion, can be ignorant that there is a superstition of scepticism as surely as of credulity, or fail of identifying the wild infidelity of the French Commonwealth with the almost equally wild fanaticism of the English one.