contempt, divested it of its solemnity: and who had possessed himself of a few acute observations or plausible maxims, not explicitly hostile to revealed religion, but which, when opportunely brought into view in connexion with some points of it, tended to throw a degree of doubt on their truth and authority. Especially if either or both of these men had any decided moral tendencies and pursuits of a kind which christianity condemned, the friend of intellectual and moral freedom was assiduous to insinuate, that, according to the principles of reason and nature at least, it would be difficult to prove the wisdom or the necessity of some of those dictates of religion, which must, however, be admitted, be respected, because divine. Let the mind have once acquired a feeling, as if the sacred system might in some points be invalidated, and the involuntary inference would be rapidly extended to other parts, and to the whole. Nor was it long probably before this new instructor plainly avowed his own entire emancipation from a popular prejudice, to which he was kindly sorry to find a sensible young man still in captivity. But he had no doubt that the deductions

motives, while they were despising vulgar men, have ruled their intellectual career. Pride, which idolizes self, which revolts at every thing that comes in the form of dictates, and exults to find that there is a possibility of controverting whether any dictates come from a greater than mortal source; repugnance as well to the severe and comprehensive morality of the laws reputed of divine appointment, as to the feeling of accountableness to an all-powerful Authority, that will not leave moral laws to be enforced solely by their own sanctions; contempt of inferior men; the attraction of a few brilliant examples; the fashion of a class; the ambition of showing what ability can do, and what boldness can dare-if such things as these, after all, have excited and directed the efforts of a philosophic spirit, the unbelieving philosopher must be content to acknowledge plenty of companions and rivals among little men, who are quite as capable of being actuated by such elevated principles as himself.

of enlightened reason would successfully appeal to every liberal mind. And accordingly, after perhaps a few months of frequent intercourse, with the addition of two or three books, and the ready aid of all the recollected vices of pretended christians, and pretended christian churches, the whole venerable magnificence of revelation was annihilated. Its illuminations respecting the Divinity, its miracles, its Messiah, its authority of moral legislation, its regions of immortality and retribution, the sublime virtues and devotion of its prophets, apostles, and martyrs, together with the reasonings of so many accomplished advocates, and the credibility of history itself, were vanished all away; while the convert, exulting in his disenchantment, felt a strange pleasure to behold nothing but a dreary train of impostures and credulity stretching over those past ages which lately appeared a scene of divine government; and the thickest Egyptian shades fallen on that total vast futurity toward which the spirit of inspiration had thrown some grand though partial gleams.

Nothing tempts the mind so powerfully on, as to have successfully begun to demolish what has been long regarded as most sacred. The soldiers of Cæsar probably had never felt themselves so brave, as after they had cut down the Massilian grove; nor the Philistines, as when the ark of the God of Israel was among their spoils: the mind is proud of its triumphs in proportion to the reputed greatness of what it has overcome. And many examples would seem to indicate, that the first proud triumphs over religious faith, involve some fatality of advancing, however formidable the mass of arguments which may obstruct the progress, to further victories. But perhaps the intellectual difficulty of the progress might be less than a zealous believer would be apt to imagine. As the

ideas which give the greatest distinctness to our conception of a Divine Being are imparted by revelation, and rest on its authority, the rejection of that revelation would in a great measure banish those ideas, and destroy that distinctness. We have but to advert to pure heathenism, to perceive what a faint conception of this Being could be formed by the strongest intellect in the absence of revelation; and after the rejection of it, the mind would naturally be carried very far back toward that darkness; so that some of the attributes of the Deity would immediately become, as they were with the heathens, subjects of doubtful conjecture and hopeless speculation. But from this state of thought it is perhaps no vast transition to that, in which his being also shall begin to appear a subject of doubt; since the reality of a being is with difficulty apprehended, in proportion as its attributes are undefinable. And when the mind is brought into doubt, we know it easily advances to disbelief, if to the smallest plausibility of arguments be added any powerful moral cause for wishing such a conclusion. In the present case, there might be a very powerful cause, besides that pride of victory which I have just noticed. progress in guilt, which generally follows a rejection of revelation, makes it still more and more desirable that no object should remain to be feared. It was not strange, therefore, if this man read with avidity, or even strange if he read with something which his wishes completed into conviction, a few of the writers, who have attempted the last achievement of presumptuous man. After inspecting these pages awhile, he raised his eyes, and the Great Spirit was gone. Mighty transformation of all things! The luminaries of heaven no longer shone with his splendour; the adorned earth no longer looked fair with his beauty;

The

the darkness of night had ceased to be rendered solemn by his majesty; life and thought were not an effect of nis all-pervading energy; it was not his providence that supported an infinite charge of dependent beings; his empire of justice no longer spread over the universe; nor had even that universe sprung from his all-creating power. Yet when you saw the intellectual course brought to this signal conclusion, though aware of the force of each preceding and predisposing circumstance, you might nevertheless be somewhat struck with the suddenness of the final decision, and might be curious to know what kind of argument and eloquence could so quickly finish the work. You would examine those pages with the expectation probably of something more powerful than subtlety attenuated into inanity, and, in that invisible and impalpable state, mistaken by the writer, and willingly admitted by the perverted reader, for profundity of reasoning; than attempts to destroy the certainty, or preclude the application, of some of those great familiar principles which must be taken as the basis of human reasoning, or it can have no basis. than suppositions which attribute the order of the universe to such causes as it would be felt ridiculous

to pronounce adequate to produce the most trifling piece of mechanism; than mystical jargon which, under the name of nature, alternately exalts almost into the properties of a god, and reduces far below those of a man, some imaginary and undefinable agent or agency, which performs the most amazing works without power, and displays the most amazing wisdom without intelligence; than a zealous preference of that part of every great dilemma which merely confounds and sinks the mind to that which elevates while it overwhelms it; than a constant endeavour to degrade as far as possible every thing that is sublime in our

speculations and feelings; or than monstrous parallels between religion and mythology. You would be still more unprepared to expect on so solemn a subject the occasional wit, or affectation of wit, which would seem rather prematurely expressive of exultation that the grand Foe is retiring.

A feeling of complete certainty would hardly be thus rapidly attained; but a slight degree of remaining doubt, and of consequent apprehension, would not prevent this disciple of darkness from accepting the invitation to pledge himself to the cause in some associated band, where profaneness and vice would consolidate impious opinions without the aid of augmented conviction; and where the fraternity, having been elated by the spirit of social daring to say, What is the Almighty that we should serve him? the individuals might acquire each a firmer boldness to exclaim, Who is the Lord that I should obey his voice? Thus easy

it is, my friend, for a man to meet that train of influences which may seduce him to live an infidel, though it may betray him to die a terrified believer; of which the infatuation, while it promises him the impunity of non-existence, and degrades him to desire it, impels him to fill the measure of his iniquity, till the divine wrath come upon him to the uttermost.

LETTER VI.

IN recounting so many influences that operate on man, it is grievous to observe that the incomparably noblest of all, religion, is counteracted with a fatal success by a perpetual conspiracy of almost all the rest, aided by the intrinsic predisposition of this our per