But the institutions savour of superstition in their very principle;
and they nourish it by a permanent and standing influence. This I do
not mean to dispute; but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from
superstition itself any resources which may thence be furnished for the
public advantage. You derive benefits from many dispositions and many
passions of the human mind, which are of as doubtful a colour, in the
moral eye, as superstition itself. It was your business to correct and
mitigate everything which was noxious in this passion, as in all the
passions. But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices? In its
possible excess I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however,
a moral subject; and of course admits of all degrees and all
modifications. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they
must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some
enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a
resource found necessary to the strongest. The body of all true religion
consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the
world; in a confidence in his declarations, and in imitation of his
perfections. The rest is our own. It may be prejudicial to the great
end; it may be auxiliary. Wise men, who as such are not ADMIRERS (not
admirers at least of the munera terrae), are not violently attached to
these things, nor do they violently hate them. Wisdom is not the most
severe corrector of folly. They are the rival follies, which mutually
wage so unrelenting a war; and which make so cruel a use of their
advantages, as they can happen to engage the immoderate vulgar, on the
one side, or the other, in their quarrels. Prudence would be neuter;
but if, in the contention between fond attachment and fierce antipathy
concerning things in their nature not made to produce such heats, a
prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors and excesses
of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, perhaps he would think the
superstition which builds, to be more tolerable than that which
demolishes; that which adorns a country, than that which deforms it;
that which endows, than that which plunders; that which disposes to
mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real injustice; that
which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful pleasures, than that which
snatches from others the scanty subsistence of their self-denial. Such,
I think, is very nearly the state of the question between the ancient
founders of monkish superstition, and the superstition of the pretended
philosophers of the hour.