excellency of your own unassisted reason. If you would know the real strength of natural reason, and how far it can proceed in the investigation or enforcement of moral duties, you must consult the manners and the writings of those who have never heard of either the Jewish or the Christian dispensation, or of those other manifestations of himself, which God vouchsafed to Adam and to the patriarchs, before and after the flood. It would be difficult perhaps any where, to find a people entirely destitute of traditionary notices concerning a deity, and of traditionary fears or expectations of another life; and the morals of mankind may have, perhaps, been no where quite so abandoned, as they would have been, had they been left wholly to themselves in these points: however, it is a truth, which cannot be denied, how much soever it may be lamented, that though the generality of mankind have always had some faint conception of God, and his providence; yet they have been always greatly inefficacious in the production of good morality, and highly derogatory to his nature, amongst all the people of the earth, except the Jews and Christians; and some may perhaps be desirous of excepting the Mahometans, who derive all that is good in their Koran from Christianity.

The laws concerning justice, and the reparation of damages, concerning the security of property, and the performance of contracts; concerning, in short, what ever affects the well-being of civil society, have been every where understood with sufficient precision; and if you choose to style Justinian's code a code of natural law, though you will err against propriety of speech, yet you are so far in the right, that natural reason discovered, and the depravity of human nature compelled human kind, to establish by proper sanctions the laws therein contained; and you will have moreover Carneades, no mean philosopher, on your side; who knew of no law of nature, different from that which men had instituted for their common utility; and which was various according to the manners of men in different climates, and changeable with a change of times in the same. And in truth, in all countries where Paganism has been the established religion, though a philosopher may now and then have stepped beyond the paltry prescript of civil jurisprudence, in his pur

suit of virtue; yet the bulk of mankind have ever been contented with that scanty pittance of morality, which enabled them to escape the lash of civil punishment; I call it a scanty pittance; because a man may be intemperate, iniquitous, impious, a thousand ways a profligate and a villain, and yet elude the cognizance, and avoid the punishment of civil laws.

I am sensible you will be ready to say, what is all this to the purpose? though the bulk of mankind may never be able to investigate the laws of natural religion, nor disposed to reverence their sanctions when investigated by others, nor solicitous about any other standard of moral rectitude, than civil legislation; yet the inconveniences which may attend the extirpation of Christianity, can be no proof of its truth.-I have not produced them as a proof of its truth; but they are a strong and conclusive proof, if not of its truth, at least of its utility; and the consideration of its utility may be a motive to yourselves for examining, whether it may not chance to be true; and it ought to be a reason with every good citizen, and with every man of sound judgment, to keep his opinions to himself, if, from any particular circumstances in his studies, or in his education, he should have the misfortune to think that it is not true. If you can discover to the rising generation, a better religion than the Christian, one that will more effectually animate their hopes, and subdue their passions, make them better men, or better members of society, we importune you to publish it for their advantage; but till you can do that, we beg of you, not to give the reins to their passions, by instilling into their unsuspicious minds your pernicious prejudices: even now, men scruple not, by their lawless lust, to ruin the repose of private families, and to fix a stain of infamy on the noblest : even now, they hesitate not, in lifting up a murderous arm against the life of their friend, or against their own, as often as the fever of intemperance stimulates their resentment, or the satiety of an useless life excites their despondency: even now, whilst we are persuaded of a resurrection from the dead, and of a judgment to come, we find it difficult enough to resist the solicitations of sense, and to escape unspotted from the licentious manners of the world: But what will become of our virtue, what of the conse

L

quent peace and happiness of society, if you persuade us, that there are no such things in two words,- you may ruin yourselves by your attempt, and you will certainly ruin your country by your suc

cess.

But the consideration of the inutility of your design, is not the only one, which should induce you to abandon it: the argument a tuto ought to be warily managed, or it may tend to the silencing our opposition to any system of superstition, which has had the good fortune to be sanctioned by public authority; it is, indeed, liable to no objection in the present case; we do not, however, wholly rely upon its cogency. It is not contended, that Christianity is to be received, merely because it is useful: but because it is true. This you deny, and think your objections well grounded; we conceive them originating in your vanity, your immorality, or your misapprehension. There are many worthless doctrines, many superstitious observances, which the fraud or the folly of mankind have every where annexed to Christianity, (especially in the church of Rome) as essential parts of it; if you take these sorry appendages to Christianity, for Christianity itself, as preached by Christ, and by the apostles; if you confound the Roman with the Christian religion, you quite misapprehend its nature; and are in a state similar to that of men, (mentioned by Plutarch, in his treatise of superstition) who, flying from superstition, leapt over religion, and sunk into downright atheism.-Christianity is not a religion very palatable to a voluptuous age; it will not conform its precepts to the standard of fashion; it will not lessen the deformity of vice by lenient appellations; but calls keeping, whoredom; intrigue, adultery; and duelling, murder; it will not pander the lust, it will not license the intemperance of mankind; it is a troublesome monitor to a man of pleasure; and your way of life may have made you quarrel with your religion. As to your vanity, as a cause of your infidelity, suffer me to produce the sentiments of M. Bayle upon that head; if the description does not suit your character, you will not be of fended at it: and if you are offended with its freedom, it will do you good: This inelines me to believe, that libertines, Like Des-Barreaux, are not greatly per

suaded of the truth of what they say. They have made no deep examination; they have learned some few objections, which they are perpetually making a noise with; they speak from a principle of ostentation, and give themselves the lie in the time of danger.-Vanity has a greater share in their disputes, than conscience; they imagine, that the singularity and boldness of the opinions which they maintain, will give them the reputation of men of parts:-by degrees, they get a habit of holding impious discourses; and if their vanity be accompanied by a voluptuous life, their progress in that road is the swifter.'

The main stress of your objections, rests not upon the insufficiency of the external evidence to the truth of Christianity; for few of you, though you may become the future ornaments of the senate, or of the bar, have ever employed an hour in its examination; but it rests upon the difficulty of the doctrines contained in the New Testament: they exceed, you say, your comprehension; and you felicitate yourselves, that you are not yet arrived at the true standard of orthodox faith,-credo quia impossibile. You think, it would be taking a superfluous trouble, to inquire into the nature of the external proofs, by which Christianity is established: since, in your opinion, the. book itself carries with it its own refutation. A gentleman as acute, probably, as any of you, and who once believed, perhaps, as little as any of you, has drawn a quite different conclusion from the perusal of the New Testament; his book, (however exceptionable it may be thought in some particular parts) exhi bits, not only a distinguished triumph of reason over prejudice, of Christianity over Deism; but it exhibits, what is infinitely more rare, the character of a man, who has had courage and candour enough to acknowledge it.

But what if there should be some incomprehensible doctrines in the Christian religion; some circumstances, which in their causes, or their consequences, surpass the reach of human reason; are they to be rejected upon that account? You are, or would be thought, men of reading, and knowledge, and enlarged understanding; weigh the matter fairly; and consider whether revealed religion be not, in this respect, just upon the same footing with every other object of your

contemplation. Even in mathematics, the science of demonstration itself, though you get over its first principles, and learn to digest the idea of a point without parts, a line without breadth, and a surface without thickness; yet you will find yourselves at a loss to comprehend the perpetual approximation of lines, which can never meet; the doctrine of incommensurables, and of an infinity of infinities, each infinitely greater, or infinitely less, not only than any finite quantity, but than each other. In physics, you cannot comprehend the primary cause of any thing; not of the light, by which you see; nor of the elasticity of the air, by which you hear; nor of the fire, by which you are warmed. In physiology, you cannot tell, what first gave motion to the heart; nor what continues it; nor why its motion is less voluntary than that of the lungs nor why you are able to move your arm, to the right or left, by a simple volition you cannot explain the cause of animal heat; nor comprehend the principle, by which your body was at first formed, nor by which it is sus tained, nor by which it will be reduced to earth. In natural religion, you cannot comprehend the eternity or omnipresence of the Deity; nor easily understand, how his prescience can be consistent with your freedom, or his immutability with his government of moral agents; nor why he did not make all his creatures equally perfect: nor why he did not create them sooner: In short, you cannot look into any branch of knowledge, but you will meet with subjects above your comprehension. The fall and the redemption of human kind, are not more incomprehensible, than the creation and the conservation of the universe; the infinite author of the works of Providence, and of nature, is equally inscrutable, equally past our finding out in them both. And it is somewhat remarkable, that the deepest inquirers into nature, have ever thought with most reverence, and spoken with most confidence, concerning those things, which, in revealed religion, may seem hard to be understood; they have ever avoided that self-sufficiency of knowledge, which springs from ignorance, produces indifference, and ends in infidelity. Admirable to this purpose, is the reflection of the greatest mathematician of the present age, when he is combating an opinion of

Newton's, by an hypothesis of his own, still less defensible than that which he opposes: :-Tous les jours que je vois de ces esprits-forts, qui critiquent les vérités de notre religion, et s'en mocquent meine avec la plus impertinente suffisance, je pense, chétifs mortels! combien et combien des choses sur lesquels vous raisonnez si légèrement, sont-elles plus sublimes, et plus elevés, que celles sur lesquelles le grand Newton s'égare si grossièrement?

Plato mentions a set of men, who were very ignorant, and thought themselves supremely wise; and who rejected the argument for the being of a God, derived from the harmony and order of the universe, as old and trite; there have been men, it seems, in all ages, who, in affecting singularity, have overlooked truth: an argument, however, is not the worse for being old; and surely it would have been a more just mode of reasoning, if you had examined the external evidence for the truth of Christianity, weighed the old arguments from miracles, and from prophecies, before you had rejected the whole account, from the difficulties you met with in it. You would laugh at an Indian, who in peeping into a history of England, and meeting with the mention of the Thames being frozen, or of a shower of hail, or of snow, should throw the book aside, as unworthy of his further notice, from his want of ability to comprehend these phæno

mena.

In considering the argument from miracles, you will soon be convinced, that it is possible for God to work miracles; and you will be convinced, that it is as possible for human testimony to establish the truth of miraculous, as of physical or historical events; but before you can be convinced that the miracles in question are supported by such testimony as deserves to be credited, you must inquire at what period, and by what persons, the books of the Old and New Testament were composed; if you reject the account, without making this examination, you reject it from prejudice, not from reason.

There is, however, a short method of examining this argument, which may perhaps make as great an impression on your minds, as any other. Three men of distinguished abilities, rose up at different times, and attacked Christianity with every objection which their malice

could suggest, or their learning could devise; but neither Celsus in the second century, nor Porphyry in the third, nor the emperor Julian himself in the fourth century, ever questioned the reality of the miracles related in the gospels. Do but you grant us what these men (who were more likely to know the truth of the matter, than you can be) granted to their adversaries, and we will very readily let you make the most of the magic, to which, as the last wretched shift, they were forced to attribute them. We can find you men, in our days, who from the mixture of two colourless liquors, will produce you a third as red as blood, or of any other colour you desire; et dicto cilius, by a drop resembling water, will restore the transparency; they will make two fluids coalesce into a solid body; and from the mixture of liquors colder than ice, will instantly raise you a horrid explosion and a tremendous flame: these, and twenty other tricks they will perform, without having been sent with our Saviour to Egypt to learn magic; nay, with a bottle or two of oil, they will compose the undulations of a lake; and by a little art, they will restore the functions of life to a man, who has been an hour or two under water, or a day or two buried in the snow: but in vain will these men, or the greatest magician that Egypt ever saw, say to a boisterous sea, "Peace, be still;" in vain will they say to a carcass rotting in the grave, "Come forth;" the winds and the sea will not obey them, and the putrid carcass will not hear them. You need not suffer yourselves to be deprived of the weight of this argument, from its having been observed, that the Fathers have acknowledged the supernatural part of Paganism; since the Fathers were in no condition to defeat a cheat, which was supported both by the disposition of the people, and the power of the civil magistrate; and they were, from that inability, forced to attribute to infernal agency what was too cunningly contrived to be detected, and contrived for too impious a purpose, to be credited as the work of God.

With respect to prophecy, you may, perhaps, have accustomed yourselves to consider it as originating in Asiatic enthusiasm, in Chaldean mystery, or in the subtle stratagem of interested priests: and have given yourselves no more trouble

concerning the predictions of sacred, than concerning the oracles of Pagan history. Or, if you have ever cast a glance upon this subject, the dissentions of learned men concerning the proper interpretation of the revelation, and other difficult prophecies, may have made you rashly conclude, that all prophecies were equally unintelligible; and more indebted, for their accomplishment, to a fortunate concurrence of events, and the pliant ingenuity of the expositor, than to the inspired foresight of the prophet. In all that the prophets of the Old Testament have delivered, concerning the destruction of particular cities, and the desolation of particular kingdoms, you may see nothing but shrewd conjectures, which any one acquainted with the history of the rise and fall of empires, might certainly have made: and as you would not hold him for a prophet, who should now affirm, that London or Paris would afford to future ages a spectacle just as melancholy, as that which we now contemplate, with a sigh, in the ruins of Agrigentum or Palmyra; so you cannot persuade yourselves to believe, that the denunciations of the prophets against the haughty cities of Tyre or Babylon, for instance, proceeded from the inspiration of the Deity. There is no doubt, that by some such general kind of reasoning, many are influenced to pay no attention to an argument, which, if properly considered, carries with it the strongest conviction.

Spinoza said, That he would have broken his atheistic system to pieces, and embraced without repugnance the ordinary faith of Christians, if he could have persuaded himself of the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead; and I question not, that there are many disbelievers, who would relinquish their deistic tenets, and receive the gospel, if they could persuade themselves, that God had ever so far interfered in the moral government of the world, as to illumine the mind of any one man with the knowledge of future events. A miracle strikes the senses of the persons who see it; a prophecy addresses itself to the understandings of those who behold its completion; and it requires, in many cases, some learning, in all some attention, to judge of the correspondence of events with the predictions concerning them. No one can be convinced, that what Jeremiah and the other