It is a deadly political malady, malefic in proportion to its influence on the people; and, I fear, until Italy is freed from it, no progress or healthy political life or morality is possible.
For myself, the study of the system and a comparison of its relations with other religions completed that evolution of my religious ideal which I regard as the principal outcome of my life.

The Roman Catholic religion is to me the _reductio ad absurdum_ of all anthropomorphic religions, and such a study of it as was there possible drove me to a logical conclusion on the whole matter, not by a sudden revulsion, but as the gradual and normal growth of a rational evolution of my conceptions of the spiritual life, starting from that stage of emancipation which my residence at Cambridge and the intercourse with the liberal thinkers there had brought me to; the influence of Norton, Lowell, Agassiz, and Emerson especially.

In this liberation I am aware of no sudden break in my belief from its crude acceptance of miraculous conversion and eternal damnation for the unconverted, but a slow opening of my eyes to larger truths.

If any individual influence other than those I have named came in, it would have been the reading of Swedenborg, which gave me a comprehension of what spiritual life was and must be; but Swedenborg himself had never been emancipated from the anthropomorphic conception of Deity.

He was a seer, not a philosopher.