But, if the gosadapted to cre

as if they had actually rejected it. pel be not a system of absurdity, dulity, the probability is greater that they would have received, than that they would have rejected it; and if, as Lord Bolingbroke says, "it must be admitted, that Plato insinuates in many places the want, or the necessity of a "divine revelation, to discover the external ser

vice God requires, and the expiation for sin, "and to give stronger assurances of the rewards "and punishments, that await men in another "world ;" it becomes highly probable, that Plato would have embraced the christian revelation; and were the testimony of Jesus Christ admissable, it is absolutely certain that, if the mighty works, which were done in Judea, had been done among the heathens, many heathens would have repented of paganism in sackcloth and ashes. To the army of philosophers they add all those christians, who do not understand, or who do not practise, the dictates of christianity. With this hypothetical reasoning they attack christianity, and boast of numbers, while all their votaries are so few that a child may write them. Bigots, who make scripture, and their sense of it, the same thing, practise the same pious fraud, and turn over all those to the deistical party, who do not allow their doctrines. Hence the popular notion of the multiplicity of deists.

From the charge of deism, first, the populace ought to be freed. Too many of them live without any religion. The religion of nature is as un

known to them as the religion of scripture. When they think of religion, their error is credulity, and their spiritual guides soon find, that the believing of too much, and not the believing of too little, is their mistake. They are wicked; but they are not deists; for the term deism, surely, stands for admitting the religion of nature, as well as for the renouncing of revelation. But of both, in general, they are alike ignorant.

They, who renounce popular doctrines, are not therefore deists. The learned and pious Dr. Bekker, one of the pastors at Amsterdam, renounced the popular opinion of the power of the devil, and published a book against it. He seemed to doubt also of the eternity of hell torments. He was reputed a deist, and the consistory, the classes, and the synods proceeded against him, suspended him first from the communion, and deposed him at last from the office of a minister. Yet Dr. Bekker was a fast friend of revelation, and all his crime lay in expounding some literal passages of revelation allegorically. Not the book, but the received meaning of it he denied.

The deists ought not to claim them, who affirm, that it is not the property of the truths of revelation to square with philosophy. Mons. Voltaire takes Pomponatius for a deist. Pomponatius denied the natural immortality of the soul; he affirmed, that it could not be proved by principles of philosophy; but he believed, and maintained, the immortality of the soul on the testimony of revelation. This learned Italian philo

sopher was persecuted by the monks; his book, it is said, was burnt by the Venetians; and the modern deists have adopted him: yet Pomponatius was a believer of revelation, and, by believing the immortality of the soul on the testimony of scripture, he discovered the most profound veneration for it, a deference exactly similar to that, which trinitarians pay to its testimony concerning the nature of God.

What Pomponatius affirmed of the immortality of the soul, Bayle affirmed of all the mysteries of the gospel but, we do not allow that Bayle waś therefore a deist. Thus he writes: "If one of "the apostles, St. Paul for instance, when among "the Athenians, had besought the Areopagus to "permit him to enter the lists against all philoso"phers; had he offered to maintain a disputation

upon the three persons, who are but one God; “and if, before he began the disputation, he had " acknowledged the truth of the rules laid down by "Aristotle in his logic, whether with regard to the terms of opposition, or the characteristics of the premises of a demonstrative syllogism, &c. Last"ly, if, after these preliminaries were well settled, " he had answered, that our reason is too weak to "ascend to the knowledge of the mysteries, in op

position to which objections were proposed to "him; in such a case, he would have suffered as "much shame, as it is possible for a defeated op

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ponent to meet with. The Athenian philosophers "must have gained a complete victory; for he would "have been judged and condemned agreeably to

"the maxims, the truth of which he had ac knowledged before. But had the philosophers employed those maxims in attacking him, after "he had informed them of the foundation of his faith, he might have opposed the following bar"rier to them: that his doctrines were not within "the cognizance of reason; that they had been re"vealed by heaven; and that mankind must be"lieve them, though they could not comprehend "them. The disputation, in order for its being "carried on in a regular manner, must not have "turned upon the following question, whether "these doctrines were repugnant to the rules of logic and metaphysics; but on the question, whe

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ther they had been revealed by heaven. It would "have been impossible for St. Paul to have been "defeated, except it could have been proved to "him, that God did not require those things to "be believed."* This reasoning does not appear to favour deism; it seems to place the mysteries of christianity on their true base.

Neither are those to be reputed deists, who doubt or deny, the inspiration of some books, which are usually accounted sacred. Luther denied the inspiration of the epistle of St. James; Grotius that of the Song of Solomon; and Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, denied that the Apocalypse was written by the Apostle John; yet no one of these was a deist.

* Gen, Dict. vol. x. Illustration upon the Manichees.

Nor ought the deists to claim those learned critics, who allow that the scriptures have undergone the fate of all other books, and who therefore expose and amend the errors of copyists; expunge interpolations; restore mutilated passages; and deal with the writings of St. Paul, as they do with the writings of Thucydides. The chronology, the geography, the history, the learning of the bible, (if the expression be not improper) must necessarily submit to a critical investigation, and upright critics have self evident rules of trial. The most severe piece of criticism on revelation is at the same time one of the most excellent defences of it. One single rule, had it been thought worthy of that attention, which it merits, would have spared the writing of many a folio, and have freed some christians from many a religious reverie.* Yet the author of this piece of criticism, the great Le Clerc, has been by some of his bigotted countrymen accounted a deist.

Finally we cannot resign those brightest ornaments of the christian church, whose sense and grace will not allow them to be dogmatical, and who hesitate about some doctrines generally received by their own communities. The celebrated Philip Melancthon has been taxed with scepticism:

* Mons. Le Clerc expresses this rule thus; Multa videri in versionibus emphatica, quæ in ipsis fontibus nullam emphasin habent. Ars Crit. tom. i. p. 2. s. i. c. 4. This rule of interpretation, which regards the idiom of a language, deserves more attention, it should seem, than hath been usually paid to it.

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