If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to
brand as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to me
now, you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes
almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer
examples. I reply that I took these extremer examples as
yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of any
science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be
eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine
what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final
judgment independently. Even so with religion. We who have
pursued such radical expressions of it may now be sure that we
know its secrets as authentically as anyone can know them who
learns them from another; and we have next to answer, each of us
for himself, the practical question: what are the dangers in
this element of life? and in what proportion may it need to be
restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance?
But this question suggests another one which I will answer
immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once
already vexed us.
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