tend to come from God, is there any, that so fully comes up to all my wants, that carries with it such an appearance of truth and power, as the Christian?' In contrast to this, there is another short method, used by a mind disposed to libertinism: Why were appetites given me, if I am not to indulge them since neither the Christian, nor any other religion established in the world, will grant me a licence to indulge those appetites at my own discretion, have I not a right to reject all those religions, and make it my only religion to live according to my nature?' As to those who will pursue the longer method of inquiry about religion through the wide ocean of learning and controversy, they ought first to consider whether they are provided with a rudder, sails, and ballast, for such a voyage. Although a strong natural judgment is, in the first place, absolutely necessary to such an inquiry; yet, without abundance of learning, it will be of no use. He who knows little, let his talents be what they will, hath neither sufficient materials to work on, nor sufficient instruments to work with; and must therefore employ those he hath to ends and purposes quite foreign to their natural aptitudes and powers. Like a tradesman, who hath but two or three tools, and therefore must saw with a hatchet, and bore with a chissel; the illiterate or half-learned controvertist is forced with a little modern philosophy, and a scanty stock of reading, scarcely extending farther than his mother-tongue can carry him, to beat his way through controversies impossible to be learnedly settled without a great skill in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and antiquities. If he is a Buckinger, mere necessity may turn his stumps into a sort of hands, with which he may perform feats to be wondered at, not because they exceed the performances of other men, but because they are done under so great disadvantages. Notwithstanding this, it is a point much laboured at by our present libertines, of all degrees, to decry learning, study, and antiquity; and to recommend nature as the best instructor, and guide. This they do, because learning and antiquity are against their principles; and nature, by which they mean human nature, in its present degenerate condition, favours those principles, as much as they again patronise their vicious pleasures. Nature in man, as well as other animals, if destitute of culture, quickly

grows wild and savage. If we are to make no advantage of history or antiquity, why do Perault, and sir Thomas Pope Blount, call the present times the ancient? It is true, the world, like a man, may grow wiser, as it grows older; but, surely, this it cannot do by decrying, and laying aside the knowledge of antiquity, on which, alone, all new improvements must be built. This witty reflection, therefore, made use of by the writers mentioned, to vilify ancient learning, contradicts and subverts itself; for, in respect to knowledge, a man can be called old, in the latter part of his life, only from the memory he retains of his past experiences and acquisitions. When the man of seventy hath lost his memory, he is again a child; and the world, in like manner, must return to ignorance and barbarism, if it neglects to enrich itself with the treasures of antiquity. Such, however, is the humour of the present times, that they will pretend to philosophy, and even learning, who never read above ten years backward, and who prefer the last novel or newspaper, to Herodotus and Livy. All this is done in order to strike at the Bible, from whence we draw, and by which we prove, our religion for the same reason, the writings of the fathers, those outworks to the sacred volumes, are cried down, and laid aside, and their excellent authors ridiculed, by the name of greybeards, and old women. Behold the judgment of God on such a conduct! These despisers of antiquity are carrying the present age with them headlong into ignorance and barbarism, insomuch that even infidelity will, in a little time, have nothing else to found itself on but the former, nor to defend itself with, but the latter. Our country, so famous, in the last century, for its Boyles, Newtons, Addisons, &c. hath at present, few rising geniuses to boast of in any of the arts and sciences. Who is there to follow Cave, Sanderson, Bull, Barrow, Tillotson, and the few eminent divines, still living, whom we borrow from the last century? Who, to take the place of Newton and Halley in mathetics and natural philosophy? Who, to succeed Dryden, Congreve, Pope, or Swift, in wit and poetry.

Temp. I take your observation, which is but too just, to be an omen of approaching barbarism. What can men expect, in any species of production, from nature unimproved, or reason uninstructed? The same thing happens

in all human performances; for instance, in dramatic poetry, as well as theology; if a man follows, in either, the dictates of his own fancy, without rules or culture, he must fail of truth in the one, and of excellence in the other. It is true, he that thinks or writes in this manner, conforms to his own particular nature, or perhaps the passions and taste of men less refined than himself: but he follows not true or general nature, no more than he does right reason. For this I may appeal, in respect to dramatic poety, to Aristotle, Horace, Cervantes, Dacier, and the duke of Buckingham, in Gildon's Essay on the Art and Rise of the Stage;' nay, and to lord Shaftsbury himself. Now it is, I think, not a little strange, that even deistical critics, such as lord Shaftsbury and Gildon, who own that the greatest geniuses can do almost nothing, without learning and culture, as to other kinds of production, wherein fancy predominates, and reason acts only a secondary part, should, in respect to the production of religious knowledge, insist, that a man of the meanest capacity, although utterly uninstructed, may easily strike out a perfect system, and, when he hath done, defend it with sufficient reasons. There are some, who, presuming on the truth of this extraordinary opinion, boldly enter the lists of religious controversy, without any fund of reading or knowledge. Others, however, whom I could name, do read; but it is in a way the most whimsical you can imagine: they run over a book with all imaginable haste and impatience, tipping the Italics as they go along, to pick out a general notion of the author's subject and matter, in order to flourish with it in conversation among beaux and ladies: this they call skimming. If a solid and learned performance were milk, they might, by this method, get the cream; but such performances being strong liquors, fermented in the head of a great genius, the skimmer gets nothing but the scum and froth. But he seldom deals in any thing else than modern trifles, penned by authors who are as great skimmers in writing, as he is in reading; so that he rarely gets any thing more, than that lighter kind of froth which rides on the very surface. There are, however, different degrees of skimmers: first, he who goes no farther than the title-page, as Librarius, famous for his collection of gilded books; secondly, he who proceeds to the contents

and index, as Micarius, the common-place declaimer; and, lastly, he who runs over the better part of a book, dipping here and there into the two or three first lines of a paragraph, and, like the king's fisher, now and then picking out a small morsel for retail.

Shep. Your account of the skimmers, who are a species of readers I never heard of before, is very entertaining.

Is I remember rightly, I think you said, in speaking of yourself, when a Deist, that your libertine principles had a bad effect on your morals.

Temp. The beauty of virtue, and the deformity of vice, were then all the moral principles I had: others may speak for themselves; but, for my own part, I confess, the beauty even of a bad woman generally made a greater impression on me, than the beauty of virtue; and, as to the deformity of vice, I can only say, that I had by no means so great a distaste to drunkenness, as to temperance. This, perhaps, was owing to my not abstracting and subliming my principles as high as lord Shaftsbury did; but this I must say, that not a soul of my deistical acquaintances was a whit more refined in his morals than myself; nay, most of them were so grossly wicked, that their vices could not be even reproved, without indecency.

Shep. If a real Christian can be an ill liver, his religion, I am sure, is not to be blamed for it; and if a Deist should lead a better life than a Christian, trace the wonder to what cause you will, most certainly his principles are not to be thanked for it; these principles laying him under no ties, which every Christian is not subject to, and taking off others of the greatest strength. Virtue is a thing of such importance, that it cannot be founded on too firm a basis. In the Christian religion it is built on the love of ourselves, which, say what we will, is the strongest of all our natural propensities and instincts? whereas, in Deism, it rests on the internal sense of moral beauty and deformity alone, which, as Christians are men, must be found in them, as well as in Deists. Besides, the self-sufficient Deist is his own judge, and may be as indulgent to himself as he pleases; for, in case of guilt, he hath a thousand amusements to blunt the feeble stings of the moral sense, and can

reward his well-doing with unlimited applauses; but the Christian hath God for his judge, and conscience for his witness; whose admonitions, although ever so severe, he is not at liberty to stifle, but, on the contrary, is obliged to enliven them with the most intense and continual reflections, and to attend to them with all possible patience and submission. This comparison gives us Christians no small cause to be uneasy at living among men, whose hands are at liberty for the perpetration of any villainy, while ours are tied up by our religion, from even a defensive resentment. I know most men recommend restraints to others, but keep themselves as free as they can. If, however, we all have reason to fear one another in some degree, which experience tells me is the case; it is necessary we should all, in proportion, be bound over to our good behaviour by better security than merely that of the moral sense. An intellectual Narcissus, like lord Shaftsbury, may be deeply smitten with the beauties of his own mind, reflected from the mirror. of his own conceit; but, notwithstanding this, the rest of mankind may have so much reason to think otherwise of him, as to let him live and die without any other admirers than those, whose whimsical understandings are disposed to dwindle into the mere echoes of his opinions. The present times are, no doubt, very happy under the influence of the new principles, which have planted so much benevolence and love of the species' among us, that a woman cannot refuse to propagate it with other men, as well as her husband. Friendship, too, runs so high upon the new benevolent system, that a man will hardly hesitate to lie, perjure, or murder, for his friend. Every man begins to know the right use and true value of laws and society; and sells them accordingly. Loose principles are retained only as panders to loose desires, and serve as well as confessors, who turn pimps to those that maintain them.

THEY who have any real regard for the political welfare of their country, be they ever so indifferent about religion, should consider a little to what a catastrophe the reigning principles of the times are guiding this unhappy nation: so much of our libertine notions as is old, hath been already suspected by philosophers; distrusted, as insufficient, or