While religious persons dread critical and searching thought, and critics despise instinctive religion, each side remains imperfect and curtailed.
It is a complaint often made by religious historians, that no church can sustain its spirituality unimpaired through two generations, and that in the third a total irreligion is apt to supervene.

Sometimes indeed the transitions are abrupt, from an age of piety to an age of dissoluteness.

The liability to such lamentable revulsions is plainly due to some insufficiency in the religion to meet all the wants of human nature.

To scold at that nature is puerile, and implies an ignorance of the task which religion undertakes.

To lay the fault on the sovereign will of God, who has "withheld his grace" from the grandchildren of the pious, might be called blasphemy, if we were disposed to speak harshly.