Still, however prevalent this belief may be, it seems to me necessary to institute some more careful and searching investigation into the influence exercised by religious dogmas thus received, and indeed by any manifestation of a religious spirit called forth by political institutions. Now, as regards the acceptance of religious truth by the less cultivated masses of the people, most reliance is to be reposed in the ideas of future rewards and punishments. But these do nothing to lessen the propensity to immoral actions, or strengthen the leaning to that which is good, and therefore cannot improve the character: they simply work on the imagination, and therefore influence action as do images of fancy in general; but that influence is in like manner dissipated and destroyed by all that impairs the force and vivacity of the imaginative faculty. If we remember, moreover, that even in the minds of the most faithful believers these expectations are so remote, and therefore so uncertain, that they lose much of their efficiency from the thoughts of subsequent reformation, of future repentance, of hopes of pardon, which are so much encouraged by certain religious conceptions, it will be difficult for us to conceive how such tenets can do more to influence conduct than the sure consciousness of civil punishments, which, with good police arrangements, are near and certain in their operation, and are not to be averted by any possibility of repentance or subsequent reformation. Provided only that the citizen were familiarized with the retributive certainty of these punishments from his childhood, and taught to trace the consequences of moral and immoral actions, we cannot suppose such present influences to be less effectual than the other remote ideas.
But, on the other hand, it is not to be doubted that even comparatively unenlightened conceptions of religion often manifest themselves in far nobler and higher views of duty,
