TO ORIGEN BACHELER.

LETTER IX.

May 21, 1831.

I HAVE said-and I adhere to the sentiment-that I hold that man excused, who, that he may procure bread for his wife and children, shrinks from publicly incurring, as a few pioneers have incurred, the ill-will of a world that has not yet learnt to respect heterodox honesty. Shall he who expresses such a sentiment pass for one who has but an "obtuse moral sensibility?" So let me pass, then, with

you.

I marvel, Sir, at the tone you assume. It is one which I (under similar circumstances) would never permit to myself. If Sceptics persecuted Christians, and that Christians kept silence, not on their heads but on ours, would 1 charge the blame. At our door, who rewarded sincerity with abuse, should I deem the sin of their silence to lie. I should feel, that it ill became those who outlawed, instead of honouring candor, to complain that candor was so rarely to be found. I should feel that it behoved us first to appreciate openness, before we ventured to demand it.

Yet would I not be misunderstood. I honor moral courage as one of the first of virtues, and it has ever been my endeavor to cultivate it in myself. Nor do I believe, that (so boldness be but tempered with courtesy) there is,

in this country, nearly so much to be risked or lost, by an undisguised avowal of heresy, as the fears of dissenters from the established faith may ofttimes imagine. Steady, prudent, disinterested moral conduct will commonly outweigh, in the long run, the most heterodox reputation ; and if all who cannot say Shibboleth to the fashionable creed would stand forth and speak prudently but fearlessly, we should soon put an end to the persecution of public opinion, as our ancestors did to that of the rack and stake. While therefore, I urge no one who depends for the actual support of his family, to an open avowal of heresy, I would encourage all never to weigh riches or a good name against the benefits which the honest expression of opinion may produce for our race.

I have not denied that cases may be found where the sceptical, but especially the careless, become religious. Our early impressions are so strong, and often recur with so much force! Besides, a man may be a sort of Sceptic from thoughtlessness as much as from conviction. That any man, who has once thoroughly examined the evidences of theology, and then deliberately adopted the opinion, that it is an imaginary science, has ever, except under the influence of disease, renounced that opinion, permit me to doubt. But suppose that all the boasted cases of conversion truly had some better foundation than that of the Lockport editor,* are they as one to ten— nay, as one to a hundred, to the converts to scepticism? What thousands did not Paine convert? What tens of thousands have not surrendered their religion to the

I learn by the postscript to the letter published from a Lockport correspondent (which postscript I withheld, from a desire not unnecessarily to allude to personal character) that the Printer of "Priestcraft Exposed" had no fixed opinion of any kind. But, as my opponent says, this is immaterial, His own experience suffices in proof that such a change as that he speaks of is possible.

searching wit of Voltaire? The progress of orthodoxy is ostentatiously announced; the progress of heterodoxy is rapid but silent. A conversion to Christianity is trumpeted all over Christendom; a conversion to scepticism is hardly whispered to one's next door neighbor.

And now, Sir, for your most strange argument in defence of a God, who, you say, seeks, first and chief, his own glory.

God, you tell us, could be under no obligation to nonentities; consequently under no obligation to place the beings he might create so as to be either good or happy. Of his own free will he created; consequently he could not be expected to relinquish any of his rights for them. A liability to sin, involving the necessity of vice and crime, may be necessary to the greatest degree of virtue, and is necessary for the glory of God. Holiness is more important than happiness; holiness is promoted by God's glorification; it is better, then, that God should be glorified by vice and misery, than that man should be blessed with virtue and happiness. Perhaps, too, man could not be made happy without his happiness clashing with other interests. In that case, God, having a right to give as much or as little happiness as he chose, acted wisely in creating vice and suffering; for it is not the first duty of God to make his children happy. These are your argu

ments.

Surely no set of theologians, barbarous or civilized, ancient or modern, ever conceived a Being more coldly selfish, more calculatingly heartless, or more childishly imbecile, than this! There is excuse for personifying the gentle and untiring love of a Mother, the disinterested and wakeful care of a Father, the self-forgetting affection with which an enlightened Parent watches over the young creatures to whom he has imparted existence, smooths

before them the path of life, sedulously removes far off its temptations and its follies, stirs up within them the mild. flame of generous virtue, and thus prepares for them a peaceful and a glad existence-there is excuse for personifying, under the form of a Great Parent, feelings so amiable as these, and calling that Universal Paternal Spirit, God. But what shall we say of the imagination (unredeemed by aught of moral beauty) that conjures forth a Being, who sits down to consider, before he gives existence to his human offspring, how much of happiness he is "under obligation" to confer on what are still nonentities, but what will soon be sentient creatures? who decides, that as he creates them of his own free will, he "cannot be expected" to relinquish his rights to benefit them, or forget his glory to think of their happiness? Obligation cannot be expected! One seems to listen to the excuses of a soulless miser, whom justice bids to pay a dollar, while the law excuses the payment! And these are to be the reasonings, these the feeling, this the paternal affection, of Him whose goodness is ineffable, and whose tender mercies are over all his other works! He is not generously to rejoice in the sinless virtue and uncheckered enjoyment he can give, but heartlessly to calculate how much of good and of happiness he may be excused for withholding from his children! If such, Sir, be your God, if within his eternal nature there spring no fountain of love such as wells even in the human breast, and gives the lie, even there, to the sordid calculations of unfeeling selfishness-far plainer and honester were it to declare, that God holds in his hands the power (and is resolved to use it) to make us miserable, and then to ask us whither we dare to appeal from the cruelty of the All-powerful?

But a liability to sin, says the ingenious apologist of Deity, may be necessary to the highest degree of virtue.

What becomes, then, of the goodness of God? Would his virtue be increased by such liability? Or to speak of earthly realities: would my opponent forbear, (if the power were placed in his hands) to take from a child of his the liability to vice, lest thereby its virtue should be lessened?

But then my opponent thinks, vice is necessary to the glory of God, that he may show forth "his holiness in its punishment and his mercy in its pardon." "If God,” says a French writer,* "made man in his own image, full well has man returned the compliment!" And he has selected but sorry specimens of humanity, too, after which to fashion the Being he adores. A king may rejoice in iniquity, because it affords him the credit of punishing it; a priest may be glad that men trespass, that he may exhibit his mercy in absolving them from their transgressions: but if we are to make a God in the image of man, let us for decency's sake, choose more respectable models than such kings and priests.

And then, the idea of an Infinite God being glorified by aught that the insect man can think or say or do! If all the caterpillars in America were to sing your praises, and extol your wisdom, not one day in seven, but all the days in the year, would you (even supposing you to have created them) be greatly flattered by their senseless adulation? Grant that you were childish enough to constitute your glory the first and chief object of desire, would that glory indeed be exalted by the caterpillar chorus? Yet you will not deny that between you and an Infinite God there is an immeasurably greater distance, than between the crawling insect and you. The God, therefore, who should conceive his glory to be increased by man's wonder and adoration, would be far more weak and vain than he, the

* Le Comte de Ségur.