mentality of intermediate agents. God has permitted us to plunge ourselves into poverty, distress, and misery, by our own vices, and has afforded us the advice, instructions, and examples of others, to deter or extricate us from these calamities. He has formed us subject to innumerable diseases, and he has bestowed on us a variety of remedies. He has made us liable to hunger, thirst, and nakedness; and he supplies us with food, drink, and clothing, usually by the administration of others. He has created poisons, and he has provided antidotes. He has ordained the winter's cold to cure the pestilential heats of the summer, and the summer's sunshine to dry up the inundations of the winter. Why the constitution of nature is so formed, why all the visible dispensations of Providence are such, and why such is the Christian dispensation also, we know not, nor have faculties to comprehend. God might certainly have made the material world a system of perfect beauty and regularity, without evils and without remedies; and the Christian dispensation a scheme only of moral virtue productive of happiness, without the intervention of any atonement or mediation. He might have exempted our bodies from all diseases and our minds from all depravity, and we should then have stood in no need of medicines to restore us to health, or expedients to reconcile us to his favour. It seems, indeed, to our ignorance, that this would have been more consistent with justice and reason; but his infinite wisdom has decided in another manner, and formed the systems both of nature and Christianity on other principles, and these so exactly similar, that we have cause to conclude, that they both must proceed from the same source of divine power and wisdom, however inconsistent with our reason they may appear. Reason is undoubtedly our surest guide in all matters which lie within the narrow circle of her intelligence. On the subject of revelation, her province is only to examine into its authority, and when that is once proved, she has no more to do but to acquiesce in its doctrines, and therefore is never so ill employed as when she pretends to accommodate them to her own ideas of rectitude and truth. God, says this self-sufficient teacher, is perfectly wise, just, and good; and what is the inference? That all his dispensations must be conformable to our notions of perfect wisdom, justice, and goodness. But it should first be proved, that man is as perfect and as wise as his Creator, or this consequence will by no means follow; but rather the reverse; that is, that the dispensations of a perfect and all-wise Being must probably appear unreasonable, and perhaps unjust, to a being imperfect and ignorant; and therefore their seeming impossibility may be a mark of their truth, and in some measure justify that

pious rant of a mad enthusiast, "Credo, quia impossibile." Nor is it the least surprising, that we are not able to understand the spiri tual dispensations of the Almighty, when his material works are to us no less incomprehensible. Our reason can afford us no insight into those great properties of matter, gravitation, attraction, elasticity, and electricity; nor even into the essence of matter itself. Can reason teach us how the sun's luminous orb can fill a circle, whose diameter contains many millions of miles, with a constant inundatio of successive rays during thousands of years, without any perceivable diminution of that body from whence they are continually poured, or any augmentation of those bodies on which they fall, and by which they are constantly absorbed? Can reason tell us how those rays, darted with a velocity greater than that of a cannon ball, can strike the tenderest organs of the human frame, without inflicting any degree of pain? Or by what means this percussion only can convey the forms of distant objects to an immaterial mind? or how any union can be formed between material and immaterial essences? or how the wounds of the body can give pain to the soul; or the anxiety of the soul can emaciate and destroy the body? That all these things are so, we have visible and indisputable demonstration ; but how they can be so, is to us as incomprehensible, as the most abstruse mysteries of revelation can possibly be. In short, we see so small a part of the great whole; we know so little of the relation which the present life bears to pre-existent and future states; we can conceive so little of the nature of God, and his attributes or mode of existence; we can comprehend so little of the material, and so much less of the moral plan, on which the universe is constituted, or on what principle it proceeds, that, if a revelation from such a Being, on such subjects, was in every part familiar to our understandings and consonant to our reason, we should have great cause to suspect its divine authority; and therefore, had this revelation been less incomprehensible, it would certainly have been more incredible.

But I shall not enter farther into the consideration of these abstruse and difficult speculations, because the discussion of them would render this short essay too tedious and laborious a task for the perusal of them for whom it was principally intended; which are all those busy or idle persons, whose time and thoughts are wholly engrossed by the pursuits of business or pleasure, ambition or luxury; who know nothing of this religion, except what they have accidentally picked up by desultory conversation or superficial reading, and have thence determined with themselves, that a pretended revelation, founded on so strange and improbable a story, so contradictory to reason, so adverse to the world and all its

occupations, so incredible in its doctrines, and in its precepts so impracticable, can be nothing more than the imposition of priestcraft upon ignorant and illiterate ages, and artfully continued as an engine well adapted to awe and govern the superstitious vulgar. To talk to such about the Christian religion, is to converse with the deaf concerning music, or with the blind on the beauties of painting. They want all ideas relative to the subject, and therefore can never be made to comprehend it. To enable them to do this, their minds must be formed for these conceptions by contemplation, retirement, and abstraction from business and dissipation, by ill health, disappointments, and distresses; and possibly by divine interposition, or by enthusiasm, which is usually nistaken for it. Without some of these preparatory aids, together with a competent degree of learning and application, it is impossible that they can think or know, understand or believe, any thing about it. If they profess to believe, they deceive others; if they fancy that they believe, they deceive themselves. I am ready to acknowledge, that these gentlemen, as far as their information reaches, are perfectly in the right; and if they are endued with good understandings, which have been entirely devoted to the business or amusements of the world, they can pass no other judgment, and must revolt from the history and doctrines of this religion. "The preaching Christ crucified was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness," (1 Cor. i. 26 ;) and so it must appear to all who, like them, judge from established prejudices, false learning, and superficial knowledge; for those who are quite unable to follow the chain of its prophecy, to see the beauty and justness of its moral precepts, and to enter into the wonders of its dispensations, can form no other idea of this revelation, but that of a confused rhapsody of fictions and absurdities.

If it is asked, Was Christianity, then, intended only for learned divines and profound philosophers? I answer, No: it was at first preached by the illiterate, and received by the ignorant; and to such are the practical, which are the most necessary parts of it, sufficiently intelligible; but the proofs of its authority undoubtedly are not, because these must be chiefly drawn from other parts, of a speculative nature, opening to our inquiries inexhaustible discoveries concerning the nature, attributes, and dispensations of God, which cannot be understood without some learning and much attention. From these the generality of mankind must necessarily be excluded, and must therefore trust to others for the grounds of their belief, if they believe at all. And hence perhaps it is, that faith, or easiness of belief, is so frequently and so strongly recommended in the Gospel; because if men require proofs of

which they themselves are incapable, and those who have no knowledge of this important subject will not place some confidence in those who have, the illiterate and inattentive must ever continue in a state of unbelief: but then all such should remember, that in all sciences, even in mathematics themselves, there are many propositions, which, on a cursory view, appear to the most acute understandings, uninstructed in that science, to be impossible to be true, which yet, on a closer examination, are found to be truths capable of the strictest demonstration; and that therefore, in disquisitions on which we cannot determine without much learned investigation, reason uninformed is by no means to be depended on and from hence they ought surely to conclude, that it may be at least as possible for them to be mistaken in disbelieving this revelation, who know nothing of the matter, as for those great masters of reason and erudition, Grotius, Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Locke, Addison, and Lyttelton, to be deceived in their belief; a belief to which they firmly adhered after the most diligent and learned researches into the authenticity of its records, the completion of the prophecies, the sublimity of its doctrines, the purity of its precepts, and the arguments of its adversaries; a belief which they have testified to the world by their writings, without any other motive than their regard for truth and the benefit of mankind. Should the few foregoing pages add but one mite to the treasures with which these learned writers have enriched the world; if they should be so fortunate as to persuade any of these minute philosophers to place some confidence in those great opinions, and to distrust their own; if they should be able to convince them, that, notwithstanding all unfavourable appearances, Christianity may not be altogether artifice and error; if they should prevail on them to examine it with some attention, or, if that is too much trouble, not to reject it without any examination at all; the purpose of this little work will be sufficiently answered. Had the arguments herein used, and the new hints here flung out, been more largely discussed, it might easily have been extended to a more considerable bulk; but then the busy would not have had leisure, nor the idle inclination to have read it. Should it ever have the honour to be admitted into such good company, they will immediately, I know, determine, that it must be the work of some enthusiast or methodist, some beggar, or some madman. I shall therefore beg leave to assure them, that the author is very far removed from all these characters; that he once perhaps believed as little as themselves; but having some leisure and more curiosity, he employed them both in resolving a question which seemed to him of some importance,-Whether Christianity was really