the spell which confines a human soul to inhabit, like a spider in one of the corners, a dusty room, consecrated with religious solemnity to old coins, rusty knives, illuminated mass books, swords and spurs of forgotten kings, and slippers of their queens; with perhaps a Roman helmet, the acquisition of which was the first cause of the collection and of the passion, elevated imperially over the relics of kings and queens and the whole museum, as the eagle was once in "proud eminence" over subjugated kingdoms. And you might be inclined to say, I wish that helmet had been a pan for charcoal, or had been put on the head of one of the quiet equestrian warriors in the Tower, or had aided the rattlings of Sir Godfrey, haunting the baron's castle where he was murdered, or had been worn by Don Quixote, instead of the barber's basin, or had been the cauldron of Macbeth's witches, or had been in any other shape, place, or use, rather than dug up an antiquity, in a luckless hour, in a bank near your garden.

I compassionate you, would, in a very benevolent hour, be your language to the wealthy unfeeling tyrant of a family and a neighbourhood, who seeks, in the overawed timidity and unretaliated injuries of the unfortunate beings within his power, the gratification that should have been sought in their happiness. Unless you had brought into the world some extraordinary refractoriness to the influence of evil, the process that you have undergone could not fail of being efficacious. If your parents idolized their own importance in their son so much, that they never themselves opposed your inclinations, nor permitted it to be done by any subject to their authority; if the humble companion, sometimes summoned to the honour of amusing you, bore your caprices and insolence with the meekness without which he had lost his privilege; if you could despoil the garden

of some harmless dependent neighbour of the carefully reared flowers, and torment his little dog or cat, without his daring to punish you or to appeal to your infatuated parents; if aged men addressed you in a submissive tone, and with the appellation of "Sir," and their aged wives uttered their wonder at your condescension, and pushed their grandchildren away from around the fire for your sake, if you happened, though with the strut of supercilious pertness, and your hat on your head, to enter one of their cottages, perhaps to express your contempt of the homely dwelling, furniture, and fare; if, in maturer life, you associated with vile persons, who would forego the contest of equality, to be your allies in trampling on inferiors; and if, both then and since, you have been suffered to deem your wealth the compendium or equivalent of every ability, and every good quality-it would indeed be immensely strange if you had not become, in due time, the miscreant, who may thank the power of the laws in civilized society, that he is not assaulted with clubs and stones; to whom one could cordially wish the opportunity and the consequer ces of attempting his tyranny among some such people as those submissive sons of nature in the forests of North America; and whose dependents and domestic relations may be almost forgiven when they shall one day rejoice at his funeral.

LETTER V.

I WILL imagine only one case more, on which you would emphatically express your compassion, though for one of the most daring beings in the creation, a contemner of God, who explodes his laws by denying his existence.

If you were so unacquainted with mankind, that such a being might be announced to you as a rare or singular phenomenon, your conjectures, till you saw and heard the man, at the nature and the extent of the discipline through which he must have advanced, would be led toward something extraordinary. And you might think that the term of that discipline must have been very long; since a quick train of impressions, a short series of mental gradations, within the little space of a few months and years, would not seem enough to have matured such a portentous heroism. Surely the creature that thus lifts his voice, and defies all invisible power within the possibilities of infinity, challenging whatever unknown being may hear him, and may appropriate that title of Almighty which is pronounced in scorn, to evince his existence, if he will, by his vengeance, was not as yesterday a little child that would tremble and cry at the approach of a diminutive reptile.

But indeed it is heroism no longer, if he know that there is no God. The wonder then turns on the great process, by which a man could grow to the immense intelligence which can know that there is no God. What ages and what lights are requisite for THIS attainment! This intelligence involves the very attributes of Divinity, while a God is denied. For unless this man is omnipresent, unless he is at this moment in every place in the universe, he cannot know but there may be in some place manifestations of a Deity, by which even he would be overpowered. If he does not know absolutely every agent in the universe, the one that he does not know may be God. If he is not himself the chief agent in the universe, and does not know what is so, that which is so may be God. If he is not in absolute possession of all the propositions

that constitute universal truth, the one which he wants may be, that there is a God. If he cannot with certainty assign the cause of all that he perceives to exist, that cause may be a God. If he does not know every thing that has been done in the immeasurable ages that are past, some things may have been done by a God. Thus, unless he knows all things, that is, precludes all other divine existence by being Deity himself, he cannot know that the Being whose existence he rejects, does not exist. But he must know that he does not exist, else he deserves equal contempt and compassion for the temerity with which he firmly avows his rejection and acts accordingly. And yet a man of ordinary age and intelligence may present himself to you with the avowal of being thus distinguished from the crowd; and if he would describe the manner in which he has attained this eminence, you would feel a melancholy interest in contemplating that process of which the result is so prodigious.

If you did not know that there are more than a few such examples, you would say, in viewing this result, I should hope this is the consequence of some malignant intervention so occasional that ages may pass away before it return among men; some peculiar conjunction of disastrous influences must have lighted on your selected soul; you have been struck by that energy of evil which acted upon the spirits of Pharao and Epiphanes. But give your own description of what you have met with, in a world which has been deemed to present in every part the indications of a Deity. Tell of the mysterious voices which have spoken to you from the deeps of the creation, falsifying the expressions marked on its face. Tell of the new ideas, which, like meteors passing over the solita y wanderer, gave you the first glimpses of truth while

benighted in the common belief of the Divine existence. Describe the whole train of causes which have operated to create and consolidate that state of mind, which you carry forward to the great experiment of futurity under a different kind of hazard from all other classes of men.

It would be found, however, that those circumstances, by which even a man who had been presented from his infancy with the ideas of religion, could be elated into a contempt of its great object, were far from being extraordinary. They might have been incident to any man, whose mind had been cultivated and exercised enough to feel interested about holding any system of opinions at all; whose pride had been. gratified in the consciousness of having the liberty of selecting and changing opinions; and whose habitual assent to the principles of religion, had neither the firmness resulting from decisive arguments, nor the warmth of pious affection.* Such a person had only, in the first place, to come into intimate acquaintance with a man, who had the art of alluding to a sacred subject in a manner which, without appearing like intentional

* It will be obvious that I am describing the progress of one of the humbler order of aliens from all religion, and not that by which the great philosophic leaders have ascended the dreary eminence where they look with so much complacency up to a vacant heaven, and down to the gulf of annihilation. Their progress undoubtedly is much more systematic and deliberate, and accompanied often by a laborious speculation, which, though in ever so perverted a train, the mind is easily persuaded to identify, because it is laborious, with the search after truth and the love of it. While, however, it is in a persevering train of thought, and not by the hasty movements of a more vulgar mind, that they pursue their deviation from some of the principles of religion into a final abandonment of it all, they are very greatly mistaken if they assure themselves that the moral causes which contribute to guide and animate their progress are all of a sublime order; and if they could be fully revealed to their own view, they might perhaps be severely mortified to find what vulgar