What proof is there of this? Whether
true or false, it has already survived numberless revolutions of human
opinions, and all sorts of changes and assaults. It is not confined,
like other religions, to any one race--to any one clime--or any one form
of political constitution. While it transmigrates freely from race to
race, and clime to clime, its chief home; too, is still in the bosom of
enterprise, wealth, science, and civilisation; and it is at this moment
most powerful amongst the nations that have most of these. If not true,
it has such an appearance of truth as to have satisfied many of the
acutest and most powerful intellects of the species;--a Bacon, a Pascal,
a Leibnitz, a Locke, a Newton, a Butler;--such an appearance of truth as
to have enlisted in its support an immense army of genius and learning:
genius and learning, not only in some sense professional, and often
wrongfully represented as therefore interested, but much of both,
strictly extra-professional; animated to its defence by nothing but
a conviction of the force of the arguments by which its truth is
sustained, and that 'hope full of immortality' which its promises have
inspired. Under such circumstances it must appear equally rash and
gratuitous to suppose, even if it be a delusion, that an institute,
which has thus enlisted the sympathies of so many of the greatest minds
of all races and of all ages--which is alone stable and progressive
amidst instability and fluctuation,--will soon come to an end.
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