Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CONSIDERATIONS ON THE RELIGIOUS WORSHIP OF THE HEATHENS, AS BEARING UNANSWERABLE TESTIMONY TO THE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIANITY. LETTER TO THE REV. W. VINCENT, D.D. HEAD MASTER OF WESTMINSTER-SCHOOL. CONSIDERATIONS, Reverend Sir, I Have a great subject before me of which I believe there is no better judge in this kingdom than yourself: and I have good reason to suppose, from your sincere attachment to the Christian Religion, that you are as much interested as myself in the use I am about to make of it. From the common forms of school-education, our youth are in danger of returning back from the purity of Christians to the impure manners of Heathens; a very afflicting example of which once fell under my own observation. An amiable youth, of the first fashion, was found to have kept loose company very early in life; from which every bad consequence was to be apprehended. So far there is no rarity in the case: you must have heard many of them: and I should not mention it to you, but for the observation made upon it by his father, which struck me to the heart; and I determined never to forget it all the days of my life. He accounted for the evil in the following manner: that his son having been accustomed at school to the loose ideas, communicated by Horace and other Heathen poets, had carried their principles into his own practice; and was therefore only in a train with other young men of his age and education. Good God said I to myself, is this the case ? and are we asleep about it ? Do we sit still, and see Christians, under the light of the Gospel, sinking into worse than heathen corruption ? This led me to consider, whether it be not possible to turn this evil into some good, by showing young men of learning, that, as the false religion of...

This book explores the intellectual contexts for Mr Casaubon, a central character in George Eliot's classic and much-loved novel Middlemarch.