the other upon the Rock of Ages-the more enemies I may have, the more shall I rejoice; for the more good shall I know, by this sign alone, that I am doing. If in this cause of civil liberty, and celestial religion, my humble talents shall be instrumental in saving from the grasp of a dark and secret combination, the constitutions of my country, and of turning her youth, or any portion of them, from the paths of vice and of folly, to those of wisdom and of virtue; then shall I exult, as did good old Simeon, in the day of our Lord; and shall thus receive more than a hundred fold compensation for the venomous and malignant hostility and abuse of ten thousand enemies: For, show me a man without numerous enemies, and I will show you one, who whatever may be the amiable traits of his character, never did any great, or lasting and permanent good to society or mankind. So long as a man glides smoothly and silently along, in the corrupted currents of the world; and if he do not in mind and in heart mingle with them; neither does he attempt to check their course, or turn them into purer channels; so long will he be permitted to remain without being made a ' mark to be shot at by the arrows of calumny and detraction nay more, he will be called "a nice man," "a wonderful clever man," by all the Noodles, male and female, in society; tipplers will toast him in bar-rooms; gossips will mingle his praises with their hyson, or souchong beverage; misers will applaud his economy, because it resembles their own; fools will cry up his wisdom for the same reason; and if a candidate for office, they will flock to the polls and vote for him; whilst at home his trembling slaves, and

his looking-glass, will make him believe, that he is the factotum of the town or state, the very deity of the day! and all this, too, when, in all probability, he never performed a solitary noble, generous or charitable act in his life, and is wholly incapable of performing one: On the other hand, no man ever yet boldly and honestly wielded his pen, or raised his voice, against error, crime, and corruption, without being reviled and persecuted by the mean, the envious and the unprincipled—for an honest, manly and magnanimous foe will never stoop to any of these means. But be all this as it may-as a patriot, and a real friend to the republican constitutions and liberties of my country, much less as a disciple of Christ, I should be a poor creature, a miserable tool indeed, if my mind were to be disturbed, for a moment, by the sneers or the jeers, the clamours or the calumnies, of my personal enemies, or those of the sacred cause in which I am engaged: on the contrary, I pity their weakness-detest their meanness-defy their malice -and laugh at their calumny. I boldly challenge them to fix on my character, by the shadow of proof, by any other than gossip, tattle and malignant slander, a single wilfully base or dishonourable act, in the whole course of my life; since if I have been an Infidel, I have never condescended to degrade my mind, or my person, in habitual vicious pursuits of any kind; for it must be recollected, that honest Infidels have their Socratic and Platonic, their Ciceronian and Aurelian, if not their Evangelical Piety: let my enemies, then, do their worst: I fear not but there will come a day, when I shall triumph

*9*

over them all, in the eye of HIM, whose favor and good will are alone worth seeking, and without which, all else may be deemed as dross, dregs, and everlasting damnation. As to my old infidel friends, with many of whom I have long corresponded in various parts of the state and the union, I know some of them to possess sound heads and honest hearts; and all I ask of these, or any of them, is to sit down, and seriously and deliberately to go through the course of study, which I have pointed out and pursued, adding to it only Lardner's profound and extensive enquiry into the credibility of the gospels, and preserving their minds, at the same time, unshackled, uninfluenced by former prejudices. They owe this to themselves, as well as to the cause of truth; for it is, I am satisfied from my extensive acquaintance with infidels, not so much from the rottenness of their hearts, or the weakness of their heads, as from a total neglect to examine both sides of the question, that they reject revelation. I know very many indeed of them, who have never taken the trouble to examine the BILLE seriously; and much less to study any of its able commentators and vindicators; but they have read Bolingbroke, and Hume, and Voltaire, and swallowed their misrepresentations and sophistry; relying, as I once did myself, with implicit confidence upon their premises, and conclusions, when the first are often false, and the latter invariably so, or at best not fairly flowing from the former. Campbell has exposed and refuted Hume in a masterby manner, showing him to be, though cool and subtle; yet contradictory, inconsistent, and unsubstantial: in fact, with all the cool subtlety

and profundity of Hume, he cannot conceal the cloven-foot of the sophist; and this, on a late reading, I clearly perceived; although when quite young, I swallowed all he says with the avidity of a gourmand: these are the contrary effects that flow from reading with our feelings and prejudices in favour of our author, or, on the contrary, with our judgment in full command of our feelings and prejudices, and prepared to decide correctly. As to Bolingbroke, he is full of declamation, without argument-and Voltaire, from the beginning to the end of all that he has written on the subject, is scarcely any thing more than a continued series of wit and sarcasm, sparkling and pungent; but in every sense of the word, a perversion of his text, and of the truth. "A little philosophy," says Lord Bacon, "inclines us to Atheism, and a great deal of philosophy carries us back to religion." The former clause of this proposition applies with full force to the infidel writers above mentioned; as the latter does to their able opponents: All, therefore, I repeat it, that is necessary to the triumph of Christianity over Infidelity, in the mind of any sensible man, who is seriously and earnestly seeking for the truth, is to pursue the same investigation that I have pursued, uninfluenced and unshackled by prejudice. When I sat down to it, I endeavored to divest myself of every bias; and to commence the work as though I had just fallen from the clouds, and had never heard of the subject, or mingled in the tumults and perplexities, or the selfish and sensual currents of the world: in this pursuit, and in this spirit, I spent at least four of the last fourteen months: And let my

honest old friends in the walks of Infidelity, do this; and I fear not the complete triumph, in their minds, of the pure, divine, and heart-felt doctrines of JESUS of Nazareth, over the corrupt, earthly, cold and heartless speculations of that Infidel School, to which I have been by far too long attached, and which has done so much to unhinge the moral order of the world, and to plunge it into confusion and destruction.

The Infidel, my young countrymen, will tell you of the arts of Priestcraft, and the abuses to which Christianity has been subjected by the frailty of human passions and human reason: but let not such insinuations, such sophistry, deter you from a thorough examination for yourselves. If liable to be punished hereafter for your Infidelity, and its immoral or sinful consequences in your practice; you cannot plead, before your Eternal Judge, that you violated his holy laws, and rejected his holy name, because you had seen or heard of such a thing as Priestcraft: Nor can you get off with the plea, that because bad men, in bad times, whether Princes, Priests, or common Laymen, abused and perverted a system, which in itself is not only of Divine Origin, but of unmixed, and unsullied, and divine purity; you, therefore, imbibed false opinions, without taking the trouble to examine for yourselves, whether the abuses were in and not of the system. In this work, I have proved, that the murder of MORGAN flowed not from the ABUSE of Free Masonry, but from the actual laws and obligations, imposed by the system; hence it is, that the system is so dangerous and destructive to liberty and religion: Not so with the abuses of Christianity, of which infidels make a handle: I fear