embraced by philosophers alone, is publicly exercised nowhere but in China.

There is no country in Europe where there are more theists than in England. Some persons ask whether they have a religion or not.

There are two sorts of theists. The one sort think that God made the world without giving man rules for good and evil. It is clear that these should have no other name than that of philosophers.

The others believe that God gave to man a natural law these, it is certain, have a religion, though they have no external worship. They are, with reference to the Christian religion, peaceful enemies, which she carries in her bosom; they renounce without any design of destroying her. All other sects desire to predomi. nate, like political bodies, which seek to feed on the substance of others, and rise upon their ruin: theism alone has always lain quiet. Theists have never been found caballing in any state.

There was in London a society of theists, who for some time continued to meet together. They had a small book of their laws, in which religion, on which so many ponderous volumes have been written, occupied only two pages. Their principal axiom was this"Morality is the same among all men, therefore it comes from God; worship is various, therefore it is the work of man."

The second axiom was, "That men being all brethren, and acknowledging the same God, it is execrable that brethren should persecute brethren, because they tes tify their love for the common father in a different manner. Indeed," said they, "what upright man would kill his elder or his younger brother, because one of them had saluted their father after the Chinese, and the other after the Dutch fashion, especially while it was undecided in what way the father wished their reve rence to be made to him? Surely, he who should act thus, would be a bad brother rather than a good son."

I am well aware that these maxims lead directly to "the abominable and execrable dogma of toleration;"

but I do no more than simply relate the fact. I am very careful not to become a controversialist. It must, however, be allowed, that if the different sects into which Christians have been divided had possessed this moderation, Christianity would have been disturbed by fewer disorders, shaken by fewer revolutions, and stained with less blood.

Let us pity the theists for combating our holy reve lation. But whence comes it that so many Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Nestorians, Arians, partisans of Rome, and enemies of Rome, have been so sanguinary, so barbarous, and so miserable, now persecuting, now persecuted? It is because they have been the multitude. Whence is it that theists, though in error, have never done harm to mankind? Because they have been philosophers. The Christian religion has cost the human species seventeen millions of men, reckoning only one million per century, who have perished, either by the hands of the ordinary executioner, or by those of executioners paid and led to battle,-all for the salvation of souls and the greater glory of God.

I have heard men express astonishment, that a religion so moderate, and so apparently conformable to reason, as theism, has not been spread among the people.

Among the great and little vulgar may be found pious herb-women, Molinist duchesses, scrupulous sempstresses who would go to the stake for anabaptism,-devout hackney-coachmen, most determined in the cause of Luther or of Arius, but no theists: for theism cannot so much be called a religion as a system of philosophy; and the vulgar, whether great or little, are not philosophers.

Locke was a declared theist. I was astonished to find in that great philosopher's chapter on innate ideas, that men have all different ideas of justice. Were such the case, morality would no longer be the same; the voice of God would not be heard by man; natural religion would be at an end. I am willing to believe with him, that there are nations in which men eat their fathers, and where to lie with a neighbour's wife is to

do him a friendly office: but if this be true, it does not prove that the law, "Do not unto others that which you would not have others do unto you," is not general. For if a father be eaten, it is when he has grown old, is too feeble to crawl along, and would otherwise be eaten by the enemy; and, I ask, what father would not furnish a good meal to his son rather than to the enemies of his nation? Besides, he who eats his father, hopes that he in turn shall be eaten by his children.

If a service be rendered to a neighbour by lying with his wife, it is when he cannot himself have a child, and is desirous of having one: otherwise, he would be very angry. In both these cases, and in all others, the natural law, "Do not to another that which you would nothave another do to you," remains unbroken. All the other rules, so different and so varied, may be referred to this. When, therefore, the wise metaphysician Locke, says that men have no innate ideas, that they have different ideas of justice and injustice, he, assuredly, does not mean to assert that God has not given to all men that instinctive self-love by which they are of necessity guided.*

ATOMS.

EPICURUS, equally great as a genius, and respectable in his morals; and after him Lucretius, who forced the Latin language to express philosophical ideas, and, to the great admiration of Rome, to express them in verse;-Epicurus and Lucretius, I say, admitted atoms and the void: Gassendi supported this doctrine, and Newton demonstrated it. In vain did a remnant of Cartesianism still combat for the plenum; in vain did Leibnitz, who had at first adopted the rational system of Epicurus, Lucretius, Gassendi, and Newton, change his opinion respecting the void, after he had embroiled himself with his master Newton: the plenum is now regarded as a chimera.

*See articles SELF-LOVE, ATHEISM, and THEISM.

In this, Epicurus and Lucretius appear to have been true philosophers, and their intermedials, which have been so much ridiculed, were no other than the unresisting space in which Newton has demonstrated that the planets move round_their_orbits in times proportioned to their areas. Thus it was not Epicurus's intermedials, but his opponents, that were ridiculous. But when Epicurus afterwards tells us that his atoms declined in the void by chance; that this declination formed men and animals by chance; that the eyes were placed in the upper part of the head, and the feet at the end of the legs, by chance; that ears were not given to hear, but that the declination of atoms having fortuitously composed ears, men fortuitously made use of them to hear with, this madness, called physics, has been very justly turned into ridicule.

Sound philosophy, then, has long distinguished what is good in Epicurus and Lucretius, from their chimeras, founded on imagination and ignorance. The most submissive minds have adopted the doctrine of creation in time, and the most daring have admitted that of creation before all time. Some have received with faith a universe produced from nothing; others, unable to comprehend this doctrine in physics, have believed that all beings were emanations from the Great the Supreme and Universal Being: but all have rejected the fortuitous concurrence of atoms; all have acknowledged that chance is a word without meaning. What we call chance, can be no other than the unknown cause of a known effect. Whence comes it then, that philosophers are still accused of thinking that the stupendous and indescribable arrangement of the universe is a production of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms— an effect of chance? Neither Spinoza nor any one else has advanced this absurdity.

Yet the son of the great Racine says, in his poem on Religion,

O toi! qui follement fais ton Dieu du hasard,
Viens me développer ce nid qu'avec tant d'art,
Au même ordre toujours architecte fidelle,
A l'aide de son bec maçonne l'hirondelle:
VOL. I.

2 D

Comment, pour élever ce hardi bâtiment,
A-t-elle en le broyant arrondi son ciment?

O ye, who raise Creation out of chance,
As erst Lucretius from th' atomic dance!
Come view with me the swallow's curious nest,
Where beauty, art, and order, shine confessed.
How could rude chance, for ever dark and blind,
Preside within the little builder's mind?

Could she, with accidents unnumbered crowned,
Its mass concentrate, and its structure round?

These lines are assuredly thrown away. No one makes chance his God; no one has said that while a swallow " tempers his clay, it takes the form of his abode by chance:" on the contrary it is said, that "he makes his nest by the laws of necessity," which is the opposite of chance.

The only question now agitated is, whether the author of nature has formed primordial parts unsusceptible of division, or if all is continually dividing and changing into other elements. The first system seems to account for everything, and the second, hitherto at least, for nothing.

If the first elements of things were not indestructible, one element might at last swallow up all the rest, and change them into its own substance. Hence perhaps it was, that Empedocles imagined that everything came from fire and would be destroyed by fire.

This question of atoms involves another; that of the divisibility of matter ad infinitum. The word atom signifies without parts-not to be divided. You divide it in thought; for, if you were to divide it in reality, it would no longer be an atom.

You may divide a grain of gold into eighteen millions of visible parts; a grain of copper, dissolved in spirit of sal ammoniac, has exhibited upwards of twenty-two thousand parts: but when you have arrived at the last element, the atom escapes the microscope, and you can divide no further except in imagination.

The infinite divisibility of atoms is like some propositions in geometry. You may pass an infinity of curves between a circle and its tangent, supposing the circle and the tangent to be lines without breadth; but there are no such lines in nature.