by way of paying insurance to the saints, who will infalli bly save you from being shipwrecked on the rock of perdition, and will steer you into the harbor of grace. Yet we are not Papists, no we won't give you absolution-we are not Protestants-No-we will not save you by repentance-No, No, we are Methodists; and it is regeneration shall save you; it shall be the cork waistcoat that shall keep you floating, and ye shall not sink into the bottomless pit of the sea, where the Devil lies in the shape of a shark to devour you."

BIBLE SOCIETY.

"Fools that we are, like Israel's fools of yore,
The calf ourselves have fashioned, we adore;
"But let true reason once resume her reign,
"This God shall dwindle to a calf again."

THE Editor of a Maryland paper recommends the establishment of these institutions in the following way:

"Every real christian has great cause to rejoice in the establishment of the " Bible Society," for by this institution every house may become a Church, and every heart an altar. Not so with the old dark system of conveying divine truths. A frail mortal like unto others is dubbed a priest ; he mounts the rostrum, gives himself audience; takes a favorite text to answer his own purpose; declaims against all other sects but his own; puts all into the lake of dreadful conflagration: brings them out again, and thus, through his gospel, makes DEITY as frail and as fickle as himself. The Scriptures certainly are" the true light which are to enlighten every one that cometh into the world." This great and unchangeable truth observed, where then is the need of the craft? of bishops, priests, deacons, and that host of drones, living in idleness, on the fat of the land, and the credulity and bigotry of the people! The time is come, when, in a great degree, there will be an end of these impositions. The scriptures

must be fulfilled, and the word of God is, "They shall all know me from the least to the greatest, without the counsel of priests, or the teaching of mortals."

We like the manner in which the Editor treats pulpit arrogance, but he seems not to be aware of another text in that celebrated book called the Bible, contradictory to what he has quoted, viz. "Who by searching can find out God? Who can find out the Almighty unto perfection?" evidently conveying a negative in the interrogatory form. We are inclined to believe this text to be true, and that no scriptures, or pulpit declaimers, will ever communicate a full and perfect knowledge of Deity to mankind. Nor is it necessary to be done. Much time has been lavished upon this topic by the learned, that might have been more usefully employed in the investigation of subjects immediately connected with our well being. What can a Doctor of Divinity, who makes theology the peculiar study of his life, know of his maker, which is not known to the illiterate ploughman? The ploughman knows that there is a God, that he is just and good. What more is necessary? The Theologian, impelled by pride and zeal to establish a peculiar doctrine, will perhaps persuade himself that God is partial, vindictive and unjust; electing some to eternal happiness, and reprobating others to eternal misery, without regard to their respective merits. This he believes upon the authority of some obscure unintelligible passage in a book, written by ignorant, though perhaps well meaning men, and compiled and pronounced holy by a council of illiterate priests, induced, as spiritual physicians, to represent the malady of their patients as the most frightful and forlorn. It is a remarkable fact, which cannot be too often noticed, that, for want of education, many of the priests whose vote decided the faith of christendom, were necessitated to substitute a mark for their signature. To those, whose faculty of understanding is not so completely blunted by faith as to be impervious to the rays of knowledge, we recommend the following lines, extracted from the Essay on

Man, by Alexander Pope, who possessed an unusual share of the useful, legitimate and indubitable spirit of inspiration.

Say first, of God above or man below,

What can we reason, but from what we know?

Of man, what see we but his station here,

From which to reason, or to which refer?

Through worlds unnumber'd though the God be known,
"Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He, who through vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What vary'd being peoples ev'ry star,
May tell why Heaven has made us as we are.
But of this frame, the bearings and the ties,
The strong connections, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look'd through? or can a part contain the whole ?

Of systems possible, if 'tis confest

That wisdom infinite must form the best,
Where all must fall, or not coherent be,
And all that rises, rise in due degree,
Then in the scale of reas'ning life, 'tis plain,
There must be, somewhere, such a rank as man ;
And all the question (wrangle e'er so long)
Is only this, if God has plac'd him wrong ?

Then say not man's imperfect; Heav'n in fault;
Say rather, man's as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur'd to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space.

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor❜d mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;

His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;

Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n
Behind the cloud-topt hill an humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier inland in the watʼry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no christians thirst for gold.

PRINCE OF WALES CONVERTED!!

An Editor of a Baltimore paper says, " that an enlightened and philanthropic gentleman lately returned from Europe states, that the Prince of Wales had thrown aside his dissolute morals, cast off his profligate manners, turned away from the path of vice, and attended strictly and devoutly to his religious duties, in short, that an intire reformation in his politics, as well as morals, has been manifested in a very striking manner." He adds, "it is a matter of notoriety in London that he had become so regularly a churchman, that his old comrades tauntingly call him the Methodist Prince." The inference, which this philanthropic editor draws from the information of his philanthropic friend, is, that the Prince of Wales will tread in the footsteps of his honoured Father ; and that blood and slaughter will continue to desolate the face of the earth. Later accounts, state that the Prince had been appointed Regent, had taken the sacrament, and was preparing to clothe himself with the regal power. He must be at this time about fifty years of age; his conversion comes rather late, and is certainly of the Methodistical kind, that is, instantaneous; but no matter, he may pass for an eleventh hour convert; and will no doubt make as good, and as pious a king as his father. Thus are the fools of this world hoaxed, and managed by the knowing ones!

No. 8.

"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, "But looks through Nature up to Nature's God."-POPE.

LETTER VI.

ON RELIGIOUS EVILS.

BY SOAME JENYNS.

[Concluded from page 252.]

I NOW come to my last head of evils, which I call religious; by which I mean all that madness, and folly, into which mankind have perpetually fallen under the name of religion; together with all those persecutions, massacres, and martyrdoms, which some have been induced to inflict, and others to suffer, from an enthusiastic zeal for those errors and absurdities: evils of the most enormous size, and which of all others are the most difficult to be accounted for, as their existence seems most inconsistent with infinite goodness, and most easily preventable by infinite power. For, though human nature could not be exempted from natural and moral evil (as has been shewn) even by omnipotence, yet, one would think, a far less degree of power might have been sufficient to have defended it from religious; by imparting to mankind, a true, rational, and explicit system of theology and ethies; by which means all the absurdities of false religions, and all the calamities flowing from those absurdities, would have been effectually prevented. Wonderful therefore must it appear, since the happiness of men, through