The Church of England Quarterly Review Volume 11 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: their most cherished feelings, and their thoughts and actions became purified when they understood that the supreme eye was ever upon them. Such should have been the invariable effects, such were the necessary tendencies of even natural religion among men. They taught their children the morality they had learnt; precepts were repeated around the social hearth, and the remembrance endeared the imbibed principles to them in after life. These things were connected together by one great master chord, and the recollection of fond familiar things, recalled to mind the religious instruction of childhood. Thus the chief end of a people was made manifest to them by themselves, their souls taught them of immortality; and great men, vast intelligences arose, who purified and elaborated their former crude notions in a definite principle into a general and accepted, organized, religion. Such were those of whom the Apostle tells us that being without the law they were a law unto themselves. We have spoken, in the abstract, of the early religious impressions of all people and of all nations. True, there wasa difference, even among those who had no especial regulation, but this difference arose from variation in customs, climate, and circumstances. Granting that the theology of ancient nations was obscured by their superstitions, by fallacies, errors, cheats, and impostures, we have only pleaded for the idea, and having this granted, we find that there is a parallel between the grand element of their conceptions and that of the Christian. There was a distinction between good and bad, virtue and crime, mortality and immortality, heaven and hell; their religions comprehended all these, and we, who have the advantage of a Revelation, which explains to us what they did not know, and who beho...