of those who are the personal organs of the laws? Are they, again, his passions, that, under a thousand forms, torment individuals and nations? or, are they the passions of men? And, if in the anguish of their misfortunes, they are too blind of understanding to see the proper remedies, is it the ignorance of God that is to be impeached? or, is it their own ignorance? Away then ye fretful mortals, away with your noisy accusations against both the decrees of Fate and the judgments of Heaven! If God be good, will he make himself instrumental to your punishment? If he be just, will he be the accomplice of your crimes? No, no; the caprice and inconstancy, of which man so loudly complains, is not the caprice and inconstancy of fate and predestination: the darkness, in which his reason strays, is not the darkness of God; the source of his calamities is not seated in the distant heavens, but very near to him upon the earth; it is not concealed in the latent bosom of the Divinity; it resides in man himself, he carries it with him in the inward recesses of his own heart. But, thou murmurest and sayest: Why have an unbelieving people enjoyed the blessings of heaven and of earth? Why is a holy and chosen race less fortunate than an impious race of infidels? Deluded man! where lies the contradiction at which thou takest umbrage and offence?— Where the enigmatical inconsistency, in which thou supposest the justice of God to be involved? Take the scales in which mercy and judgment, causes and effects, arc

weighed, into thine own hand, and then tell me-When these infidels thou alludest to attentively observed the laws of the heavens and the earth, when they regulated their intelligent and industrious labours by the order of the seasons and the course of the stars, ought God to have disturbed the equilibrium of the world for the purpose of defeating their prudence? When they cultivated, by the toil and sweat of their own brow, the face of the surrounding country, ought he to have interrupted the fall of rain, to have withheld the fertilizing dews, and to have caused thorns to spring up every where upon it? When, in order to render this parched and barren soil more fertile and productive, they had, by dint of their own assiduity and perseverance, constructed aqueducts, cut canals, and carried the distant waters across the deserts, ought he to have dried up the springs in the mountains? Ought he to have blighted the harvests, which art had so abundantly promoted? Ought he to have desolated a country by war, that had been peopled by peace? Ought he to have demolished the towns which entirely flourished by the encouragement of industry? In a word, Ought he to have confounded and subverted what the brightest wisdom of man had been so sedulously employed in establishing? And, what species of infidelity is that, let me ask, which founded empires by prudence, defended them by courage, and strengthened them by justice; which raised magnificent cities, formed large seaports, drained unwholesome marsh

es, covered the ocean with ships, the earth with inhabitants, and, like the creative spirit, diffused life and motion through the globe? If such be characteristic of faithless impiety, what is true belief? Does holiness consist in acts of destruction? Is then that God, which peoples the air with birds, the earth with animals, and the waters with their finny inhabitants; Is that God, which animates universal nature, a God that delights in ruins and monuments of death? Does he require devastation for homage, and conflagration for sacrifice? Does he demand of his votaries expiring groans for hymns, desperadoes and murderers for his worshippers, and a ravaged and desert world for his temple? Yet, ye holy and faithful generation of believers, what are your pious works? What are the fruits of your godliness? Ye have massacred the people, burnt and reduced their cities to ashes, destroyed every species of cultivation, and made the earth itself a perfect wilderness; and ye demand too the reward of your labours! Ye must indeed perform miracle! Ye must raise from the dead the peasantry that ye have so savagely murdered; ye must cause the walls, that ye have so wantonly demolished, to rise again; ye must make the flourishing harvests which ye have laid waste, to re-appear; ye must collect afresh the water into conduits, that has been uselessly diverted and squandered away; ye must counteract the laws of heaven and earth, supersede the whole system which God has established for the display of his greatness and magnificence, repeal

that eternal code of laws, anterior to every other and to all the prophets; annul those immutable principles, and that fixed order of things, which can never, in their present state, alter the progress of the passions, nor the ignorance of man./ But, the victim of passion who is a stranger to these laws, the child of ignorance who observes no cause, and who foresees no effect, have said in the foolishness of their hearts: "Every thing proceeds from the womb of chance; a blind fatality distributes good and evil upon the earth; nor is prudence nor wisdom itself able to withstand its sovereign influence." Or else, changing their language, and assuming the tone of hypocrisy, they have exclaimed: "Every thing proceeds from God himself; who delights in deceiving the wisdom of the sage, and in confounding the reason and judgment of the learned." And ignorance hath applauded herself in her own malignity; and, hath said, "Thus will I cope with science, which is a vulture to my soul: thus will I render inefficient and abortive, the prying investigations of useful policy and genius, which are an eye-sore to my sight, and a dagger to my ear:" And ambition, waking from her dreams of rapine, and stretching forth her greedy hand, sternly rejoined: "I too, by dint of the same dogma, will oppress and domineer over the weak; and will thus devour the fruit of his labour: and I will say,-It is God, that hath decreed it, it is fate, that hath willed and predestinated it." But, mark me, for I swear by all the laws of heaven and earth

and by those which governs the human heart, the hypocrite shall fall by his own hypocrisy, and the deceiver by his own deceit, and rapacity itself shall whet a sword for his own destruction. But, sooner shall the sun change his course, and light turn to darkness, than folly shall prevail over wisdom and genuine science; sooner shall the planets start from their orbits, than the intrigues of blindfold stupidity and growling bigotry shall trample upon the sacred principles of heaven-born reason, and enlightened policy, or dethrone and banish them from their station in the exercise of that virtuous and profound art of securing to man the birth-right of his own natural enjoyments, and of establishing in his own heart the empire of his happiness on the solid basis of sympathetic feeling and reciprocal justice.

CHAP. IV.

PREPARATORY EXPOSITION.

THUS spoke the Apparition. Awed and electrified by this discourse, my heart was agitated by a multitude of reflections, and I remained for some time silent. At length emboldening myself, I summoned courage, and thus addressed him: "Oh! thou Genius of tombs and ruins! thy presence and air of austerity have thrown my senses into disorder, but the justness of thy observations give confidence to my soul. Excuse my ignorance.