Page:An Index of Prohibited Books (1840).djvu/24

xviii and metals in the sacred vessels!—what spiritual intoxication of melody and harmony, both vocal and instrumental!—what scientific and successful management of light and position!—in short, what a masterly performance of the whole external, sensual, and sensualising exhibition, where eye and ear have every imaginable gratification allotted to them! So that the simple victims of the enchantment, instead of a saving religion, which will bring them to heaven, and fit them for it, find, to their endless disappointment, unless escaped from, that they have embraced, and mocked themselves with, a brilliant but noxious phantasm—an inflated inanity—a religion of sound and sentimentality—made up of chants and anthems; of copes, tunicles, albes, chasibles, and stoles; of the diversified luxuries of masonry and sculpture, arches, vaulted roofs, picturesque windows, carved and embossed; not to add, grotesque and satirical ornaments of all sorts, with shrines, monuments, tapers, and every ornament devisable by human ingenuity— and last, not least, of the "dim religious light," so apt and expressive an emblem of the superstition which it is meant to recommend, even in its most favourable form. This is the real material, though the formal may, and must, vary—a circumstance which presents the only admissible mitigation in the affair; and it is admitted, as far as it extends, with joy.