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Updated: June 18, 2025
In this nineteenth century the spirit of education stalks abroad and influences men directly and indirectly, by private generosity and national foresight, to accumulate as religiously as in former ages ecclesiastics and devotees gathered sacred relics, all that helps to give the people a full understanding of lives and times and countries other than their own.
When materialistic science shall define "gravitation" the supposed aggregating force of infinitely diffused matter in space so as to make it a distinct and separate factor in the universe from "the spirit of God," that spirit which was breathed into man when he became a living soul, and which, we are told, "upholds the order of the heavens," then its devotees may sneer at the Bible Genesis, and the logical deductions to be drawn therefrom.
The three devotees en titre each submitted to these exorbitant demands on their mind and attention, in hope of a crowning triumph, when at last Dinah should become human; for neither of them was so bold as to imagine that Dinah would give up her innocence as a wife till she should have lost all her illusions.
Rapturous ecstasies supplied the place of study and reflection; and while the zealous devotees poured out their thoughts in unpremeditated harangues, they mistook that eloquence which to their own surprise, as well as that of others, flowed in upon them, for divine illuminations, and for illapses of the Holy Spirit.
Written in a style which the devotees of "free verse" in our time would do well to analyse, it is the most complete expression of his own individual character that he ever attained. Here the Captain of Jehovah, here the champion of Light against Darkness, of Pride against Humility, of Man against Woman, finds his opportunity and his hour.
In this original state of nature, these idle and pretended devotees, assemble together sometimes in armies of ten or twelve thousand, and under a pretence of going in pilgrimage to certain temples, like locusts devour every thing on their way; the men flying before them, and carrying all that they can out of the reach of their depredations; while the women, not in the least afraid of a naked army of lusty saints, throw themselves in their way, or remain quietly at home to receive them.
The altars were brilliant with memorial tablets, the green, red, and gold flower vases, and sandalwood taper-holders, so familiar to me, and all about were the written prayers of devotees, soliciting the favor of Heaven, asking success in business, or the averting of illness.
It was affecting to think how lately these were blind devotees of the virgin and the saints, and profaning the name of God a hundred times a day. "Going to the afternoon service," says Mr. Smith, "where Butrus addressed the people, I found the children of the congregation assembled in the court, and engaged in repeating the Assembly's Catechism.
His reverence for Beauty embraced not merely physical and material types, but that nobler, grander beauty which centres in pure ethics and ontology; and a religion that seeks no higher forms than those of clay, whether Himalayas or 'Greek Slave, whether emerald icebergs, flashing under polar auroras, or the myosotis that nods there on the mantelpiece, a religion that substitutes beauty for duty, and Nature for Nature's God, is a shameful sham, and a curse to its devotees.
The effect of the revived interest in Greek and Roman culture, which, as we have seen, dominated European thought from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was felt not only in literature and in the outward life of its devotees in ransacking monasteries for lost manuscripts scripts, in critically studying ancient learning, and in consciously imitating antique behavior but likewise in a marvelous and many-sided development of art.
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