But a symbolical worship--the creation of a separate and established order of priests--never is, and never can be, the religion professed, loved, and guarded by a people.

The multitude demand something positive and real for their belief--they cannot worship a delusion--their reverence would be benumbed on the instant if they could be made to comprehend that the god to whom they sacrificed was no actual power able to effect evil and good, but the type of a particular season of the year, or an unwholesome principle in the air.

Hence, in the Egyptian religion, there was one creed for the vulgar and another for the priests.

Again, to invent and to perpetuate a symbolical religion (which is, in fact, an hereditary school of metaphysics) requires men set apart for the purpose, whose leisure tempts them to invention, whose interest prompts them to imposture.

A symbolical religion is a proof of a certain refinement in civilization--the refinement of sages in the midst of a subservient people; and it absorbs to itself those meditative and imaginative minds which, did it not exist, would be devoted to philosophy.