Moloch!" The Protestant thinks it was an act of religion in Abraham to sacrifice his only son unto Jehovah; the Catholic still justifies the St Bartholomew massacre. Mankind did not shrink at human sacrifice which was demanded in the name of religion terribly perverted. These facts are enough to show that the religious faculty is the strongest in human nature, and easily snaps all ties which bind us to the finite world, making the lover forswear his bride, and even the mother forget her child.
See what an array of means is provided for the nurture and development of the religious instinct,—provided by God in the constitution of men and of the universe. All these things about us, things magnificently great, things elegantly little, continually impress mankind. Even to the barbarian Nature reveals a mighty power and a wondrous wisdom, and continually points to God. I do not wonder that men worshipped the several things of the world, at first reverencing the Divine in the emmet or the crocodile. The world of matter is a revelation of fear to the savage in northern climes: he trembles at his deity throned in ice and snow. The lightning, the storm, the earthquake, startle the rude man, and he sees the Divine in the extraordinary.
The grand objects of Nature perpetually constrain men to think of their Author. The Alps are the great altar of Europe; the nocturnal sky has been to mankind the dome of a temple, starred all over with admonitions to reverence, trust, and love. The Scriptures for the human race are writ in earth and heaven. Even now we say, "An undevout astronomer is mad," What a religious mosaic is the surface of the earth,—green with vegetable beauty, animated with such swarms of life. No organ or Pope's Miserere touches my heart like the sonorous swell of the sea, and the ocean wave's immeasurable laugh. To me, the works of men who report the aspects of Nature, like Humboldt, and of such as Newton and Laplace, who melt away the facts, and leave only the laws, the forces of Nature, the ideas and ghosts of things, are like tales of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or poetical biographies of a saint; they stir religious feelings, and I commune with the Infinite.
