Chapter IV: Section V

Extreme poverty of religious knowledge among the uneducated people:
their notions respecting God, Providence, Jesus Christ, the invisible
world.--Fatal effect of their want of mental discipline as causing an
inaptitude to receive religious information.--Exemplifications,--in a
supposed experiment of religious instruction in a friendly visit to a
numerous uneducated family; in the stupidity and thoughtlessness often
betrayed in attendance on public religious services; in the
impossibility of imparting religious truths, with any degree of
clearness, to ignorant persons, when alarmed into some serious concern
by sickness; in the insensibility and invincible delusion sometimes
retained in the near approach to death.--Rare instances of the
admirable efficacy of religion to animate and enlarge the faculties,
even in the old age of an ignorant man.--Excuses for the intellectual
inaptitude and perversion of uncultivated religious
minds.--Animadversions on religious teachers.