And whence comes this monstrosity into such bosoms?
Weakness of common sense, dread of the common understanding, an insufficient faith in common morality, are surely the disease: and evidently, nothing so exasperates this disease as consecrating religious tenets which forbid the exercise of common sense.
I now began to understand why it was peculiarly for unintelligible doctrines like Transubstantiation and the Tri-unity that Christians had committed such execrable wickednesses.

Now also for the first time I understood what had seemed not frightful only, but preternatural,--the sensualities and cruelties enacted as a part of religion in many of the old Paganisms.

Religion and fanaticism are in the embryo but one and the same; to purify and elevate them we want a cultivation of the understanding, without which our moral code may be indefinitely depraved.

Natural kindness and strong sense are aids and guides, which the most spiritual man cannot afford to despise.
I became conscious that I _had_ despised "mere moral men," as they were called in the phraseology of my school.

They were merged in the vague appellation of "the world," with sinners of every class; and it was habitually assumed, if not asserted, that they were necessarily Pharisaic, because they had not been born again.