lightened and reason ennobled them; whilst all that civilization has accomplished is but to enslave mankind. What is here meant by a state of nature?

Man can only exist in society, and all the regulations of society are conventional. Indeed, there is nothing natural to man, save life and the faculties of his being; and he owes the exercise of those faculties to such casual and artificial relations as call them into action. Had the disciples of the system of nature, light and power to advance one step farther, they would see that the revelation of God is the perfection of reason, and that nature is only the action of the mechanical and chemical laws by which the universe is sustained and governed; but it is hid from their eyes! They seem to argue that that society which is the farthest removed from political cultivation, approaches the nearest to moral perfection. * Which is, in fact, saying, that the most barbarous people are the most enlightened that men see the clearest in the dark! An entertaining and useful volume might be written, showing the various objects and forms of worship which the different nations of the earth have invented. A cursory glance down the stream of time is sufficient to show their absurdity. The earliest people of whom

* Vide Helvetius on the Mind, pp. 17, 18.

we read, out of the pale of revelation, are the Egyptians. Their institutions were their own; and, unless derived from Noah, their religion was primitive, yet it showed nothing of the perfectibility of nature. They had their priests, their temple, and their god. Nature taught them to worship a bull! It is unnecessary to say more of the nations of the East, than that Bramha drove his rival Buddah from India, who carried with him his rites into China. The Scythians, the Huns, the Goths, and every wandering tribe, had their own peculiar worship, whose origin was, in all probability, (for nature abandons us to conjecture,) some petty tyrant, who owed his apotheosis more to his animal strength than to his wisdom. The Persians, with more taste and consistency, adored the sun. The African has been found worshipping the embodied spirit of evil; and the American Indian deifying a bear! These general notices are sufficient to answer the claims of nature; yet still we grant too much to the deist, if we even allow that either the notion of worship, or of a god, is the natural conception of the mind. All the nations of the earth were in the loins of Noah; they could not, therefore, escape a traditionary knowledge of a true God, who revealed himself to that patriarch. In any case, therefore, where this tradition is lost,

nature has either frittered away the original idea, or supplied its place with some fantastic absurdity.

If we also accompany our voyagers to each newly discovered people, we shall find, that the only lessons which nature taught them, were the indulgence of passion, and the gratifications of sense. Fraud, theft, debauchery, drunkenness, incontinence, malice, and revenge, war to the knife, are the characteristics of "nature's unsophisticated children." And as if to give a

more decided answer to those theorists, who assert the doctrine of the light of nature, the only aboriginals who have been discovered without any trace of conventionary regulations, either civil or religious, are also the least distinguished by the exercise of those faculties which place man above the inferior animals.*

With few exceptions, it appears that an idea of a supreme being was universal; and we are therefore told, that it was natural. The general formation of an idea is not a proof of its innate origin. The unassisted idea has never led to the truth; and the diversity of object, of form, of quality, of office, and of power, with which different people strove to embody their respective idea, is a convincing proof, that although

* Bishop Horne uses an argument to show that, as there is but one God, those who have not the true God, have no God.

there was a capability of receiving the knowledge of a God, yet that there was no natural or innate adjunct in the mind, of the true God. The worshippers of the God of nature thus mistake the capability of receiving the revelation of the Deity for a manifestation of the Deity himself. Aristotle exclaimed, " Being of beings!" He also felt the want of a God, a feeling which operates no less with the admirers of nature. Nature is their God! A confession that they want one; and not being able to find, or willing to receive the God of revelation, they supply his place with his own physical laws, whilst the power which decrees and sustains them is foolishly overlooked. Even in the confession which is made of nature being their God, and of their worshipping the God of nature; terms which their writings and conversation, use as convertible, an indistinctness of thought is shown, which sufficiently proves that they have no clear idea of a God; for the God of nature must be as distinct from nature as cause is from effect.

The consent, therefore, of all mankind to the notion of some God, proves either too much, or too little for the Deist: for it either is a corruption of the revelation of the true God, of himself, made to the patriarchs, or an ineffectual attempt of the powers of the mind, to discover a God, as in no one instance has it led to the truth. The reason why the traditionary knowledge

would so firmly seize upon the mind is, that in the constitution of the species, man being originally formed for communion with his Maker, is imperfect unless he be engaged in such an exalted intercourse. There is a void in the mind, a feeling in the heart, a desire in the soul, which nothing short of such an exalted fellowship can supply:

"Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?"

And hence the readiness, even of savage nature, to believe in incantations, and to deify the wonders of the universe; and hence, the use, the aptness, and the necessity of revelation. The spirit of man wanders abroad like the dove from the ark, but finds no rest, until God himself has abated the waters of ignorance which cover the earth.

If the light of nature could have shown the existence of a deity, it would have been exultingly stated and demonstrated in the works of some of the votaries of that system. That they have insisted upon such a discovery without a demonstration, is a sufficient proof for my present purpose, that it has never been demonstrated.

In my next letter, I purport to consider if the powers of abstract reasoning have been more successful on this interesting and important subject. And I am,

Dear Sir, &c.