Amazon.com description: Product Description: From the PREFACE.
The author of this book has no other occupation for the remainder of his life one tenth part as interesting to him, as the undoing, as far as his feeble efforts can, prevalent superstitions of the church in respect to the justification of believers.
He finds piety in the Roman Catholic Church, but desperately marred by superstitious additions. So of the Baptist Church; so of the Methodist; so of the ritualistic Episcopalians: a great many good works, and a great many pious experiences, increasing in excellence and amount as the church becomes not Papist but Protestant, and not Protestant alone but down nearer the rock-bed of absolute Christianity.
But this he notices: Churches flourish numerically by force of their superstitions. I offer shares on Wall Street. I get the most bids if there be an element of gambling. If what I have to propose involves hard work, men bid slowly. If it have a speculative cast, men crowd upon me and buy. And so of the different denominations. There are pious people in every one of them. There are the most pious people in those that have most of Christ. But how obvious is it that the children of this world are wiser than the children of light; and, therefore, that the way-making property of a church, or that by which it gathers numbers, is not the pious points in it, but the superstitions; or, in other words, the pious points give it character and favor with heaven, but its superstitions cut its way, and load on it its numerical strength, though they bring it at last to its ghostly dissolution.
Let me illustrate this. The Baptists are a pious sect, but who does not see that they make their way by immersion? The Jansenists were an excellent people: and who that has seen much of ritualism is narrow enough to deny, that there are singular instances of faith under the most direful idolatry? And, yet, it is the idolatry that fights the battle. It is the labor-saving principle. Or rather, it is that which does without purity of life. And, therefore, though good men get into such systems, they are flocked into by the bad: and the ritualism is the speculative cast that makes the sect attractive as in the Wall Street overtures.
Now take our Presbyterian communion. I have thought it the very soberest. It seems down at the hard-pan of actual revelation. What could be more plain? And, yet, watch its operations. Regard its scenes of present revival. What does it harp upon most? Precisely those things that are capable of superstition.