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The day shall come, that great avenging day,
When all their honours in the dust shall lay:
Ourself shall pour dire judgments on their land,
Thus have we said, and what we say shall stand.
Their cruelty for justice daily cries,

And draws reluctant vengeance from the skies;
Such hypocritic foes their toils shall know,
And ev'ry hand shall work its share of wo.
How av'rice fires their minds: ye heav'n born train,
Behold our sacred gospel preach'd in vain;
Behold us disobey'd; what dire alarms

Inflame their souls to slaughter, blood, and arms.
Their dreadful end will wing its fatal way,
Nor need their rage anticipate the day.
Let him who tempts me dread the dire abode,
And know th' Almighty is a jealous God.
Still they may charge on us their own offence,
And call their woes the crimcs of Providence ;
But they themselves their miseries create,
They perish by their folly, not their fate."

In this world, virtue in some degree carries her reward in her bosom contempt of covetousness ensures repose, temperance secures health, benevolence produces the most exquisite of all earthly delights, infinitely superior to the libertine's or the epicure's most sanguinary gratification. The first delight is divine, the last beastly and sensual; humility begets assurance of safety, and removes fear, for the man cannot fall far, who is on a plain. The few, by fraud, rob the many of their portion of the earth's blessings, till they are cloyed with super-abundance, and of course cannot enjoy what they possess; while the poor suffer and die, for want of the necessaries of life.

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Happy, thrice happy, would it have been for India, if it had never been visited by the commercial tyrants of Europe.' To relate the many instances of rapine, desolation, and injustice, which a lust of gain has induced them to cominit, would require many volumes. Let the following extract suffice. "Lord Cornwallis, in a letter dated 18th September, 1789, had the following remarkable words: I can safely affirm, that one third of the company's territory in Indostan

is now a jungle inhabited by wild beasts:' and Colonel Dow, a Scotch officer, who had been long in India, and who wrote the history of Indostan, thus describes the effect of their barbarity in that unhappy country. The civil wars, to which our violent desire of creating nabobs gave rise, were attended with tragical events. Bengal was depopulated by every species of public distress. In the space of six years, half the great cities of this opulent kingdom were rendered desolate; the most fertile fields in the world laid waste; and five millions of harmless and industrious people were either killed or destroyed. Want of foresight became more fatal than innate barbarism; and men found themselves wading through blood and ruin, when their only object was spoil.' This is the way some Christians preach the gospel to the Heathen!"

The laws of nature are inverted by those of man. God supplies our wants in a thousand different ways, while man uses as many ways to destroy our comforts; God commands even the forests to produce spontaneous fruits, for his creatures' inheritance; the earth nourishing roots for their aliment, that we may learn from his kindness to us all, to be kind to one another. Alas! no part of the brute creation is so cruel as man! always either the victim or the tyrant of his fellow worms; yet he alone, of all the creation, knows that God is great in goodness, and good in greatness, and that his justice governs the world; and that beneficence is the happiness of virtue, and that virtue exalts man to heaven. We see men every where paying the homage due only to God, to their kings and priests; and as a just re-action, we see always those kings and priests, both oppressing them, as a punishment for their idolatry.

I have one desire, and that is to please God, by endeavouring to alleviate the miseries of his creatures. The censure of king-ridden and priest-ridden people, I calculate upon : they are their own greatest enemies; how then can I expect them to be my friends? My happiness or unhappiness does not consist in the praise or dispraise of dying man, but in the approbation of the living God, who has spread a table for me, in the presence of mine enemies. His presence makes my sequestered enclosure a paradise; in my beautiful flower garden, methinks I could see a particle of the sovereign beauty, in miniature. The expanding rose and tulip, wherein

thousands of ephemeral beings participate the liberality of their Maker, teaches me a more profitable lesson, than all the Greek and Latin schoolmasters in the universe; namely, that God supplies the wants of the most diminutive insects, and embraces the concerns of my circumscribed garden, as well as the boundless garden of nature. If, then, his beneficence extends to the smallest insect in my garden, can I for a moment think he will forget me?

The chief evils of society, I am persuaded, arise from the wrong association of ideas among the rich, who are imitated by the poor; the rich are continually seeking novelties to procure them pleasure, and in so doing, render themselves miserable; and the poor are often equally miserable, for the want of those novelties, because they suppose, very improperly, that they in reality are productive of pleasure. Were it not for this, what pleased the poor man yesterday, would likewise please him to-day; what was sufficient for his simple maintenance, would always appear good and desirable. Did the poor know the painful disquietude of the rich, they would no doubt be contented, and of course happy. In what are called colleges, and other seminaries of learning, the foundation of the misery of thousands is laid; the sentiments inculcated in such places, often in opposition, and not in subordination to the gospel, are as ambition is to humility.

Ah! paradise is even on earth, for the delight of such wealthy men, to whom God has given the power of doing much good, if they would but improve the blessed opportunity, as they will most assuredly wish they had done when they find sickness seize, medicine fail, and the icy arms of death encircling them. I must confess, that the parsimonious and tyrannical conduct of some distinguished professors of religion, has been a stumbling block to me. I associated with them, with a view of putting myself under the protection of virtue, because I found the word religion continually in their mouths; but because I would not be a dependant partisan, I was calumniated: however, their oppression and calumny has cured me of my bigotry, and sectarian predilec. tions; their disorders, of which I have been the victim, have inspired me with the love of order; and their defects have taught me to take my eyes from man, and look only to God for relief, for rest, for refuge. But I forgive them from my

heart, because I also have had much forgiven; and only lament, that the arbitrary few, in either church or state, should have the power to oppress and persecute the comparatively innocent many.

We too often find, in the works of classical and clerical authors, nothing but wrong premises, wrong conclusions, and wrong association of ideas, with a super-abundant transcription of Latin and Greek quotations, which not one in a thousand can understand, and only taunt the reader's ignorance, and expose the author's vanity, and to men of sense will only pass for what they are worth. "Let us look through nature up to nature's God," for unadulterated truth; and take our eyes and hearts from the selfish world, where truth is discarded, and interest is the order of the day, both among politicians and ecclesiastics; where almost every sect endeavours to appropriate the promises and presence of God to their individual churches, to the exclusion of the rest of mankind. Little do they think, that the temple of Jehovah is the universe; his lamp, the sun; his organ, the melodious voices of his saints, who love him; his altar, the most humble heart. Unless the truth shall make us free, we never" shall be free indeed." We were placed upon this earth to know, to love, and to obey the truth, to be grateful to God, and affectionate to man; for it is a fundamental law of nature, (hear it, ye cruel, unfeeling rich men, and tremble at your approaching doom!) that the cruelty of man to his fellow-man, shall recoil upon himself, that no individual villain, or government of them, shall ever find their happiness in the misery of others. This one simple truth undermines the false hopes of millions of the great, the rich, the mighty and honourable of mankind. This sentiment will be grating to the feelings of many, who will no doubt hate me, because I tell them the truth. I am most earnestly desirous to do good to mankind; I must, therefore, calculate upon calumny and abuse from them; but abuse or applause are synonymous terms with me, as I endeavour to write so as to merit the approbation, not of man, but of my conscience and of God.

I have learned by my own miseries, always to pity and relieve the miserable, and to look forward to death as a pleasing sleep, which will end them all. I sought truth with singleness of heart, and I did not seek it in vain; and I have

learned, that in order to preserve it pure, it must be deposited in a pure heart; for when the eye is evil, the light within us is turned to darkness. Every good man finds an unerring guide and a faithful monitor in his heart, while it is single and full of gratitude; he feels and finds Deity in his soul, both in power, intelligence and goodness.

It was an easy thing for an artful, designing villain, in the early and solitary ages of the world, while the chief employ. ment of men was attending their flocks and cultivating their lands, to usurp authority over his neighbours, and to influence them by his false eloquence to relinquish their peaceable and profitable employments, and become a banditti to overcome a country, lay it under contribution, and enslave the defenceless and innocent inhabitants. It was also an easy thing for this artful villain, when his power was established by multiplied conquests, or rather robberies, to entitle himself the chief or king of his band, and consequently of 'his country. Thus, most assuredly, robbery was the foundation on which monarchy was originally built.

"Proud Nimrod first the bloody chase began,

A mighty hunter, and his prey was man.

What in the first instance was considered the most cruel murder and robbery, in the following years was called conquest, and the spoil a just acquisition; hence the people who viewed the robber Nimrod, on the commencement of his career, with horror and detestation, in the following years viewed the same Nimrod metamorphosed to a monarch, not only with cringing servility, but with sycophantic adulation, (I had almost said adoration,) such is the servile, abject, hypocritical nature of man. But we need not go to the early ages of the world to ascertain the origin of monarchy and aristocracy. The case of Bonaparte presents itself, to prove to a demonstration the villany of monarchy and the servility of man. Likewise Christophe, the negro emperor of St. Domingo, and (antipodes of Toussaint Louverture,) who has recently been metamorphosed from an obscure subaltern to a sable monarch. In order to account for the many bloody and brutal wars which have been the curse and disgrace of humanity from time immemorial, we have only to consider how natural it was for these bands of robbers, who parcelled

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