be well conducted without some religion; you must of necessity introduce a priesthood, with probably as much hypocrisy-a religion with assuredly more superstition, than that which you now reprobate with such indecent and ill-grounded contempt. But I will tell you from what you will have freed the world: you will have freed it from its abhorrence of vice, and from every powerful incentive to virtue; you will, with the religion, have brought back the depraved morality of Paganism; you will have robbed mankind of their firm assurance of another life; and thereby you will have despoiled them of their patience, of their humility, of their charity, of their chastity, of all those mild and silent virtues, which (however despicable they may appear in your eyes) are the only ones which meliorate and sublime our nature; which Paganism never knew, which spring from Christianity alone, which do or might constitute our comfort in this life, and without the possession of which, another life, if after all there should happen to be one, must (unless a miracle be exerted in the alteration of our disposition) be more vicious and more miserable than this is. a stituting in the room of the gospel, you do not understand those rules of conduct, which an individual abstracted from the community, and deprived of the institution of mankind, could excogitate for himself; but such a system of precepts as the most enlightened men of the most enlightened ages have recommended to our observance. Where do you find this system? We cannot meet with it in the works of Stobæus, or the Scythian Anacharsis; nor in those of Plato, or of Cicero; nor in those of the emperor Antoninus, or the slave Epictetus; for we are persuaded, that the most animated considerations of the g and the honestum, of the beauty of virtue and the fitness of things, are not able to furnish even a Brutus himself with permanent principles of action; much less are they able to purify the polluted recesses of a vitiated heart, to curb the irregularity of appetite, or restrain the impetuosity of passion in common men. If you order us to examine the works of Grotius, or Puffendorf, or Burlamaqui, or Hutcheson, for what you understand by the law of nature, we apprehend that you are in a great error in taking your notions of natural law, as discoverable by natural reason, from the elegant systems of it which have been drawn up by Christian philosophers; since they have all laid their foundations, either tacitly or expressly, upon a principle derived from revelation thorough knowledge of the being and attributes of God: and even those amongst ourselves, who, rejecting Christianity, still continue Theists, are indebted to revelation (whether you are either aware of, or disposed to acknowledge the debt or not) for those sublime speculations concerning the Deity which you have fondly attributed to the excellency of your own unassisted reason. If you would know the real genius of natural law, 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 These, however, you will think, are extra- where quite so abandoned as they would have ordinary instances; and that we ought not been, had they been left wholly to themselves from these to take our measure of the excel- in these points. However, it is a truth which lency of the law of nature, but rather from cannot be denied, how much soever it may the civilized states of China or Japan; or be lamented, that though the generality of from the nations which flourished in learning mankind have always had some faint concepand in arts before Christianity was heard of tions of God and his providence, yet they in the world. You mean to say, that by the have been always greatly inefficacious in the aw of nature, which you are desirous of sub-production of good morality, and highly Perhaps you will contend, that the universal light of reason, that the truth and fitness of things, are of themselves sufficient to exalt the nature, and regulate the manners of mankind. Shall we never have done with this groundless commendation of natural law? Look into the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and you will see the extent of its influence over the Gentiles of those days; or if you dislike Paul's authority, and the manners of antiquity, look into the more admired accounts of modern voyagers; and examine its influence over the Pagans of our own times-over the sensual inhabitants of Otaheite-over the cannibals of New Zealand, or the remorseless savages of America. But these men are barbarians: Your law of nature, notwithstanding, extends even to them. But they have misused their reason: They have then the more need of, and would be the more thankful for that revelation, which you, with an ignorant and fastidious self-sufficiency, deem useless. But they might of themselves, if they thought fit, become wise and virtuous: I answer with Cicero, "Ut nihil Interest, utrum nemo valeat, an nemo valere possit ; sic non intelligo quid intersit, utrum nemo sit sapiens, an nemo esse possit." 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. 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 upon 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 consequent 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 The laws concerning justice, and the reparation of damages-concerning the security of property, and the performance of contractsconcerning, in short, whatever affects the well-being of civil society, have been everywhere 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 But the consideration of the inutility of been the established religion, though a philo- your design is not the only one which should sopher may now and then have stepped induce you to abandon it; the argument beyond the paltry prescript of civil jurispru- a tuto ought to be warily managed, or it may dence in his pursuit of virtue; yet the bulk tend to the silencing our opposition to any of mankind have ever been contented with system of superstition which has had the that scanty pittance of morality which en- good fortune to be sanctified by public authoabled them to escape the lash of civil punish-rity: it is, indeed, liable to no objection in ment. 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, cess. 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 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; * "Le Papisme" says Helvetius in a posthumous work, "n'est aux yeux d'un homme sensé qu' une pure idolatrie-nous sommes étonnés de l'absurdité de la religion Paienne. Celle de la religion Papiste étonnera bien d'advantage un jour la postérité." We trust that day is not at a great distance, and Deism will then be buried in the ruins of the Church of Rome; for the taking the superstition, the avarice, the ambition, the intolerance of Antichristianism for Christianity, has been the great error upon which infidelity has built its system, both at home and abroad. As to 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 dueling, murder: it will not pander to 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. 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 offended at it; and if you are offended with its freedom, it will do you good. "This inclines me to believe, that libertines, like Des-Barreaux, are not greatly persuaded 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 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) exhibits, 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; Bayle, Hist. Dict. Art. Des-Barreaux. + See A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, by Boame Jenyns. some circumstances which, in their causes of 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 understandings: 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 yourself at a loss to comprehend the per petual approximation of lines which can never meet; the doctrine of incommensurables, and of an infinity of infinities, each infinitely greater, or infinitly less, not only than any infi nite 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 sustained, 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 diffidence, 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 même avec la plus impertinente suffisance, je pense, chetifs, mortels! combien et combien des choses sur lesquelles vous raisonnez si légèrement, sont elles plus sublimes, et plus elévés, 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 nad 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 farther notice, from his want of ability to comprehend these phenomena. 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 proDe Leg. lib. x. • Euler. duce you a third as red as blood, or of any other colour you desire; et dicto citius, 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 undulation 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 they will 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 detect 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, See Lord Lyttelton's Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul, p. 59. in the ruins of Agrigentum or Palmyra; so you cannot persuade yourselves to believe that the denunciation 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 prophets foretold of the fate of Babylon,-that it should be besieged by the Medes; that it should be taken when her mighty men were drunken, when her springs were dried up; and that it should become a pool of water, and should remain desolate for ever,-no one, I say, can be convinced, that all these, and other parts of the prophetic denunciation, have been minutely fulfilled, without spending some time reading the accounts which profane historians have delivered down to us concerning its being taken by Cyrus ; and which modern travellers have given us of its present situation. Porphyry was so persuaded of the coincidence between the prophecies of Daniel and the events, that he was forced to affirm, the prophecies were written after the things prophesied of had happened. Another Porphyry has, in our days, been so astonished at the correspondence between the prophecy concerning the destruction of Jerusalem as related by St Matthew, and the history of that event as recorded by Josephus, that, rather than embrace Christianity, he has ventured (contrary to the faith of all ecclesiastical history, the opinion of the learned of all ages, and all the rules of good criticism) to assert, that St Matthew wrote his Gospel after Jerusalem had been taken and destroyed by the Romans. You may from these instances perceive the strength of the argument from prophecy it has not been able indeed to vanquish the prejudices of either the ancient or the modern Porphyry; but it has been able to compel them both to be guilty of obvious falsehoods, which have nothing but impudent assertions to support them. Some over-zealous interpreters of Scripture have found prophecies in simple narrations, extended real predictions beyond the times and circumstances to which they naturally were applied, and perplexed their readers with a thousand quaint allusions and allegorical conceits. This proceeding has made men of sense pay less regard to prophecy in general. There are some predictions, however, such as those concerning the present state of the Jewish people, and the corruption of Christianity, which are now fulfilling in the world; and which, if you will take the trouble to examine them, you will find of such an extraordinary nature, that you will not perhaps hesitate to refer them to God as their author: and if you once become persuaded of the truth of any one miracle, or of the completion of any one prophecy, you will resolve all your difficulties, (concerning the manner of God's interposition in the moral government of our species, and the nature of the doctrines contained in revelation,) into your own inability fully to comprehend the whole scheme of divine Providence. We are told, however, that the strangeness of the narration, and the difficulty of the doctrines contained in the New Testament, are not the only circumstances which induce you to reject it: you have discovered, you think, so many contradictions in the accounts which the Evangelists have given of the life of Christ, that you are compelled to consider the whole as an ill-digested and improbable story. You would not reason thus upon any other occasion ; you would not reject as fabulous the accounts given by Livy and Polybius of Hannibal and the Carthaginians, though you should discover a difference betwixt them in several points of little importance. You cannot compare the history of the same events as delivered by any two historians, but you will meet with many circumstances which, though mentioned by one, are either wholly omitted, or differently related by the other; and this observation is peculiarly applicable to biographical writings: but no one thought of disbelieving the leading circumstances of the lives of Vitellius or Vespasian, because Tacitus and Suetonius did not in every thing correspond in their accounts of these emperors. And if the memoirs of the life and doctrines of M. de Voltaire himself were, some twenty or thirty years after his death, to be delivered to the world by four of his most intimate acquaintance, I do not apprehend that we should discredit the whole account of such an extraordinary man, by reason of some slight inconsistencies and contradictions which the avowed enemies of his name might chance ever |