our imagination, compared to the miseries which one lost soul must endure through ages and ages of eternity, beyond what the imagination can conceive? The rigor with which they sought to enforce this idea fostered the very evils they sought to eradicate.
By separating the æsthetic from the moral and religious, by cultivating one faculty at the expense of another, and setting up their own standard as the infallible test for all, they ranged bigotry and superstition on the one side,—unrestrained vulgarity and licentiousness on the other. In banishing from their houses all fictitious works in order to avoid contamination with, what was low and sensual in them, they could not banish imagination nor repress the magnetism of human nature, which would find expression through such sources as the public patronage permitted. If denied access to the pure and virtuous, it would cater to the prejudices of the thoughtless and profane.
One of the greatest instrumentalities of moral and religious instruction exists under the name of fiction. Its office consists in bringing us to a more intimate acquaintance with human nature, not so much to philosophize upon it as to present it as it is, leaving the reader to draw his own inferences. It reveals the secret springs of human action, upon which, more than upon public deeds and military prowess hangs the fate of nations. By appealing directly to the feelings, the heart is touched when the intellect would never be reached by logic. A truth is often unconsciously imbibed under the gorgeous coloring of the imagination, when it would find
