It
was your business to correct and mitigate everything which was noxious
in this passion, as in all the passions. But is superstition the
greatest of all possible vices? In its possible excess I think it
becomes a very great evil. It is, however, a moral subject and, of
course, admits of all degrees and all modifications. Superstition is
the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an
intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or
other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found
necessary to the strongest. The body of all true religion consists, to
be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in
a confidence in his declarations, and in imitation of his perfections.
The rest is our own. It may be prejudicial to the great end; it may be
auxiliary. Wise men, who as such are not admirers (not admirers at
least of the Munera Terrae), are not violently attached to these
things, nor do they violently hate them. Wisdom is not the most severe
corrector of folly. They are the rival follies which mutually wage
so unrelenting a war, and which make so cruel a use of their
advantages as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar, on
the one side or the other, in their quarrels. Prudence would be
neuter, but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce
antipathy concerning things in their nature not made to produce such
heats, a prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors
and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he
would think the superstition which builds to be more tolerable than
that which demolishes; that which adorns a country, than that which
deforms it; that which endows, than that which plunders; that which
disposes to mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real
injustice; that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful
pleasures, than that which snatches from others the scanty subsistence
of their self-denial.
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