A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to My Lord *****.

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Page 26 - The magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand, and instead of caustics, incisions, and amputations, should be using the softest balms, and, with a kind sympathy, entering into the concern of the people, and taking, as it were, their passion upon him, should, when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavour, by cheerful ways, to divert and heal it. This was ancient policy : and hence, as a notable author of our nation expresses it, it is necessary a people should have a public leading...
Page 31 - I am sure the only way to save men's sense or preserve wit at all in the world is to give liberty to wit.
Page 33 - ... so much as in a play, a novel, or a ballad, we might perhaps see a new Arcadia...
Page 49 - In short, my lord, the melancholy way of treating religion is that which, according to my apprehension, renders it so tragical, and is the occasion of its acting in reality such dismal tragedies in the world.
Page 82 - Something there will be of extravagance and fury, when the ideas or images received are too big for the narrow human \ vessel to contain.
Page 27 - But to prescribe bounds to fancy and speculation, to regulate men's apprehensions and religious beliefs or fears, to suppress by violence the natural passion of enthusiasm, or to endeavour to ascertain it, or reduce it to one species, or bring it under any one modification, is in truth no better sense, nor deserves a better character, than what the comedian declares of the like project in the affair of love — Nihilo plus agas...
Page 45 - I am perfuaded of, that had the Truth of the Gofpel been any way furmountable, they vvou'd have bid much fairer for the filencing it, if they had chofen to bring our primitive Founders upon the Stage in a pleafanter way than that of Bear-Skins and Pitch-Barrels.
Page 16 - Justness of thought and style, refinement in manners, good breeding, and politeness of every kind can come only from the trial and experience of what is best. Let but the search go freely on, and the right measure of every thing will soon be found.
Page 71 - I saw him lately under an agitation (as they call it) uttering prophecy in a pompous Latin style, of which, out of the ecstacy, it seems, he is wholly incapable, it brought into my mind the Latin poet's descriptions of the Sibyl, whose agonies were so perfectly like these.
Page 59 - Is the doing good for glory's sake so divine a thing? Or is it not diviner to do good even where it may be thought inglorious, even to the ungrateful and to those who are wholly insensible of the good they receive?

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