And shews this vengeful, blood-stain'd thing was made To serve to Priestcraft, as his stock in trade.

Is there a God?

Hear haughty Power reply:

"Who Priesteraft's deity shall dare deny,

We have decreed, in torture let him die."

Is there a God? Hear wealth with lardy sides :
(A world of care has he for all besides,
The needy circle he might set at ease,

Around his dwelling, if he did but please.)

Hear wealth: "There is a God, the God whom priests
Teach us to worship: all who doubt are beasts.
What would the nations do without a God?
Justice would weep o'er power's broken rod,
Subordination would no more be known;
Nor I adorn the bench, nor George the throne.
From fear of God set human nature free,
What would become of rank and property?
Missions 1 help to pay, that God's own word
May be in earth's remotest regions heard:
Yea, even Apes on God's own word shall look."
He speaks, exults, and lifts a printed book!
Is there a God? The philosophic brain,
Whose axioms are-what it must needs explain,
Leads on its puzzled reader thro' a maze
Of letter-press by such surprising ways;

So flower'd with verbiage, and so lit with thought,
The tiring traveller wonders how 'twas wrought:
And when with aching eyes and dizzy brain,
And blunted penetration, he again
Breathes freely in the air of common sense,
He asks, why entered he, on what pretence?
"Oh for to learn if there's a God or not:-
There is is not by God, he has forgot!
Is there a God? let Reason be our guide,
Set free from interest, superstition, pride;
I mean not God in a religious sense,
But a First Cause, All-wise, Intelligence;
I ask the free, th' informed, the man of sense,
No one has seen him, therefore, who'll reply?
Since who asserts there is, may tell a lie :
Will this man, that man, you, my may deny ?
But what says Reason! judging things unknown
By things we know, which is the means alone,
By which their truth we can approximate;
Say what says Reason in this doubtful state?

First take a work of Man's, a watch will do;
Examine it, aye, look it thro' and thro'.
Mark well its order, see the wond'rous skill
Of spring and chain, and wheel impelling wheel;
Then mark this order, work completion; see,
The hand is round, the hour is mark'd, 'tis three!
By this completion, what do we obtain ?
Important knowledge;-good, an end we gain;
Now that we gain this end, attain this good;
What are the means by Reason understood?
Completion, order, retrospectively;
Extend this view, and you plainly see
Contrivance and design, which do imply
Intelligence, or truth's itself a lie.

Now judging That, unknown, by This we know,
Is there a God? To work let Reason go.
And take the solar system, if he will;

A flower or mite, and mark the wond'rous skill
With which the flowing blood or sap appears
In these, in that the order of the spheres ;
See the great ends, this order doth attain;
Then will he call it chance, or say 'tis vain?
In Nature's works, or be they high or low,
If, then, attainment from completion flow,
And if completion does from order spring,
As is observed in man's ingenious thing;
Reason will find, by retrospective view,
Contrivance and design; if so, 'tis true,
We must a Great Intelligence infer

In Nature;-be God then, the Mind of Her.

Westminster.

March 29, 1828.

H. M. L.

ANSWER.

If if; if if; if if

Man steals, he is a thief.
And if there be design,
There must be also mind.
If mind must be, 'tis odd,
How it can form a god,

Without those nerves and such

Eyes, ears, taste and touch,

And the cogitation

That is mind's creation.

R. C.

FIFTH DISCOURSE,

Delivered before the Society of Universal Benevolence, on Sunday, August 27th, 1826

On Moral Fortitude.

By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B., Orator of the Society.

Men and BrethREN.-Your very earnest and animated attention from the first day that I had the happiness of addressing you as Members of the Society, or Friends to the principles of universal benevolence; (an attention so honourable to yourselves and of so delightful an augury in promise of the final triumph of those principles,) precludes the necessity of any recapitulation on your account, of the method of inculcation through which we have thus far proceeded.

For the benefit only of those who fall in now, for the first time, on our advanced stage, it may be necessary to state, that having on Sunday last, treated of the means, both physical and moral, whereby vigour, tone, and strength might be given to the intellectual faculties (and consequently to the moral characters) of men: we come now to that delicate and exquisite line, at which the physical and moral faculties (inseparably interwoven in the plexus of their origination) bifurcate into their distinctive characters; and the philosopher becomes competent to hang the plummet of demarcation, assigning on this side, what the machine is, by the idiosyncrasy of its structure; and on that side, what the man is, as the creature of moral instruction.

The first, therefore, of all virtues,-the first appearance of a quality in man, acquired and superadded to his physical anatomy, is that quality which we call MORAL FORTITUDE. This, therefore, in consecutive order, claims the present place in our tractation: and under favour of your most honoured attention, shall be the subject of the present discourse.

The word fortitude, like that which is almost its synonime, (virtue,) takes its origin in a term expressive of physical strength, or power, as fortis (strong,) and hence fortitudo (strength) as peculiarly predicted of the mind: and virtus-from vis, (power or force,) and vir, (a man) indicative of the kind of strength and force which makes man what he is. Undoubtedly, therefore, this is not, a physical strength merely, nor attributable merely to his physical organization. For in these respects, the Lord of the creation, must yield the ascendancy to the thousandfold strength of the Rhinoceros, the vaulting spring of the Tiger, the stupendous majesty of the Elephant, in whose despite, nature hath made the paragon of her works, a monarch of all the weakest ; yet of all the Lord.

The noble theorem, therefore, of a moral capability in man, wholly distinct from the physical energies of muscles, nerves, and sinews, has its demonstration in every work of art, or contrivance of ingenuity presented to our observation. While the condition of a more helpless and infirm infancy than attaches to any other creature, through which the human animal proceeds to his tardy maturity, is pregnant with a lesson of the highest moral advantage. As if nature, casting her brightest material into her softest mould, had designed that, taking its structure only from her hand, it might owe its perfection to itself alone.

And so taught the Roman satirist, whose philosophy was as good-while his theology could not possibly be worse than that of the best theologians and philosophers of the present day.

"Hæc satis est orare Jovem qui donat et aufert;

Det vitam, det opes, animum æquum, mi ipse parabo.
Let Jupiter give me life and means,

I will give myself an equal mind.

The justice of the sentiment, (with our pardon for the terms in which it is conveyed) is of the more importance to be inculcated, inasmuch as the prevalent want of moral fortitude among men, is so directly attributable to the more mischievous superstition which has originated and consecrated a directly opposite sentiment.

Men, having been most preposterously led to look for virtue, to an imaginary source of it, (from whence reason would, that they should have looked for nothing at all,) have been rendered thereby traitors against their own capabilities: and in the neglect of what they could, and what theymight have done for their own improvement; by the perverted application of their, energies, wearying themselves to catch the moon's reflected surface from off the bosom of the glassy lake, have sunk into that nerveless impotency which supposes a fatal destination of man to troubles which his wisdom might avert, or his courage might redress.

The distinctive quality of fortitude of mind, the absolute necessity of which, to man, and the means and discipline of acquiring and improving which in ourselves, I am now to illustrate, is defined by the illustrious orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, the highest authority I could possibly adduce, either on this or any other subject, as "that quality which is ever to be called into action-in grief or pain, in labour, and in danger."

Fortitudo omnis in dolore, in labore, aut in periculo spectatur.

The subjection of man to these circumstances, renders a certain degree of moral fortitude necessary to the preservation of his existence; while a high degree of it, is the most essential ornament of his nature-and the glory of his character as a man. No. 14.-Vol. 3.

2 F

There was nothing that the worthies of Greece and Rome were so ashamed of, as to be found deficient in this quality:nothing of which they were so ambitious, (and most justly and reasonably so) as to obtain from their contemporaries and from posterity, the fame of having excelled in it. Hence, in their language itself, we trace the inseparable connection of rhetoric and logic-so they spake, because so they reasoned.

Avdpaa, manhood; and viriliter agere, "to act like a man," were the terms by which they expressed the virtue of fortitude; because they had no notion that a man could be worthy of the name of man, who was destitute of that quality. And as all other virtues suppose and imply a moral strength in the mind, whereby it makes an effort, and struggles against the opposition of circumstances that might sway it into vice; and all vice, supposes a yielding and giving-up to the sway of those circumstances; so, with exceeding propriety, they accounted it better to die, and so altogether to cease to be a man, than being one, to live under a suspicion of wanting that character of fortitude, without which, there can be no virtue present, and no vice absent from the mind.

Though the quality of moral fortitude in man, cannot well be conceived to be compatible with the indulgence of any vice, or the commission of crimes, inasmuch as these things seem to origiginate in want of fortitude to have persisted in a magnanimous course of integrity and virtue; and the definition of MR. ADDISON can hardly be overthrown.

"True fortitude is seen in great exploits,

Which justice warrants and which wisdom guides;
All else is towering frenzy and distraction.'

Yet it is no less true, that independently of the character of actions in which it may be called into exercise, and as logicians say "per se," in itself alone; whether it be found in a good man, or in one that must in all other respects, be deemed a bad one, fortitude is still a glorious virtue it is still that essentially rewardable quality, which commands our admiration in whomsoever found, and in whose honour, fate and fortune empty their cornucopia, before the feet of him who is endued with it.

'Tis this which vindicates nature's justice in the often admired prosperity of very bad men, and the successful issue of evil enterprises. The fortitude therein displayed, the fortitude alone was glorious, and fortune gives the prize to this, as a stimulus to that energy and activity which is of the nature of life itself, and without which, the mere passive and enduring qualities of a beggarly very-well-sort of virtue, sink into inanity and uselessness.

Who, but almost forgives his life of crime, and forgets the evil of the cause in which he was engaged, when he contemplates the fortitude of the Spaniard Cortes, on the Mexican tower, flinging