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cannot dip into the Bible, but one text or other will turn up for their purpose: if they are under persecution, as they call it, then that is a mark of their election; if they flourish, then God works miracles for their deliverance, and the saints are to possess the earth.

They may think themselves to be too roughly handled in this paper; but I who know best how far I could have gone on this subject, must be bold to tell them they are spared: though at the same time I am not ignorant that they interpret the mildness of a writer to them, as they do the mercy of the government; in the one they think it fear, and conclude it weakness in the other. The best way for them to confute me is, as I before advised the Papists, to disclaim their principles and renounce their practices. We shall all be glad to think them true Englishmen when they obey the King, and true Protestants when they conform to the Church-discipline.

It remains that I acquaint the reader, that these verses were written for an ingenious young gentlemen my friend, upon his translation of The Critical History of the Old Testament, composed by the learned father Simon: the verses therefore are addressed to the translator of that work, and the style of them is, what it ought to be, epistolary.

If any one be so lamentable a critic as to require the smoothness, the numbers, and the turn of heroic poetry in this poem; I must tell him, that if he has not read Horace, I have studied him, and hope the style of his epistles is not ill imitated here. The expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction, ought to be plain and natural, and yet majestic; for here the poem is presumed to be a kind of lawgiver, and those three qualities which I have named, are proper to the legislative style. The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul, by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life or less: but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.

RELIGIO LAICI.

DIM as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is Reason to the soul: and as on high,
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,

Not light us here; so Reason's glimmering ray

Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear,
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere;
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight;

So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.
Some few, whose lamp shone brighter, have been led
From cause to cause, to nature's secret head;
And found that one first principle must be:
But what, or who, that UNIVERSAL HE;
Whether some soul incompassing this ball,
Unmade, unmoved; yet making, moving all;
Or various atoms' interfering dance

Leap'd into form, the noble work of chance;
Or this great all was from eternity;
Not even the Stagirite himself could see:
And Epicurus guess'd as well as he.
As blindly groped they for a future state;
As rashly judged of providence and fate:
But least of all could their endeavours find
What most concern'd the good of human kind;
For happiness was never to be found,
But vanish'd from 'em like enchanted ground.
One thought Content the good to be enjoy'd;
This every little accident destroy'd:

The wiser madmen did for Virtue toil,
A thorny or at best a barren soil:

In Pleasure some their glutton souls would steep,
But found their line too short, the well too deep;
And leaky vessels which no bliss could keep.
Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll,
Without a centre where to fix the soul:

In this wild maze their vain endeavours end:
How can the less the greater comprehend?
Or finite reason reach Infinity?

For what could fathom God were more than He.
The Deist thinks he stands on firmer ground;
Cries, Eureka-the mighty secret 's found:
God is that spring of good; supreme, and best;
We, made to serve, and in that service blest:
If so, some rules of worship must be given,
Distributed alike to all by Heaven;
Else God were partial, and to some denied
The means his justice should for all provide.