AN APOLOGY FOR RESENTMENT

I WILL here crave the reader's leave to make one general apology for anything, either in my Dissertation or my Defence of it, that may seem too severe. I desire but this favour, or justice rather, that he would suppose my case to be his own: and then, if he will say sincerely, that he should have answered so many calumnies with fewer marks of resentment, I am content to lie under his censure. But it is a very difficult thing for a person unconcerned and out of the reach of harm, to be a fair arbitrator here. He will be apt to think the injured party too angry; because he cannot have as great a passion in seeing the ill-usage, as the other has in feeling it. Even Job himself, with all his patience, was accused of losing his temper by his companions that had no share in his sufferings. Besides, there is a common fault in human nature, which I crave leave to express in Greek, éiɣaiρekakía. There is a secret pleasure, they say, in seeing another man under the risk of a shipwreck, while one's self is safe on the shore; and so we find the world is delighted to see one worried and run down, while themselves are made the spectators, and entertained with the diversion. 'Twas an excellent saying of Solon's, and worthy of the wisest of the famous seven; who, when he was asked, Πῶς ἥκιστα ἀδικοῖεν οἱ ἄνθρωποι; What would rid the world of injuries? If the bystanders, says he, would have the same resentment with those that suffer the wrong; Ei oμoíws ἄχθοιντο τοῖς ἀδικουμένοις οἱ μὴ ἀδικούμενοι. If the reader will but follow that great man's advice, and have an equal sense of ill-usage as if it had fallen upon himself; I dare then challenge him to think, if he can, that I have used too much severity.

oi

I do not love the unmanly work of making long complaints of injuries; which, I think, is the next fault to deserving them. Much less will I imitate Mr. B.,1 who has raked together those few words of my Dissertation that had the least air of resentment, 1 Mr. Boyle.

and repeated them six times over. For, if I was to enter into the particulars of his abuses, I must transcribe his whole book, which from beginning to end, is nothing else but a rhapsody of errors and calumnies.

But there is one rudeness that I ought not to omit; because it falls upon others as much as myself. I am satisfied, says he, how unnatural a step it is for an amanuensis to start up professor of divinity. I am persuaded every ingenuous reader must be offended at his insolence who could suffer such stuff as this to come out of his mouth; which is a double affront, both to the whole order of bishops, and to a whole University. As if a person, who in his youth had been an amanuensis to a bishop, was upon that account made unfit to be Doctor of Divinity; as if a whole University, which was pleased to confer that degree upon him, were neither fit judges of his merit, nor knew their own duty.

I should never account it any disgrace to have served the Right Reverend the Bishop of Worcester in any capacity of a scholar. But I was never amanuensis to his lordship nor to anybody else; neither did his lordship ever make use of any amanuensis: so little regard has this examiner either to decency or truth. I was tutor to his lordship's son, and afterwards chaplain to himself; and I shall always esteem it both my honour and my happiness to have spent fourteen years of my life in his family and acquaintance, whom even envy itself will allow to be the glory of our church and nation; who, by his vast and comprehensive genius, is as great in all parts of learning as the greatest next himself are in any. And I have the satisfaction to believe, that this excellent person has not the worse opinion of my probity or my learning, for all the calumnies that the examiner has cast upon me.

As for the general character that Mr. B. endeavours to fix upon me, that I have no learning, no judgment, no reasoning, no knowledge in books, except indexes and vocabularies, with many other expressions of the utmost contempt, that make up the greatest part of his book; I do not think myself concerned to answer them. These things shall never make a dispute between us; he shall be as great as he thinks himself, and I as little as he thinks me. But then it will lie upon him to dispute with some other persons, who have been pleased to declare publicly such an esteem of me and my writings, as does not altogether agree with Mr. B.'s.

(From the Preface to the Dissertation on Phalaris.)

THE COMMONPLACES OF SCEPTICISM

AND now we come to a new argument, from the conduct of the priests; which by a tedious induction is branched out into ten instances, and takes up half a hundred pages. And what will be the grand result?

Nae iste hercle magno jam conatu magnas nugas dixerit.

The sum of it is no more than this: the priests cannot agree among themselves about several points of doctrine, the attributes of God, the canon of Scripture, etc.; and therefore I will be of no religion at all. This threadbare obsolete stuff, the most obvious surmise that any wavering fool catches at when he first warps towards atheism, is dressed up here as if it was some new and formidable business.

What great feats can our author now promise himself from this; which, after it has been tried age after age, never had influence on mankind either in religious concerns or common life? Till all agree, I'll stand neuter. Very well; and till all the world speaks one language, pray be you mute and say nothing. It were much the wiser way, than to talk as you have done. By this rule, the Roman gentry were to learn no philosophy at all, till the Greeks could unite into one sect; nor make use of any physician, till the empirics and methodists concurred in their way of practice. How came Christianity to begin, since the objection now brought to pull it down was as visible and potent then as now? or how has it subsisted so long, since all the present discord in opinions does not near amount to the sum of what Epiphanius alone collected above a thousand years ago? Nay, how came our author's new sect to be rising and growing, since the atheists are as much at variance among themselves, and can settle and centre in nothing? Or, if they should resolve to conspire in one certain system, they would be atheists indeed still, but they would lose the title of free-thinkers.

This is the total of his long induction; but let us see his conduct in the parts of it. Some fathers thought God to be material; this he has said, and I have answered before in remark the 10th. Several ancient Christian priests of Egypt were so gross as to conceive God to be in the shape of a man.

If they did so, they were no more gross than his master Epicurus, who was of the very same opinion. But it is fatal to our author ever to blunder when he talks of Egypt. These priests of Egypt were all illiterate laymen; the monks or hermits of those days, that retired into the desert, the fittest place for their stupidity. But several of your English divines tax each other with atheism, either positively or consequently. Wonderful! and so because three or four divines in your island are too fierce in their disputes, all we on the great continent must abandon religion. Yes; but the Brahmins, the Mahometans, etc., pretend to Scriptures as well as we. This, too, has come once already, and is considered in remark the 22nd; but, being so great a piece of news, deserved to be told twice. who, without his telling, would have known that the Romish church received the Apocrypha as canonical? Be that as it will, I am sure it is unheard-of news, that your church receives them as half-canonical. I find no such word in your articles, nor ever saw a such-like prodigy before. Half-canonical? what idea, what sense has it? 'tis exactly the same as half-divine, half-infinite, half-omnipotent. But away with his Apocrypha; he'll like it the worse while he lives, for the sake of Bel and the Dragon.

And

(From Remarks on Collins's Discourse of Freethinking.)

CAPTIOUS ARGUMENTS ANSWERED

To show his good taste and his virtuous turn of mind, he praises two abuses upon James I.; that he was a doctor more than a king, and was priest-ridden by his archbishop; as the most valuable passages in Father Paul's Letters; and yet, as I have been told, those passages are spurious and forged. Well, but were they genuine and true, are those the things he most values ? Oh, the vast love and honour he bears to the crown and the mitre ! But his palate is truly constant and uniform to itself: he drudges in all his other authors, ancient and modern, not to find their beauties, but their spots; not to gather the roses, but the thorns; not to suck good nutriment, but poison. A thousand bright pages in Plutarch and Tully pass heavy with him, and without relish; but if he chances to meet with

a suspicious or sore place, then he is feasted and regaled, like a fly upon an ulcer, or a beetle in dung, and with those delicious scraps put together, he has dressed out this book of free-thinking.

But have a care of provoking him too much, for he has still in reserve more instances of your conduct; your declamations against reason; such false reason, I suppose, as he and his tribe would put off for good sterling: your arts and method of discouraging examination into the truths of religion; such truths, forsooth, of religion as this, that religion itself is all false and again, your encouraging examination when either authority is against you (the authority, he means, of your late King James, when one of his free-thinking doctors thought himself into popery), or when you think that truth is certainly on your side he will not say that truth is certainly on your side, but only that you think so: however, he allows here you are sometimes sincere; a favour he would not grant you in some of his former instances.

:

But the last and most cutting instance is, your instilling principles into youth no doubt he means those pernicious principles of fearing God, honouring the king, loving your neighbour as yourselves; living soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Oh, the glorious nation you would be, if your stiff parsons were once displaced, and free - thinkers appointed tutors to your young nobility and gentry! How would arts, learning, manners, and all humanity flourish in an academy under such preceptors! who, instead of your Bible, should read Hobbes's Leviathan; should instil early the sound doctrines of the mortality of the soul, and the sole good of a voluptuous life. No doubt such an establishment would make you a happy people, and even a rich; for our youth would all desert us in Germany, and presently pass the sea for such noble education.

The beginning of his third section, where (as I remarked before) free-thinking stands for no more than thinking, may pass in general for truth, though wholly an impertinence. For who in England forbids thinking? or who ever made such objections as he first raises, and then refutes ? He dare not, sure, insinuate as if none of your clergy thought, nor examined any points of doctrine, but took a system of opinions by force and constraint, under the terror of an inquisition, or the dread of fire and faggot. So that we have twenty pages of mere