2876. FANATICISM, Growth and decline.—
I hope and believe you are mistaken
in supposing the reign of fanaticism to be on
the advance. I think it certainly declining.
It was first excited artificially by the sovereigns
of Europe as an engine of opposition to
Bonaparte and to France. It rose to a great
height there, and became, indeed, a powerful
engine of loyalism, and of support to their
governments. But that loyalism is giving way
to very different dispositions, and its
prompter, fanaticism, is vanishing with it. In
the meantime, it had been across the
Atlantic, and chiefly from England, with their
other fashions, but it is here also on the wane.—
To Thomas Cooper. Washington ed. vii, 170.
(M.
1820)
