found thought, of comprehension and sagacity' far beyond the vigour of ordinary minds." He considered himself" not unlikely to serve the cause of revealed truth, with manly and unprejudiced enquirers, by an examination of a deistical pamphlet, which seemed so fair a candidate for extensive circulation;" regretting that "by a strange perversity, whilst natural philosophy, politics, and morals, are pursued with unremitting diligence of investigation, Revelation alone seems an object of inferior consideration: her evidences, it is conceived, may be decided upon without learning, her pretensions judged without discussion, or rather disregarded altogether, as unworthy the notice of the profound philosophers of modern times." bas

Mr. Wakefield (as is well known) was what is generally called an Unitarian Christian, rejecting the sway of creeds and councils, of hierarchies and churches." He was not con cerned in the difficult task of supporting the antiquated systems' framed by fallible and erested men, or of men, or of proving every doctrine to be true which happened to have been long. established. On the contrary he quotes that

in

tox

< Ibid. p. 4.

C

part of the "Age of Reason," which describes "the moral mischief which mental lying has produced in society," as a "paragraph, replete with manly sense, and dignified morality, conyeyed in simple but energetic language."

d

But he is soon at issue with Mr. Paine, and proceeds to shew that what he would degrade into a system of "Fabulous Theology" is the most valuable source of human knowledge.

"It is a most shocking reflection to every lover of truth and honesty, that a requisition to acknowledge a multitudinous mass of theological and political propositions, denominated articles of religion, which many have never read, which they who read cannot understand, and which the imposers of them have never yet been able to expound with an uniformity of interpretation, should be made an indispensable condition to the privilege of preaching the truths of Christianity; nay thẹ basis of that preaching, and the criterion of those truths."

"Exam." p. 13. See also "Mem." I. 121, &c.

d Ibid. p. 11.

e In answer to a remark that " Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special commission from God, communicated to certain individuals," Mr. Wakefield observes, that "what the Jews and Christians maintain in behalf of their respective systems, is simply this: That their founders delivered to mankind most rational sentiments of the divine nature, of his existence, and his providential government of the world, at a time when ignorance and depravation, with respect to these fundamental canons of religious rectitude, were almost universally predominant, even

f

....He then offers to the ingenuity of Unbelievers that problem which they have never yet, we apprehend, been prepared to solve;

among the superior and most enlightened portion of mankind at large.

"With relation to the writings of the Jews," he adds, "it is altogether undeniable, and is a truth of the utmost weight and magnitude, the force of which no sophistry can baffle, and no scepticism can elude, that our accumulated discoveries in science and philosophy, and all our progress in other parts of knowledge, have not enabled the wisest of the moderns to excel the noble sentiments conveyed in the didactic and devotional compositions of the Old Testament; compositions, many of which existed, without dispute, long before the earliest writings of heathen antiquity, and at a period, when even those illustrious instructors of mankind, the Greeks and Romans, were not only strangers to alphabetic characters, but wholly barbarous and unknown." Ibid. pp. 14 & 15.

f

"It would gratify me much, I confess, to be informed by some of our philosophical literati, in what manner these contemners of the Jews, and of the Mosaic system, can account for this singular phænomenon; which indeed might be stated with abundantly more fulness and cogency, if it were necessary on this occasion. Has Thomas Paine the deist, or any of our modern atheists, the intrepidity to undertake a solution of this, surely highly interesting, problem in the history of the human mind?-Besides, let any man compare the simple morality and the noble precepts of the gospel, as they relate to the attributes of God, and the duties of humanity, with the monstrous theology, with the subtleties and the contradictory schemes of contemporary moralists among the Greeks and Romans (who nevertheless had, in all probability, profited

3

and concludes, from those inquiries for which his extensive literature had so wellyfitted him, 11 that "very few philosophers indeed, imeall d probability, (if one) have illuminated mankindil. with light unborrowed from the candles of theto sanctuary."8 A similar sentiment is thus ex+16 pressed in one of the allegorical Essays of al distinguished moralist: "I looked then upon the road of Reason, which was indeed, so far!/ as it reached, the same with that of Religions nor had Reason discovered it but by her in s

mediately or immediately by the Jewish system, which could not exist, like a light shining in a dark place, without diffus60 ing some influence through the neighbourhood) and reflect at the same time, that a perfect manual of morality may be collected from a few pages in the Gospel, but must be picked in dst Pagan writers from a multitude of discordant volumes and a to mass of incoherency and absurdity, and then condescend to to furnish us with an explanation of what must be allowed on all hands a most surprizing fact; namely, the existence of such superior intelligence in a Jewish carpenter at Nazareth. So then, though we concede to Mr. Paine, that the way to God was open to every man alike, we affirm of the Jewish and Christian dispensations, that they only were this way to any man desirous of entertaining rational notions of God, and human duty." Ibid. PP. 15 & 16.

TO

Mr.Wakefield's argument has been ably supported by other writers, especially by Archdeacon Paley, "Evid." ii. 306. 2d ed. and "Campbell on Mir." part ii. sect. 7.

struction pyet, when she had once been taught it, she clearly saw that it was right; and Pride hads sometimes incited her to declare that sheds discovered it herself, and persuaded her to" offer herself as a guide to Religion, whom, after many vain experiments, she found it hers? highest privilege to follow." 200 si bazary

We shall next quote the animated close ofib Mrs Wakefield's pamphlet, in which his views t are developed, and his feelings described, ates a crisis of public affairs the most awfulsando alarming.

bisɔI have now finished my remarks on thisso pamphlet of Thomas Paine, which have been extended thus far, more in deference to the deserved celebrity of the man, than the powers of the disputant: nor am I conscious to myself of eluding any difficulty, or shrinking from the terrors of a single argument directed against**** the authenticity of revealed religion, in the course of this examination; but, to the best of or my ability, a concise answer to every objec tion, not completely puerile and impertinent, has been specifically given, or is virtually included in this series of observations. Nor, in conclusion, will I dissemble one of my most

6

Johnson's "Vision of Theodore," Works, ii. 412.