FANATICISM.

The progress of reason, and free cultivation of the human mind, had not, however, entirely banished those ridiculous sects and schisms of which the kingdom had been formerly so productive. Imposture and fanaticism still hung upon the skirts of religion. Weak minds were seduced by the delusion of a superstition styled Methodism, raised upon the affectation of superior sanctity, and maintained by pretensions to divine illumination. Many thousands in the lower ranks of life were infected with this species of enthusiasm, by the unwearied endeavours of a few obscure preachers, such as Whitfield and the two Wesleys, who propagated their doctrine to the most remote corners of the British dominions, and found means to lay the whole kingdom under contribution. Fanaticism also formed a league with false philosophy. One Hutchinson, a visionary, intoxicated with the fumes of rabbinical learning, pretended to deduce all demonstration from Hebrew roots, and to confine all human knowledge to the five books of Moses. His disciples became numerous after his death. With the methodists, they denied the merit of good-works, and bitterly inveighed against Newton as an ignorant pretender, who had presumed to set up his own ridiculous chimeras in opposition to the sacred philosophy of the Pentateuch. But the most extraordinary sect which distinguished this reign was that of the Moravians, or Hernhutters, imported from Germany by count Zinzendorf, who might have been termed the Melchisedec of his followers, inasmuch as he assumed among them the threefold character of prophet, priest, and king. They could not be so properly styled a sect, as the disciples of an original, who had invented a new system of religion. Their chief adoration was paid to the second person in the Trinity; the first they treated with the most shocking neglect. Some of their tenets were blasphemous, some indecent, and others ridiculously absurd. Their discipline was a strange mixture of devotion and impurity. Their exterior worship consisted of hymns, prayers, and sermons; the hymns extremely ludicrous, and often indecent, alluding to the side-hole or wound which Christ received from a spear in his side while he remained upon the cross. Their sermons frequently contained very gross incentives to the work of propagation. Their private exercises are said to have abounded with such rites and mysteries, as we cannot explain with any regard to decorum. They professed a community of goods, and were governed as one family, in temporals as well as spirituals, by a council or kind of presbytery, in which the count, as their ordinary, presided. In cases of doubt, or great consequence, these pretended to consult the Saviour, and to decide from immediate inspiration; so that they boasted of being under the immediate direction of a theocracy, though in fact they were slaves to the most dangerous kind of despotism; for as often as any individual of the community pretended to think for himself, or differ in opinion from the ordinary and his band of associates, the oracle decreed that he should be instantly sent upon the mission which they had fixed in Greenland, or to the colony they had established in Pennsylvania. As these religionists consisted chiefly of manufacturers who appeared very sober, orderly, and industrious; and their chief declared his intention of prosecuting works of public emolument; they obtained a settlement under a parliamentary sanction in England, where they soon made a considerable number of proselytes, before their principles were fully discovered and explained.