and confequently, our whole bufinefs being with the present life, it is not to be supposed, that our infinitely wife-Creator would have fuffered our attention to have been taken off from it, by our being led into the notion of any other; much lefs, that our whole species should be irresistibly poffeffed with the fame useless and hurtful delufion nor that he would have univerfally impreffed their minds with a falfe notion of an account to be hereafter given of all their thoughts, words, and actions. Had he wanted them to conform themselves to his general scheme in the government of the world, he could have brought that about, and certainly would, by any other means, rather than by fuffering them to be mifled into a series of groundlefs imaginations and. delufions. Nor would the infinitely-wife Creator have given us thefe vaft and infatiable defires after endless improvement in knowledge, this reach of thought, which expatiates through creation, and extends itself beyond the limits of the univerfe; nor would he have fired our fouls with the profpect of an endless exiftence, for carrying on thofe improvements, only to curfe us with a cruel disappointment. Nor would he have made the human foul for himself; fixed its defires and wishes upon the enjoyment of his own perfections; drawn and engaged it to love, admire, and breathe after the fruition of him; raised it to this lofty heighth of ambition, only to throw it down, baffled and disappointed, into a state of infenfibility

infenfibility and annihilation. Nor would he have formed the mind with a capacity for continual advances in goodness, and nearer approaches to himself, only to give us an opportunity of fitting ourselves for a future ftate of perfection and happiness, to which according as we approached nearer and nearer, we fhould approach nearer and nearer to the total difappointment of all our labours and all our hopes, and find the whole at laft to have been no other than a golden dream.

The only reafon why any one has recourfe to artifice and deceit, is, that he has not fagacity enough to gain his ends by proceeding in a fair and open manner. Whoever is mafter of his scheme, has no need of tricks and arts to compafs his defigns. And who will dare to affirm, that Infinite Wifdom had no way of bringing about his important designs for the good of his univerfe, but by deluding his reasonable creatures, or fuffering them to be univerfally deluded, which is the fame, into the belief of a future Utopia? We know of nothing in nature analogous to this. Whatever our fpecies, or any other, are liable to be mistaken in, is owing to the mere imperfection of fenfe, or understanding, unavoidable in beings of inferior rank: but we have no idea of a whole fpecies irresistibly led into a pofitive error, efpecially of fuch confequence as that of the expectation of a future ftate, if it were an error. worthy of remark, that it VOL. II.

F

And here it is highly is not the weak, the

fhort-fighted,

fhort-fighted, and the ignorant part of the human kind, that are most inclinable to the perfuafion of the immortality of the foul, as might have been expected, were it an error; but quite otherwife. While the moft fordid, degenerate, and barbarous of the fpecies have overlooked, or not been fufficiently perfuaded of it; the wifest and greatest of mankind have been believers and teachers of this important doctrine; which fhews it in a light wholly unaccountable, if it be fuppofed an error.

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The irregular distribution of happiness and mifery in the prefent ftate renders it highly probable, that this is only a part, not the whole of the Divine oeconomy with respect to our species.

Do we not find, that in the present state the highest degree of goodness is, in fome cafes, attended with the greatest unhappiness? For tho' virtue muft, in general, be owned to be the likelieft means for procuring happiness in the prefent, as well as future ftate; yet there are numerous exceptions to this rule. I appeal to the experience of every man, who, from a courfe of thoughtlessness and libertinifm, has had thè happiness to be brought to fome concern about the interests of futurity, whether he does not now fuffer a thousand times more of the anguish of remorfe from a reflexion upon the leaft failure, than he did formerly for the groffeft enormities. If so, it is evident, that improvement in virtue brings with it fuch a delicacy of fentiment, as

muft

must often break in upon the tranquillity of the mind, and produce an uneafinefs to which the hardned finner is wholly a ftranger. So that in this inftance, we fee that virtue is not in the prefent life its own reward, which infers the neceffity of a future reward in a life to come.

Nor is the permiffion of perfecution or tyranny, by which the best of mankind always fuffer the moft feverely, while wickedness reigns triumphant, at all reconcileable with the goodness of the univerfal Governor, upon any footing, but that of a future ftate, wherein the sufferings, to which the mere incapacity of refifting, or the ftrict adherence to truth, has expofed multitudes of the fpecies, of the best of the fpecies, fhall be fuitably made up for. When an Alexander, or a Cæfar, is lét loofe upon his fellow-creatures, when he pours defolation, like a deluge, over one fide of the globe, and plunges half the human species in a fea of their own blood, what must be the whole amount of the calamity fuffered by millions, involved in the various woes of war, of which great numbers must be of the tender fex, and helpless age! What must be the terror of thofe, who dread the hour, when the merciless favage, habituated to fcenes of cruelty, will give orders to his hellhounds to begin the general maffacre? What the carnage, when it is begun? Men flaughtered in heaps in the streets and fields; women ravished and murdered before their husbands faces; children dashed against the walls

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walls in the fight of the parents; cities wrapt in flames; the fhouts of the conquerors; the groans of the dying; the ghaftly visages of the dead; univerfal horror, mifery, and defolation. All to gain a spot of ground, an useless addition of revenue, or even the vifionary fatisfaction of a founding name, to fwell the pride of a wretched worm, who will himfelf quickly fink among the heaps his fury has made, himself a prey to the univerfal leveller of mankind. And what is all history full of, but fuch horrid scenes as these? Has not ambition or fuperftition fet mankind, in all ages and nations, in arms against one another; turned this world into a general fhambles, and fattened every foil with flaughtered thoufands?

The blood-thirsty inquifitor, who has grown grey in the fervice of the Mother of abominations, who has long made it his boast, that none of her priests has brought fo many hundreds of victims to her horrid altars, as himfelf; the venerable butcher fits on his bench. The helpless innocent is brought bound from his dungeon, where no voice of comfort is heard, no friendly eye glances compassion, where damp, and stench, perpetual darkness and horrid filence reign, except when broken by the echo of his groans; where months, and years, have been languish'd out in want of all that nature requires; an outcast from family, from friends, from eafe and affluence,

and