therefore not at all to be wondered at, that some few should be found who attempt to oppose this system by objections, by ridicule, and by argument, But, in estimating these, many considerations are necessary to be taken into the account, of which infidels are either not aware, or appear to be careless. It will not be the contemptuous reasoning of young libertines, or of any set of men, under the influence of ungovernable passions, which the religion they despise prohibits, which will with reasonable men have any weight. It will not even be the philosophic clamour of persons better informed, though sometimes perhaps not less culpable, that will stagger a serious man's belief: Because they have evidently and avowedly neglected, in their enquiries and objections, some of the most material considerations. Mr Paine, who, whatever effect his reasoning may have, has confidence sufficient for the whole fraternity, confesses, in the first part of his Age of Reason, that he had not then a bible to which he could refer; and, of course, he had no other work on the part of the subject against which he sat down to write. He therefore avowedly formed his opinions on religion, without duly considering its evidences, and went on with his objections, without having it in his power to estimate their force, or to know whether they had not all been made, and completely answered over and over again. The nature

and evidence of the religion he opposed, he could not possibly have it in his power to judge of, in the circumstances in which he was placed; and no man can be at liberty, if truth be his object, to oppose any system which depends on external evidence, and of the propriety or necessity of every part of which, even if it should prove to be true, we can be no judges, by a priori or imaginary laws of propriety, rectitude, or probability. These may be after considerations, but they cannot be the first. That Mr Paine should afterwards be confirmed in the opinions he had so unfairly formed, by a perusal of the Bible, as in the advertisement to the second part of his work, he informs us, was the case, is neither new nor uncommon. When opinions are assumed, without maturely consulting evidence, they are often persevered in with the most inveterate obstinacy, in spite of argumeut. People, in this case, act the part of a jealous man, who, from whim or constitutional weakness, takes up his suspicions, and so blinds himself with the confusion of his own ideas as to consider the innocent and artless effusions of love as the genuine proofs of criminality.

"Were infidels, as I have already hinted, to give themselves the trouble (and, in any view that can be taken of it, the enquiry is curious and important) to investigate the several pretensions to divine revelation, which have at various periods been

made, with that candour and attention which the subject merits; and were they to endeavour, not to excite silly objections, and to raise useless and unmeaning ridicule, but to trace these several pretensions to some primitive original, they would do more service to truth and to themselves, than by their general and unmeaning remarks on philosophy and candour, on persecution and bigotry, words they seem to use without any just idea of their import, and which, at all events, will neither constitute nor lead to truth. In the course of such an investigation, judiciously conducted, they would acquire more real knowledge of human nature, and of the history of the mind of man, than random disquisitions in modern philosophy, and unsupported objections to ancient systems, can possibly unfold. From a serious examination of this kind, truth has certainly nothing to fear; but of random objections and crude hypotheses, truth will seldom be the consequence. In the course of an enquiry of this kind, the numerous coincidences in the opinions, customs, and superstitions of the most distant nations, clearly point out a similar origin, and that origin it must of consequence be possible to discover. There is one fact which all the systems which we find existing or professed, in ancient or modern times, take for granted, and proceed upon, and which universal experience shews us to exist;-I mean, the depravity of man,

which the boldest infidel dare not deny. There may be different opinions respecting the origin and nature of this depravity, but respecting its existence there can be but one. In every age, in every climate, and under every dispensation of religion, the bulk of mankind have been naturally depraved. They have ever been more attentive to present pleasures, and to present pursuits, than to the consideration of what is to follow hereafter. They have been ignorant of, and inattentive to, their real destination and their chief good; and, in direct proportion to this ignorance and inattention, they have been depraved and wicked. In the first stages of society, and in barbarous states, the most horrid crimes, at the very mention of which we of this age shudder, have not only been perpetrated, but approved ;-and the consequence of false refinement, continued luxury, and sceptical philosophy, has been, to plunge men again into the vices of early barbarism.

"Infidel writers, whose direct purpose it seems to be to degrade the nature of man, and, by annihilating his best hopes, to sink him in some measure to the level of the brutes that perish, have seen this depravity, and have, with a strange perversion of mind, and insult on reasoning, endeavoured to trace its origin to the influence of the Jewish and Christian dispensations of religion. Jews and Christians are men, and liable, like othE

er men, to the corruptions of human nature, They have consequently often been wicked; and, while they have professed a divine religion, have neglected the precepts it enjoins by the most aweful sanctions. "Therefore", say the sceptics, "Judaism and Christianity have taught vice, and have been the cause of all the misery we see in the world, and of all the evil which Jews and Christians have committed." They thus artfully withdraw the mind from considering the evidence of facts, and the nature of doctrines, to the contemplation of erroneous and inconsistent practice; and, because they cannot directly oppose the former, they ridicule and undermine religion, by dwelling on the latter. They forget to bring into the account, or they carefully conceal, the instancés, so numerous and so evident, in which religion has been effectual; and they are not aware, or wish not to reflect, that a practice uniformly consistent in every inattentive or careless individual, is more than the experience of human nature gives us reason to expect; and that, therefore, even from a divine religion, no such uniform effect is to be looked for, unless human liberty were totally annihilated.

"To a person who attentively views the various systems of antient and modern superstition, among people civilized and savage, and who considers the numerous coincidences proved between the facts related