This deficiency of the moral power of the government, to promote the progress of conviction in the mind of the nation, would be slenderly supplied by the authority of the class next to the government in the claim to deference, and even holding the precedence in actual influence,--that is, the families of rank and consequence throughout the country. For the people well knew, in their respective neighborhoods, that many of these had never in reality forsaken the ancient religion, consulting only the policy of a time-serving conformity; and that some of them hardly attempted or wished to conceal from their inferiors that they preserved their fidelity. And then the substituted religion, while it came with a great diminution of the pomp which is always the delight of the ignorant, acknowledged,--proclaimed as one of its chief merits,--a still more fatal defect for attracting converts from among beings whose ignorance had never been suffered to doubt, till then, that men in ecclesiastical garb could modify, or suspend, or defeat for them the justice of God; it proclaimed itself unable to give any exemptions or commutations in matters of conscience.
When such were the recommendations which the new mode of religion _not_, and when the recommendation which it _had_ was simply, (the royal authority set out of the question,) an offer of evidence to the understanding _that it was true_, no wonder that many of a generation so insensate through ignorance should never become its proselytes. But even as to those who did, while it was a happy deliverance, as we have said, to escape almost any way from the utter grossness of popery, still they would carry into their better faith much of the unhappy effect of that previous mental debasement. How should a man in the rudeness of an intellect left completely ignorant of truth in general, have a luminous apprehension of its most important division? There could not be in men's minds a phenomenon similar to what we image to ourselves of Goshen in the preternatural night of Egypt, a space of perfect light, defined out by a precise limit amidst the general darkness.
Only consider, that the new ideas admitted into the proselyte's understanding as the true faith, were to take their situation there in nearly those very same encompassing circumstances of internal barbarism which had been so perfectly commodious to the superstition recently dwelling there; and that which had been favorable and adapted in the utmost degree, that which had afforded much of the sustenance of life, to the false notions, could not but be most adverse to the development of the true ones. These latter, so environed, would be in a condition too like that of a candle in the mephitic air of a vault. The newly adopted religion, therefore, of the uncultivated converts from popery, would be far from exhibiting, as compared with the renounced superstition, a magnitude of change, and force of contrast, duly corresponding to the difference between the lying vanities of priestcraft and a communication from the living God. The reign of ignorance combined with imposture had fixed upon the common people of the age of the Reformation, and of several generations downward, the doom of being incapable of admitting genuine Christianity but with an excessively inadequate apprehension of its attributes;--as in the patriarchal ages a man might have received with only the honors appropriate to a saint or prophet, the visitant in whom he was entertaining an angel unawares. Happy for both that ancient entertainer of such a visitant, and the ignorant but honest adopter of the reformed religion, when that which they entertained rewarded them according to its own celestial quality, rather than in proportion to their inadequate reception. We may believe that the Divine Being, in special compassion to that ignorance to which barbarism and superstition had condemned inevitably the greater number of the early converts to the reformed religion, did render that faith beneficial to them beyond the proportion of their narrow and still half superstitious conception of it. And this is, in truth, the consideration the most consolatory in looking back to that tenebrious period in which popery was slowly retiring, with a protracted exertion of all the craft and strength of an able and veteran tyrant contending to the last for prolonged dominion.