Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1826 edition. Excerpt: ...are apt to think thus of public worship, calculate, if they pan, what would be the consequence if it were laid aside. Perhaps it is not easy to estimate how much of the manners as well as the morals--how much of the cultivation as well as the religion of a people is derived from this very source. If a legislator or philosopher were to undertake the civilization of a horde of wild savages, scattered along the waste in the drear loneliness of individual existence, and averse to the faces of each other--if he had formed a plan to gather them together, and give them a principle of cohesion; he probably could not take a more effectual method than by persuading them to meet together in one place--at regular and stated times--and thereto join together in a common act, imposing from its solemnity and endearing from the social nature of its exercises. If an adventurer were stranded on some foreign shore, and should find the inhabitants engaged in such an act, he might draw the conclusion, that the blessings of order, internal peace, mutual confidence, and a considerable degree of information, existed there, as surely as the philosopher drew a similar inference from the discovery, of mathematical diagrams traced upon the sand. And thus, in fact, it was, that in the early beginnings of society, legislators called in the assistance of religious ideas, and with the charm and melody of solemn hymns, like those of Orpheus or of Linus, gathered round them the stupid, incurious barbarians, roused them to attention and softened into docility. Agreeably to this train of thinking, our r great dramatic moralist places the influences of social worship upon a par with the sacred touches of sympathetic sorrow, and the exhilarating pleasures of the hospitable...
