and reason can suggest, that the ancient philosophers, who carried virtue as high as it was possible without divine assistance, fell into the gross enormities practised by the people they lived among. They made all the efforts human strength was capable of, to find out the true object of worship, and came nearer to the discovery, in proportion as they had opportunities, by travelling into the east, of drawing hints from the stream of true tradition. And, after all, none but Socrates and Plato talked of one God, and that but obscurely, speaking, at other times, in favour of a plurality of gods, and recommending it to their disciples to worship the deities of their country. However, it must be owned they lived, in the main, as if they had better principles of religion than their countrymen and contemporaries. They did enough to shew, that if they had been well acquainted with the true religion, they would never have taken long journeys by land, and made dangerous voyages by sea, to visit the celebrated prostitutes of their time; they would never have let out their wives for hire, nor kept their misses, nor given the world the strongest reasons to think them guilty of greater crimes, than it was possible to commit with the other sex. What a condition must the pagan world have been in, when the ancient philosophers were esteemed by their contemporaries, as the wisest and best of men! Yet this must have been the case, or the youth of prime quality had never been committed to their tuition. Those philosophers, however, had, generally speaking, little sense of religion, and as little of moral virtue, or even decency. Many of them were Atheists, as Diagoras, Theodorus, and Critias. Epicurus denied the spirituality and providence of God, and so did all his followers. Aristotle denied his providence, as to this lower world. In the opinion of Hippasus and Heraclitus, God was fire; in that of Parmenides, a mixture of fire and earth; in that of Xenophanes, a great impassible sphere of matter. Socrates and Plato were, at least in practice, polytheists; so were Cicero and Plutarch, the latter holding, among a multiplicity of inferior gods, two supreme deities, the one infinitely good, the other infinitely evil. The Stoics believed God to be the soul of the world, and that soul to consist in a subtile flame. They likewise held, with the poets and the vulgar, that God is subject to

fate. Among the philosophers there were three hundred different opinions concerning their supreme deity, or rather, as Varro testifies, three hundred Jupiters, or supreme deities. The followers of Democritus and Epicurus denied the immortality of the soul. Pherecydes and Pythagoras believed it to be immortal, and gave it in common to brutes, as well as men. The Academics were doubtful, as to this important point. Socrates, Plato, and Cicero, who were more inclined to the belief of a future existence, than the other philosophers, plead for it with arguments of no force, speak of it with the utmost uncertainty, and therefore are afraid to found their system of duty and virtue on the expectation of it. Their notions of morality were of a piece with their religion, and had little else for a foundation than vain-glory. Tully, in his treatise of friendship, says, that virtue proposes glory as its end, and hath no other reward. Accordingly he maintains, that wars undertaken for glory, are not unlawful, provided they are carried on without the usual cruelty. Zeno maintained, that all crimes are equal; that pardon is never to be granted to one, who offends or injures us; and that a man may as lawfully use the utmost familiarity with his mother, as stroke her arm. It was not only his, but, likewise, the opinion of Cleanthes and Chrysippus, that the horrible sin of using the male for the female is a thing indifferent. The two former taught, that sons and daughters may as lawfully roast and eat of the flesh of their parents, as any other food. Diogenes, and the sect of the Cynics, held, that parents have a right to sacrifice and eat their children; and that there is nothing shameful in committing the grossest acts of lewdness publicly, and before the faces of mankind. Epicurus allows of cohabitation with mothers and daughters; Aristippus, although a man of fortune, refused to maintain his own children, regarding them only as the spittle or vermin produced by his body; and as he placed the happiness of a man in the pleasures of a brute, so, to indulge those pleasures, he said, a wise man might commit theft, sacrilege, or adultery, if he had an opportunity. The virtuous sentiments discovered by the philosophers on some occasions, will neither palliate these execrable principles, nor suffer us to think those who could abet them fit instructors for mankind.

Dech. It is not much matter what the philosophers uttered by way of speculation or emblem: the goodness of their lives is a sufficient voucher for the probity of their real principles.

Shep. The very covering of an emblem ought to be chaste and virtuous, lest those, who cannot penetrate to the kernel, should be poisoned by the shell. But that their principles were literally what I have represented them, their practices, which you so confidently appeal to, may fully prove. Plutarch represents Aristotle as a fop, a debauchee, and a traitor to Alexander his master. Dion Cassius is as severe on Seneca the moralist. Lucian, as well as Minutius Felix, represents the sages of antiquity as corrupters of youth, as adulterers and tyrants. Diogenes kept a filthy strumpet, with whom he lay openly in the streets. Speusippus was caught, and slain, in the act of adultery. Aristippus kept a seraglio of boys and whores, and yet took journeys, at the peril of his life, to see the reigning courtesans of his time; nor was lewdness his only vice; he actually forswore a sum of money deposited in his hands. Crates, and the female philosopher Hipparchia, made a practice of strolling from place to place, and lying together publicly before multitudes of people. Xenophon not only kept a boy, called Clinias, with whom he was guilty of unnatural pollutions, but practised the same execrable enormity with persons of riper years. Herillus was a filthy pathic in his youth; Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Zeno, Cleombrotus, and Menippus, committed murder on themselves; the last, because he had lost a considerable sum of money, which, as he was a usurer, went a little too near his heart. That I do not charge the philosophers with worse principles and practices than they them- · selves maintain, and their own pagan historians ascribe to them, any one may satisfy himself, who will consult Diogenes, Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Lucian, Plutarch, and the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Thus, gentlemen, I think it is plain, whether we consider what the human understanding could do, or what it actually did, that it could not have attained to a sufficient knowledge of God without revelation; so that the demonstration, brought in favour of some religion, ends in a demonstration of the revealed. When we attentively consider the nature of man,

we find it necessary he should have some religion; when we consider the nature of God, we cannot help concluding he would never have made a falsehood necessary to the happiness of his rational creatures; and that, therefore, there must be a true religion. And when we consider, that by our natural faculties it is extremely difficult to arrive at a right idea of God till he reveals it to us, that all the gentile world hath run into the grossest theological errors, and, in consequence of those, into the most enormous customs and crimes; and that no legislator ever founded his scheme of civil government on any supposed religious dictates of nature, but always on some real or pretended revelation; we cannot help ascribing all the true religion in the world to divine instruction, and all the frightful variety of religious errors to human invention, and to that dark and degenerate nature, by the imaginary light of which you believe the right idea of God may be easily and universally discovered.

Dech. I cannot give myself leave to think, that an infinitely gracious God could have brought a species of creatures into being, destined to be extremely miserable, if ignorant of their Maker, and yet, by nature, destitute of means to know him; or, that if he did, he could so long have withheld the external opportunities of that knowledge from them all, excepting one inconsiderable nation. I must confess, I have not credulity enough for such an article of faith as this.

Cunn. Nor I, indeed.

Temp. It seems very strange; yet flying to the light of nature will not relieve us from the diffiulty, since wherever that hath been tried, although assisted by some dark traditions and instructions, it hath miserably failed.

Shep. It is true, that light, in the present imbecillity and blindness of human nature, is insufficient; but God never left us altogether trusting to it, having communicated to us the knowledge of himself and his will through Adam and Noah, the common parents of mankind: but men becoming vain in their own imaginations, as St. Paul says, not only departed from the divine instructions, but, in a great measure, extinguished the light of their own reason, whereby their foolish hearts were darkened. And, besides, as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them

over to a reprobate mind:' however, as we are told, he winked at the times of this ignorance; some compassion and indulgence, no doubt he had for those from whom, in afterages, the idolatry of their forefathers had, in a great measure, cut off the necessary means of knowing him. This is farther intimated to us, by what immediately follows; 'but now God commandeth all men every where to repent;' now, that better means of knowing him are afforded, he expects we should return to the worship of him alone. From both expressions we may conclude, that God requires of mankind as much, but no more, knowledge, than he hath given them means of attaining to. What the heathens suffered in this world by their ignorance of the true God, was hardly a sufficient punishment for their neglecting to make a right advantage of the means still left them in the use of their reason, in the consideration of his works, and in the imperfect theological traditions, handed down to them, in order to recover a right notion of God. But of these matters we shall have a more proper occasion to discourse, when we come to consider the last article of the deistical creed, under which, I suppose, Mr. Dechaine will not forget to press me with the late introduction of Christianity.

Dech. I shall not; and, besides, as the day is pretty far advanced, it is time to quit our chat. Mr. Shepherd, will you step over, and dine with us?

Shep. I will wait on you, sir.

Dech. If you stay all night with us, we will return to our subject as early in the morning as you please. Shep. You may command me.

DIALOGUE III.

DECHAINE, TEMPLETON, CUNNINGHAM, SHEPHERD. Dech. THE Conversation of yesterday hath not been out of my thoughts ever since, excepting when I was fast asleep. Shep. A man left to his own hypothesis, although it should happen to be a little inconsistent with itself, is apt to think more uniformly, and rest more quietly, in it, than in a