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benevolent that he associates and assimilates his will to others, instinctively like the brute creation; Coercion will be a demon unknown, which in European countries is set up and worshipped as an idol, to whom liberty, moral and political, is sacrificed to obtain the surety of a miserable existence. If the native of America had but a ray of reason sufficient to show him the folly and wickedness of warring with his neighboring tribes of fellow Indians, his mode of association would have charms that would attract the slaves and victims of civilization, and all Europe would fly to happiness among Indian tribes, toying away a life of liberty, peace and love, in the indulgent arms of their common mother, Nature.

These dark clouds of heterogeneity, in the mass of population, that eclipse the rising sun of American empire, can be dispersed only by the religion of Nature, which, if universally taught, would assimilate and incorporate this great mass. This may be represented by the allegory of two children struggling to destroy each other, while they were hanging each upon a redundant and protuberant breast of their mother Nature, tearing the nipple and forcing out blood to mix and corrupt the spilled and overflowing milk; Nature repaying these injuries with the indulgent caresses of a fond parent, and striving, by wise admonition, to appease that passion of interest which fascinates the creature, pursuing misery to obtain happiness, and destruction to procure salvation. This figure, painted in lively and just colors, should be worn about the neck by those, whose intellect could be enlightened only through the sensual sight; it might also, by the statuary, be chisseled in marble, and should be erected upon the ruins of those monuments of falsehood, error and misery, that have been elevated and cemented by the bloody sweat of the laborious part of mankind, whose liberty, virtue and happiness are sacrificed in them upon the altars of superstition, by the baseness and treachery of the vilest, though most elevated part of the human species-priests and princes.

CONCLUSION.

HAVING taken a general view of the state of virtue, or sympathy and probity, of the different nations of the globe, I shall now draw up some retrospective and conclusive considerations, to prove that virtue, and not form of political institutions, is the real source of national as well as of individual happiness.

Though various constituted governments have snatched the sceptre from the hand of one tyrant, they have but effected the transposition of tyranny, and rendered it more incurable, and more intolerable in the hands of an oligarchy or aristocracy, whom riches have thrown into the bosom of luxury and debauchery, where sympathy and probity cannot possibly exist, as they delight only in the bosom of sobriety, temperance and wisdom.

England and America are the only countries in the world, where the people exercise the most sacred and fundamental functions of all authority, the administration of civil and criminal justice; and they are singularly eminent in the candor of their commercial dealings. Let a purchaser enter a store in these countries, and though he be as ignorant of the commodity, as of the seller's person, both parties deal with confidence, and neither are deceived. Let him enter a store in any other part of the world-Italy, France or Germany for instance, upon the continent, and deal with simplicity and confidence, the purchaser would be as basely cheated, as if he had dealt with a Jew or a sharper. The discussion or commercial dialogue used in a shop in these countries, would force the pride of an English shop-keeper to turn his customer out of doors, or be subject to the humiliating suspicions, that he is an arrant knave. This practice of rectitude proves, that the people possess that virtue, the only source and basis of all good political association, and the mo

ment that this virtue becomes infected by luxury and debauchery, they must divest themselves of all their liberty, and establish a despot, like the sentinel or watchman of the night, to protect them in the darkness of vice and ignorance.

In the present moral state of mankind, practical truth will ever cause a dangerous variance in their opinions, and is to be counteracted only by the stability, and unity of abstract truth. This, therefore, should be the end of all reflection and deliberation, and any action that opposes it should be entered upon with extreme regret, as the effect of deplorable necessity, which the cultivation of truth will gradually annihilate.

Mankind should, therefore, enter into an intellectual commerce, to improve the mind-to supplant that which avarice has rapidly extended to pamper and poison the body; and they should treat that man or country as an enemy to the divinity of Self and Nature, who should tyrannically and ignorantly murder the embryo, or sacrilegiously spill the germ of intellect, by violating the liberty and faculty of thought, the source of intellectual life. and happiness, the comprehensive divinity of Nature.

To elucidate this subject, Ij shall relate what passed in France upon the important motion in the National Assembly, respecting the powers of making peace or war. The aristocratic party involving their personal interests with the political interests of the nation, maintained, that national energy required the sovereign to be invested with those rights. The democratic party contracting abstract truth to the standard of practical truth, influenced by the consideration of necessary energy, passed a decree, by which the king and the nation divided that power. This, however, was effected by a very small majority, and it is said, that the populace of Paris were waiting with tumultuous murmurs of discontent and threats, at the door of the Assembly, that if the decree which passed, had not tallied with the point of abstract truth, measured by their enthusiasm, the most fatal insurrection would have en

sued, and such anarchy must have prevailed, as would have prepared the tomb of liberty, and the triumph of the most irrefragible despotism. Alas! how deplorable is the fate of humanity! how weak the state of perverted and prejudiced reason! Man is induced to proscribe the standard of practice, and exclaim-Stet veritas, ruat mundus; [(Abstract) Truth shall stand, though the World should fall !]

I am apprehensive that my curious readers will have been much disappointed, that I have neglected the policy, customs and manners, together with the natural history of countries; to which subjects it has been usual for travellers to confine their observation and narrative. If mankind are wretched over the whole face of the globe, and the moral chaos is universal, what avails the information that marks the civil and physical position of man! it serves but to increase the labyrinth of knowledge, and augment the embarrassments of, wisdom!

REVELATION

OF

NATURE:

WHEREIN THE

SOURCE OF MORAL MOTION

IS DISCLOSED

AND A MORAL SYSTEM ESTABLISHED, THROUGH THE EVIDENCE AND CONVICTION OF THE SENSES,

TO ELEVATE MAN

10 INTELLECTUAL EXISTENCE, AND AN ENLIGHTENED STATE OF NATURE.

"In Error's room, This holds up Nature's Light,
Keeps wand'ring Passion on the line of Right;
Grasps the whole worlds of Reason, Life and Sense
In one close system of Benevolence."

From the Era of the first rising of the Sun of Reason, or the Publication of the Revelation of Nature, in the Year of retrospective Astronomical Calculation 5000.

London: Printed for J. RIDGWAY, York-street, No. 1, St James' Square 1790.

[From the above original edition, revised and re-printed, 1835.]

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