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.

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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upon the subject." Then, enumerating the titles of his works, you add, p. 167, "In these treatises there is no defence of the damnatory clause, nor, that I recollect, any mention of the Athanasian creed. There is no defence of the damnatory clause in the Sermons and English Tracts, published by Mr. Nelson, nor can I find any such tract mentioned by Mr. Nelson among the Bishop's lost works; for many small pieces, which it was known he had written, were never found after his death. Where have I mentioned, Sir, with such high approbation a work which I declare I have never seen, and of which, you will forgive me, if I still doubt the existence ?"

Notwithstanding this ridiculous parade, which hath helped to swell out your book, you might just as well have said, that I never wrote an Answer to your Charge, merely because I called my work Letters to Dr. Horsley; and I will engage, that whatever doubt you might have had, if you had given an order to any bookseller in London in the very words that I used, he would have sent you the Judicium, &c. i. e. The Judgement of the Catholic Church in the three first Centuries, concerning the Necessity of believing that our Lord Jesus Christ is the true God. Now, Sir, what is implied in the necessity of believing, but the condemnation of those who do not believe? The whole truth, and the occasion of all this lamentable outcry is, that, not having the book before me at the time, I said the damnatory clause in the Athanasian creed, instead of the anathema annexed to the Nicene creed, a thing of exactly the same

nature.

Besides, from your account, one would imagine that, as you declare yourself no lover of damnatory clauses,

this good bishop, whose writings you so much recommend, was no more a friend to them than yourself, but that he might be the meekest and most candid of all christians. To give a specimen, therefore, of this most excellent prelate's writings, I shall produce a few pas sages from the preface of this particular work, from which a judgement may be formed of the object and spirit of the whole.

Giving a reason for this publication, he says, "There have appeared a few years ago in England many writings of wicked men who have laboured with all their might to overturn the capital article of our creed, on which the hinge of christianity certainly turns, namely, concerning the Son of God, born of God the Father himself before all ages, very God of very God, by whom all things were made, who for our salvation was incarnate, and made man; some of them impudently defending the Arian, and some the Samosatenian blasphemy*."

He then quotes with approbation, a passage from Zanchius, in which he calls the writings of the unitarians idle ravings, inepta deliria; and afterwards speaking of Episcopius and others, who though orthodox themselves, pleaded for some moderation towards these erring brethren, he calls it "an attempt to reconcile Christ and Belial," and adds, "These men, professing to hold and believe with the catholics (in which I wish

Prodiere in Anglia nostra, intra paucos abhinc annos, scripta non pauca hominum nefariorum qui dogma fidei nostræ xugiwTaTo, in quo certe christianismi cardo vertitur (de filio nempe dei ante omnia secula ex ipso deo patre nato, vero deo de vero deo, per quem omnia condita fuere, nostræ salutis causa incarnato, homineque facto) labefactare atque evertere omni ope adnisi sunt; eorum aliis Arianam, aliis vero Samosatenianam blasphemiam impudentur propugnantibus.