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"With your

notion of in

you say, p. 106, be true. spiration, you are at liberty to dispute what the inspired apostles taught." Here is no exception made with respect to any thing that they taught, and even what they taught from inspiration. I do not personally require any acknowledgement for these gross misrepresentations, but the Public, whom you have imposed upon, have a right to demand it of

you.

Your endeavour to show the little value of christianity on the unitarian principles, besides showing your disposition to calumniate, discovers equal ignorance both of the state of the world, and of the system of revelation. You talk, p. 154, of sober, deists, who, rejecting revelation, acknowledge, however, the obligations of morality, believe a providence and a future retribution. The whole difference between them and us," you make them say, "is that we believe the same things upon different evidence, you upon the testimony of a man who you say was raised up to preach these truths; we upon the evidence of reason, which we think a higher evidence than any human testimony, &c.

I wish, Sir, you would produce, a few of these sober deists. I think I am acquainted with as many unbelievers as you are; but whatever may have been the case formerly, I know no such persons at present as you describe; i. e. unbelievers who have a serious expectation of a future life. We may see from fact that the arguments from reason alone are unable to make any lasting impression on the minds of those who can resist the much plainer evidences of christianity; which, being of the historical kind, are much better adapted to carry conviction to the mind.

The present state of things furnishes an abundant

proof that it is by the gospel alone that life and immortality are fully brought to light. This gives the most satisfactory of all evidence of a future life, such as we see can really influence the heart and the life; such as can controul the strongest passions of the human breast, and give men a manifest superiority of mind to the world, and all the pleasures and pains of it.

To imagine, as you do, that the arguments for a future life from reason alone, that is, from appearances in the common course of nature, are at all comparable to the evidence that results from the gospel history, and especially from the death and resurrection of Christ, (a man like ourselves, and therefore the most proper pattern of a future universal resurrection,) discovers such a want of real discernment and judgement, and such ignorance of human nature, as I will venture to say are no where more conspicuous than in these letters of yours.

Your representation of the doctrine of materialism as favourable to atheism, only shows your ignorance of the system that you wish to expose, as indeed what you dropped on the subject of ideas, p. 113, sufficiently showed before. But upon this I have said so much (more I suppose than you will ever take the trouble to read) in my Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, that I shall not reply to such trite and idle reasoning as yours here.

What you say on the subject of the resurrection, if it has any weight at all, affects the christian doctrine, as taught by St. Paul. "The hope which you hold out," you say, p. 156, "of a resurrection, he" (the unbeliever)" will tell you is no hope at all, even admitting that the evidence of the thing could, upon

your principles, be indisputable. The atoms which compose me, your atheist will say, may indeed have composed a man before, and may again; but me they will never more compose when once the present me is dissipated. I have no recollection of a former, and no concern about a future self."

This might have been copied from the writings of the heathen philosophers against christianity. For if, as I have already intimated, there be any force in the objection, it will operate against the doctrine of a resurrection universally considered. Because, if the thing that dies (and it is the body only that is ever said to die) do not rise and come to life again, there is no proper resurrection at all.

Whatever hope of a future life you may build on the Platonic doctrine of a soul, it is I will venture to say universally abandoned by the philosophical unbelievers of the present age; and therefore, with respect to them, you can never establish any hope of a future life at all on any other principles than those purely christian ones which you endeavour to expose; and whatever difficulties may attend the consideration of it, they will all vanish, even to the philosophical mind, before the certain promise of that great being who made us and all things. If we once believe that he has given us this assurance, we can never suppose that he will be at a loss for proper means to accomplish his end; and if the gospel history be true, we have this assurance. But from natural appearances we have no evidence whatever of any thing belonging to man that can subsist, feel, and act when the body is in the grave. And what I maintain is, that we must depart from all the

known rules of philosophizing before we can conclude that any such thing belongs to man.

From the same mode of reasoning by which we can prove that there is an immaterial principle in man, we may also prove that there is such a principle not only in a brute or a plant, but even in a magnet, and the most inanimate parts of nature. For even the most inanimate parts of nature are possessed of powers or properties, between which and what we see and feel of them, we are not able to perceive any connexion whatever. There is just as much connexion between the principles of sensation and thought and the brain of a man, as between the powers of a magnet and the iron of which it is made, or between the principle of gravitation and the matter of which the earth and the sun. are made; and whenever you shall be able to deduce the powers of a magnet from the other properties of iron, you may perhaps be able to deduce the powers of sensation and thought from the other properties of the brain. But to you, Sir, the whole of this subject is absolutely terra incognita. I perceive no traces of your being much at home, as you pretend, in the Greek language, but here you are a perfect stranger.

You are pleased to supply unbelievers with objecjections to revelation on the views that I have given of it; but I can produce numbers who will tell you, that such christianity as yours, including the belief of three persons in one God, is a thing absolutely incapable of proof, and who have actually rejected it on account of this doctrine, which they consider as so palpable an absurdity and contradiction, as not even miracles can make credible. I am, &c.

LETTER XVI.

Of Bishop Bull's Defence of Damnatory Clauses.

N

REV. SIR,

In this Letter I shall exhibit a curious specimen of your peculiar mode of controversial writing, and the advantage you take of the most trifling oversights in your opponents.

You gave the highest encomiums to the works of Bishop Bull, without any qualification or distinction, and recommended them to your clergy, as an infallible guide in every thing relating to the subject of our controversy. On this I said, "As you recommend the writings of Bishop Bull without exception, I presume that you approve of his defence of the damnatory clause in the Athanasian creed. Indeed you mentioned it among his most valuable works." When I wrote this, I did not, to be sure, look into the title-page of the book, in order to copy the very words of it; but no person could have any doubt which of Bishop Bull's treatises I really meant, as what I said sufficiently characterized it. And though he does not mention the Athanasian creed in particular, he defends every thing that is harsh and severe in the treatment of unitarians by the orthodox in the primitive times, and particularly

the anathema annexed to the Nicene creed.

On this subject, however, you write as follows, p. 165; "Sir, did you write this in your sleep, or is it in a dream only that I seem to read it? Bishop Bull's defence of the damnatory clause! From you, Sir, I have now my first information that Bishop Bull ever wrote

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