"Sir,-Your long expected performance has at length made its appearance. If the work tended to promote the happiness of society; to animate our hopes; to subdue our passions; to instruct man in the happy science of purifying the polluted recesses of a vitiated heart; to confirm him in his exalted notion of the dignity of his nature, and thereby to inspire him with sentiments averse to whatever may debase the excellence of his origin, the public would be indebted to you; your name would be recorded amongst the asserters of morality and religion; and I myself, though brought up in a different persuasion from yours, would be the first to offer my incense at the shrine of merit. But the tendency of your performance is to deny the divinity of Christ and the immortality of the soul. In denying the first, you sap the foundations of religion; you cut off at one blow the merit of our faith, the comfort of our hope, and the motives of our charity. In denying the immortality of the soul, you degrade human nature, and confound man with the vile and perishable insect. denying both, you overturn the whole system of religion, whether natural or revealed; and in denying religion, you deprive the poor of the only comfort which supports them under their distresses and afflictions; you wrest from the hands of the powerful and rich the only bridle to their injustices and passions, and pluck from the hearts of the guilty the greatest check to their crimes-I mean this remorse of conscience, which can never be the result of a handful of organized matter; this interior monitor, which makes us blush in the morning at the disorders of the foregoing night; which erects in the breast of the tyrant a tribunal superior to his power; and whose importunate voice upbraids a Cain in the wilderness with the murder of his brother, and a Nero in his palace with that of his mother. Such are the consequences

In

naturally resulting from the principles laid down in your writings."

He deplores the folly of him who "works himself into a conviction that his soul is no more than a subtile vapour, which, in death, is to be breathed out into the air, to mix confusedly with its kindred element, and there to perish;" and asserts that the upholder of so monstrous a creed " would do well to conceal his horrid belief with more secrecy than the Druids concealed their mysteries." "In doing otherwise," he continues, "the infidel only brings disgrace on himself; for the notion of religion is so deeply impressed on our minds, that the bold champions who would fain destroy it, are considered by the generality of mankind as public pests, spreading disorder and mortality wherever they appear; and in our feelings we discover the delusions of cheating philosophy, which can never introduce a religion more pure than that of the Christian, nor confer a more glorious privilege on man than that of an immortal soul. In a word, if it be a crime to have no religion, it is a folly to boast of the want of it."

Some notion may be formed of Blair's style of reasoning from the fact, that he regards the whole narration in Genesis of man's creation, situation, and fall, as purely allegorical. Thus writes the doctor:-"God planted a garden eastward in Eden,' says the inspired - writer. What is called a garden I take to be the human mind. By the river which watered the garden, and afterwards divided into four branches, is meant innocence, divided into the four cardinal virtues."

"A warm fancy," writes O'Leary, "in a paroxysm of zeal, may indulge its boundless excursions in the path of allegory, when obscure passages and mystical expressions open a field for interpretations and allusions. Mead, Whiston, Wesley, and the Doctor himself, may discover the Pope in the beast with ten horns, and

Rome in the great city built on seven hills. The Jewish rabbins, after obtaining permission from the Prince of Orange to build a synagogue, applied to their benefactor this famous passage of Isaiah: ' On that day seven women will take hold of one man,' alluding to the Seven United Provinces that had elected him stadtholder; and I myself, if I were in humour, could, in a long-winded discourse, enlarge upon the seven sacraments, or the three theological and four cardinal virtues, and compare them to the seven golden candlesticks mentioned in the Revelations of St. John. But, in an historical narration, giving an account of the origin of the world, of a garden planted with trees, watered with four rivers, with their names, the countries through which they flow, the precious stones, mines, and minerals to be found in those countries, &c., the introduction of an allegory is the subversion of reason."

But human vanity betrays its victim into the most 'absurd excesses of unreason. "We would fain," he concludes, "sound the unfathomable ocean of the Christian religion, and arraign its mysteries at the tribunal of a glimmering reason-while the small atom that swims on the surface baffles our severest scrutiny." Those who doubt the inspiration of Moses, and the original perfection of human nature, he thus confutes:"Examine the character of Moses, and confess your folly. Besides his divine mission, in what historian does truth shine more conspicuous? He relates his personal defects, as well as the extraordinary powers with which the Lord invested him; deduces a long chain of patriarchs from the first man down to his days; traces a genealogy in which every chief is distinguished by his peculiar character. In quitting Egypt, the nursery of fiction, did it comport with the dignity of the legislator, and commander of a chosen people, to write romances? In the space of five hundred years, from

Noah's death to Moses' time, could the fall of man, and his expulsion from paradise, be forgotten? And as he had enemies, would they not have charged him with imposture? Or was he the only person amongst the Jews who was instructed by his father? In a word, it was out of his power to deceive the Jews; much less was it his inclination or interest. All, then, is coherent in Moses; and to his genuine narrative we are indebted for the knowledge of ourselves, for without the aid of revelation man would ever be an inexplicable mystery.

"In believing my descent from a father created in a state of perfection, from whence he fell a father on whose obedience or disobedience my happiness or misery depended-I can account for the corruption of my nature, and all the train of evils which have descended to Adam's children. Without this clue to direct me, I must be for ever entangled in a labyrinth of perplexities. Let philosophy glory in levelling man with the brute, and say that there never was any difference in his state that he was always the same, destined to gratify his appetites and to die-I am really persuaded that I must renounce common sense, if I believe that man is now the same that he was when he came from his Maker's hands. The opposition between our passions and reason is too palpable to believe that we were created in such an excess of contradictions. Reason dictates to be temperate, just, and equitable; to deal with others as I would fain be dealt by; not to infringe the order of society; to pity and relieve the afflicted. My passions, those tyrants so cruel, prompt me to raise myself on the ruin of others; to tread in the criminal paths of flowery pleasures; and to sacrifice my enemy to my resentment. If God, then, be the author of reason, and it be granted to man to regulate and curb his inclinations, misery and corruption were not our primitive state.

Philosophers, in a strain of irony, may deride our Bible and Catechism, and laugh at our folly for believing that an apple could entail such miseries on mortals; but let them seriously consider the multitude and greatness of the evils that oppress us; and how full of vanity, of illusions, of sufferings, are the first years of our lives; when we are grown up, how we are seduced by error, weakened by pain, inflamed by lust, cast down by sorrow, elated with pride-and ask themselves whether the cause of those dreadful evils be the injustice of God or the original sin of man.

"The evidence of those miseries forced the pagan philosophers to say that we were born only to suffer the punishments we had deserved for crimes committed in a life before this. They, doubtless, were deceived as to the origin and cause of our miseries; but still some glimmering of reason did not permit them to consider those calamities as the natural state of man. But religion reforms the error, and points out that this heavy yoke, which the sons of Adam are forced to bear from the time their bodies are taken from their mother's womb, to the day they return to the womb of their common mother, the earth, would not have been laid upon them if they had not deserved it by the guilt they contract from their origin.

The province of reason in religion is well defined. "Is man to be debarred the use of his reason, or has he anything to dread for not believing mysteries he cannot comprehend? Make full use of your reason, not with a design to fall into scepticism, but with a sincere desire to come at the knowledge of the truth. Reason is never better employed than in discovering the will of its Author; and when once we discover that it is His will we should believe, reason itself suggests that it is our duty to submit, otherwise we are guilty of rebellion against the first of