the infidel stigma. And so much for the voluptuous and improper tendency of the Temple of NaAdieu ! ture. LETTER XV. Dr PERCIVAL of Manchester. Lichfield, June 29, 1803. SINCE I received your kind and various literary presents*, coercive claims upon my time and attention, wrested from me many days leisure, which I wished to have employed in an earlier examination of their contents. To have made my acknowledgments upon a careless and curtailed perusal, could only have proved an abortive consciousness, and an inadequate gratitude. My pen is now enabled to pay a tribute of thanks and praise less utterly unworthy. In these volumes you give the public a blended treasure of medical duties, morality, and Christ, * Third Part of a Father's Instructions, Medical Ethics, and Biographical Memoirs of Thomas Butterworth Bayley, Esq. F. R. A. &c. &c.—S. ian faith. Powerfully must it strengthen the professional shield against the imputed irreligion of physicians. Doubtless the lives, the oral and occasionally written testimonies of several of your pathologic predecessors and contemporaries, have considerable tendency to weaken the censure. They have raised repelling mounds; you have built a tower of strength. While hypothetical materialism, rash General of the undisciplined army of second causes, boasts Dr Erasmus Darwin as his chief captain—God and his retributory tribunal; Christ and his expiatory power; the immortality of the soul, and resurrection of the body; the union of pious faith and energetic good works; all that is rational, all that is lovely in the gospel system, will shew to future times, amongst their able champions, the contemporary of Dr Darwin, Dr Thomas Percival. Your page of consecration has solemn and pathetic simplicity. The events it records had my sympathetic concern when they first reached my ear; and they have often since cost me sighs. Esteem augments into affectionate veneration, when we contemplate the sage who had bowed resigned to deprivations so trying, and see him here risen up "To justify eternal Providence, And vindicate the ways of God to man." Beautifully does your Fragment introduce your eloquent discussion of that difficult subject, the Divine permission of evil, natural and moral. I never heard or saw it reasoned upon so ably. Pope has thrown around it the richest hues of poesy; but his arguments, or rather his argumentative questions, are brought to no satisfactory conclusion. Little must it console the individual sufferer, that the earthquakes, the tempests, or the flames which have consumed his property; the diseases which have preyed upon his frame, or the afflictions which have agonized his bosom, are not inconsistent with the general order and moral government of the universe. He may learn, on your pages, to extract their bitterness, and make them instruments of his increased virtue, and, consequently, increased happiness, possibly here, and certainly hereafter. Much would it exceed the compass of my paper, were I to descant on the separate merits of this tract; but none of them have been lost upon me. I must, however, observe, that I am particularly gratified by all you write, with so much just discrimination, on the nature and proper ends of our appetites; and upon those of our nobler faculty, imagination. Concerning that, you have brought into a luminous focus all the diffuse dissertations of Addison, and the harmonious and picturesque metaphysics of Akenside. Nor less does my whole heart approve your wise, and much needed, cautions to our clergy, against raising their doctrinal superstructures upon partial texts, rather than upon the general tenor of the Gospel tenets. Had such caution governed the preachers and writers in the early periods of Christianity, it had escaped the pollutions of the Romish church. Had it prevailed from the first establishment of Protestantism, it had precluded the divisions, almost endless, of the sectaries, and the disgrace upon the rationality of the Scriptures, brought upon them by Calvinistic theory, and its presumptuous assertions. They are founded on partial texts of the Apostles, subsequent to Christ, addressed to converts under particular circumstances, and inapplicable to those educated in his faith. In the sense to which they wrest them, they are neither compatible with the justice or the mercy of God, or with the general precepts of the Scriptures. You have doubtless seen Mr Fellowes's publications. He also is, in this day, a very able champion of pure Christianity. Your cautions to the clergy are the grounds he has taken; but his charming writings do not seem popular. The proud high-priests stigmatize them as latitudinarian. The human mind is prone to gloomy extremes, either to sink into that broad large limbo of Scepticism, "Where violent cross-winds, from either coast, or into the gloomy gulf of superstition. Few tread the straight plain path, though the benevolent rays of Gospel truth shine upon it; for men are disposed to love darkness rather than light-the sceptics, from pride of intellect and laxity of morals; the Calvinists, because their tempers are sour and malignant. They wrap themselves up in their Pharisaic mantle, and fondly believing it their own shield, scowl from beneath it on the multitude, which they have the arrogance to judge and condemn. In your Medical Ethics, there are just and incontrovertible arguments against the heinous crime of duelling, that murderous punctilio of Luciferian honour. I cannot, however, think, that any sincere exertions have been made to repress it. Had they been sincere, they must have been efficient. See how the phantom laws against the guilt are scorned and foiled by the |