"In religion,
What damned error, but some holy cheat,
Can gloss it over!"
Pope to the same effect, tracing the progress of superstition, says—
"Fear made their devils, and weak hope their Gods;
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust!
Zeal then, not charity, became the guide,
And hell was built in spite, and heaven in pride."
Some French writer observes that—
"Priests are all for vengeance, force, and fire,
And only in his thunders act their God!"
Thus human passions have contaminated the shrines which human reason should have raised to heaven—and thus, as Mr. Shelley justly remarks,
"Priests babble of a God of peace,
E'en while their hands are red with guiltless blood!"
Thus once the Christian crusaders made a slaughter-house of Turkey, for the conquest of Jerusalem in the name of Christ; and a few weeks since Constantinople has seen the Greek Christians, with their patriarch at their head, murdered to the honor and glory of the god of Mahomet. But is the Great Author of All, the Eternal Immutable Spirit, to be denied, because some beings,
"drest in a little brief authority,
F
