The
faculty of wonder is not defunct, but is only getting more and more
emancipated from the unnatural service of terror, and restored to its
proper function as a minister of delight. A higher mode of belief is the
best exorciser, because it makes the spiritual at one with the actual
world instead of hostile, or at best alien. It has been the grossly
material interpretations of spiritual doctrine that have given occasion
to the two extremes of superstition and unbelief. While the resurrection
of the body has been insisted on, that resurrection from the body which
is the privilege of all has been forgotten. Superstition in its baneful
form was largely due to the enforcement by the Church of arguments that
involved a _petitio principii_, for it is the miserable necessity of all
false logic to accept of very ignoble allies. Fear became at length its
chief expedient for the maintenance of its power; and as there is a
beneficent necessity laid upon a majority of mankind to sustain and
perpetuate the order of things they are born into, and to make all new
ideas manfully prove their right, first, to be at all, and then to be
heard, many even superior minds dreaded the tearing away of vicious
accretions as dangerous to the whole edifice of religion and society.
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