Attaching so much importance to the truths which interest them, they are prone to overrate the Authors by whom those truths are expressed and enforced.

They come prepared to impart so much passion to the Poet's language, that they remain unconscious how little, in fact, they receive from it.

And, on the other hand, religious faith is to him who holds it so momentous a thing, and error appears to be attended with such tremendous consequences, that, if opinions touching upon religion occur which the Reader condemns, he not only cannot sympathize with them, however animated the expression, but there is, for the most part, an end put to all satisfaction and enjoyment.

Love, if it before existed, is converted into dislike; and the heart of the Reader is set against the Author and his book .-- To these excesses, they, who from their professions ought to be the most guarded against them, are perhaps the most liable; I mean those sects whose religion, being from the calculating understanding, is cold and formal.

For when Christianity, the religion of humility, is founded upon the proudest faculty of our nature, what can be expected but contradictions?
Accordingly, believers of this cast are at one time contemptuous; at another, being troubled, as they are and must he, with inward misgivings, they are jealous and suspicious;--and at all seasons, they are under temptation to supply by the heat with which they defend their tenets, the animation which is wanting to the constitution of the religion itself.
Faith was given to man that his affections, detached from the treasures of time, might be inclined to settle upon those of eternity;--the elevation of his nature, which this habit produces on earth, being to him a presumptive evidence of a future state of existence; and giving him a title to partake of its holiness.