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LETTER IV.

SIR,

IN the preceding letters, we have touched upon the weakness, and the neceflity of revealed religion; the obfcurity in which mortals were involved, and the incongruity of denying religious myfteries, when the book of nature, open to our eyes, is fcarce legible; our fall in Adam, and our restoration in Chrift.

It is now time to examine your opinion concerning the foul of man: an opinion which you deliver in the feventy-second page of your work, in these words: "Hence, I conclude "that the foul dies with the body. It is an opi"nion conformable to reafon, obfervation, and "to the doctrine taught by Jefus Chrift and his "apoftles." Whatever arguments you might have drawn from obfervation, you should have paffed over the authority of Christ and his apoftles an authority never adduced before in fupport of a doctrine which in every page they condemn. Or at least, you should have first a bible of your own, and forced it on the world, as handed to you by the angel Gabriel.

Man

Man muft certainly be liable to error, when, in the blaze of revelation, and after the progress philosophy has made in the world, he still cries out, with the difciple of Epicurus :

"We know not yet how our foul's produc'd, "Whether by body born, or else infus'd : "Whether in death, breath'd out into the air, "She doth confus'dly mix and perish there, "Or through vaft shades and horrid filence go "To visit brimstone caves and pools below." *

Your obfervation must be quite different from the obfervations of the greatest men the faculty of phyfic ever produced: men who were, and are ftill, as great ornaments to the literary world, as they are useful to mankind.

We obferve, fir, within ourselves, a principle that is obeyed as a fovereign, that now finds fault with what it before approved; that covets with paflion what it defpifes after enjoying; that now rejoices and then mourns; that reafons and judges. I confult my reafon and it informs me, that this principle, fo noble, and, at the fame time, fo liable to fuch conflicting agitations, cannot be a particle of matter, round or fquare, red or blue; a volatilized vapour diffolvable into air; a contexture of atoms interwoven or feparated by a fportive brain.

* Creech's Lucretius, Book 1.

My

My reafon informs me, that a being, capable to take in hands the government of a vast empire, to form projects, the fuccefs whereof depends on an infinity of different fprings, whofe motions and accords must be ftudied and combined, is fomething more than a little fubtilized mud.

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I obferve matter with all its mutations and refinements: and I perceive nothing but extenfion, divifibility, figure, and motion.

My reafon tells me, that the combinations of the different particles of matter, let their velocity be ever fo great, can never reveal the facred myfteries of faith,-the holy rules of equity, the ideas of piety, order, and juftice.

Moreover, reafon informs us, that matter is indifferent to motion or reft, to this or that fituation. When moved in any direction, the fmalleft particle of any body or mass of matter, muft yield to the motion of the whole. On the other hand, in our temptations and ftruggles, amidft the folicitations of fenfe, and the cravings of appetite, we can fay, with St. Paul, that we feel an interior conflict and two oppofite laws in ourselves: "the law of the body war

ring against the law of the mind, and attempting to captivate us to the law of fin." Under the inconvenience of fuch struggles and conflicts,

conflicts, a part of ourselves ftill remains the directing principle, always afferting its rights, and constantly supporting its native title to dominion.

Reconcile, if you can, to the laws of mechanism,-to the cohesion of atoms, and to the motions of particles of matter,-the infinite capacity of the foul,--its ftrong defires after immortality,—its power to infer conclufions from principles, in mathematical demonstrations and logical arguments,-its arbitrary and voluntary determinations, this fhifting and changing,those strange and fudden returns, reflections, and tranfitions in thought, which, by experience, we find it in our power to make.

We all agree, that matter touches in contact, and that whatever moves, is put in motion by another. We know, on the other hand, that, in reasoning, argumentations, demonftrations, &c. wherein we infer one thing from another, and another thing from that inference, and a third from thence, and fo on, there is an infinity of different modes of thought. If those different modes of thought be no more than the different states of the folid, figured, divifible parts of. matter, with refpect to velocity and direction, it is neceffary that they fhould have been put into these different ftates, by the impulse of fome foreign mover.

If this mover, which is the cause of motion, be matter, it must be moved or acted on itself: for otherwise it could not produce a change of motion in other contiguous parts of matter. There must still be a mover prior to the former, and another prior to that, and fo on to infinity, in every act of reafon and argumentation. But a progreffion to infinity is difcarded by allphilofophers, both ancient and modern.

To fpin out the fubject in metaphysical arguments, were lofs of time. Suffice it to fay, that we would contradict our reason, and belye our hearts, in fuppofing that the troubles, agitations, importunate remorfes, we feel after the commiffion of some horrid crime,-the fecret reproaches of a guilty confcience, which made the Athenian parricide cry out, twenty years after having murdered his father, that the crows upbraided him with his death:-we would, I fay, only belye our hearts, in fuppofing such interior punishments, which tread in the heels of guilt, to be no more than an affemblage of little atoms, with hooked or rough furfaces. In fuppofing that patience and refignation in our afflictions, from an expectation of immortality and the spiritual joys of future bliss, the diftant reward of our trials, are the refult of smooth atoms gliding through the brain; or that the horrors, which haunt the guilty, proceed from

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