If they did so, they were no more gross than his master Epicurus, who was of the very same opinion. But it is fatal to our author ever to blunder when he talks of Egypt. These priests of Egypt were all illiterate laymen; the monks or hermits of those days, that retired into the desert, the fittest place for their stupidity. But several of your English divines tax each other with atheism, either positively or consequently. Wonderful ! and so because three or four divines in your island are too fierce in their disputes, all we on the great continent must abandon religion. Yes; but the Brahmins, the Mahometans, etc., pretend to Scriptures as well as we. This, too, has come once already, and is considered in remark the 22nd; but, being so great a piece of news, deserved to be told twice. And who, without his telling, would have known that the Romish church received the Apocrypha as canonical? Be that as it will, I am sure it is unheard-of news, that your church receives them as half-canonical. I find no such word in your articles, nor ever saw a such-like prodigy before. Half-canonical? what idea, what sense has it? 'tis exactly the same as half-divine, half-infinite, half-omnipotent. But away with his Apocrypha ; he'll like it the worse while he lives, for the sake of Bel and the Dragon.

(From Remarks on Collins's Discourse of Freethinking.)

CAPTIOUS ARGUMENTS ANSWERED

To show his good taste and his virtuous turn of mind, he praises two abuses upon James I.; that he was a doctor more than a king, and was priest-ridden by his archbishop; as the most valuable passages in Father Paul's Letters; and yet, as I have been told, those passages are spurious and forged. Well, but were they genuine and true, are those the things he most values? Oh, the vast love and honour he bears to the crown and the mitre ! But his palate is truly constant and uniform to itself he drudges in all his other authors, ancient and modern, not to find their beauties, but their spots; not to gather the roses, but the thorns; not to suck good nutriment, but poison. A thousand bright pages in Plutarch and Tully pass heavy with him, and without relish; but if he chances to meet with

a suspicious or sore place, then he is feasted and regaled, like a fly upon an ulcer, or a beetle in dung, and with those delicious scraps put together, he has dressed out this book of free-thinking.

But have a care of provoking him too much, for he has still in reserve more instances of your conduct; your declamations against reason; such false reason, I suppose, as he and his tribe would put off for good sterling your arts and method of discouraging examination into the truths of religion; such truths, forsooth, of religion as this, that religion itself is all false and again, your encouraging examination when either authority is against you (the authority, he means, of your late King James, when one of his free-thinking doctors thought himself into popery), or when you think that truth is certainly on your side: he will not say that truth is certainly on your side, but only that you think so: however, he allows here you are sometimes sincere; a favour he would not grant you in some of his former instances.

But the last and most cutting instance is, your instilling principles into youth: no doubt he means those pernicious principles of fearing God, honouring the king, loving your neighbour as yourselves; living soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Oh, the glorious nation you would be, if your stiff parsons were once displaced, and free - thinkers appointed tutors to your young nobility and gentry! How would arts, learning, manners, and all humanity flourish in an academy under such preceptors! who, instead of your Bible, should read Hobbes's Leviathan; should instil early the sound doctrines of the mortality of the soul, and the sole good of a voluptuous life. No doubt such an establishment would make you a happy people, and even a rich; for our youth would all desert us in Germany, and presently pass the sea for such noble education.

The beginning of his third section, where (as I remarked before) free-thinking stands for no more than thinking, may pass in general for truth, though wholly an impertinence. For who in England forbids thinking? or who ever made such objections as he first raises, and then refutes ? He dare not, sure, insinuate as if none of your clergy thought, nor examined any points of doctrine, but took a system of opinions by force and constraint, under the terror of an inquisition, or the dread of fire and faggot. So that we have twenty pages of mere

amusement, under the ambiguity of a word. Let your clergy once profess that they are the true free-thinkers, and you will soon see the unbelieving tribe renounce their new name.

However, in these sapless pages he has scattered a mark of his great learning. He says, the infinite variety of opinions, religions, and worships among the ancient heathens, never produced any disorder or confusion. What! was it no disorder when Socrates suffered death for his opinions; when Aristotle was impeached, and fled; when Stilpo was banished; and when Diagoras was proscribed? Were not the Epicureans driven out from several cities, for the debaucheries and tumults they caused there? Did not Antiochus banish all philosophers out of his whole kingdom; and for any one to learn of them, made it death to the youth himself, and loss of goods to his parents? Did not Domitian expel all the philosophers out of Rome and whole Italy? Did the Galli, the vagabond priests of Cybele, make no disturbances in town and country? Did not the Romans frequently forbid strange religions and external rites that had crept into the city, and banish the authors of them? Did the Bacchanals create no disorders in Rome, when they endangered the whole state, and thousands were put to death for having been initiated in them? In a word, was that no disturbance in Egypt, which Juvenal tells of his own knowledge (and which frequently used to happen), when in two neighbouring cities their religious feuds ran so high, that, at the annual festival of one, the other, out of zeal, went to disturb the solemnity; and after thousands were fighting on both sides, and many eyes and noses lost, the scene ended in slaughter, and the body slain was cut into bits, and eaten up raw by the enemies? And all this barbarity committed, because the one side worshipped crocodiles, and the other killed and ate them. (From the Same.)

FLATTERY OF EPICURUS

BUT he's now come to Epicurus, a man distinguished in all ages as a great free-thinker, and I do not design to rob our growing sect of the honour of so great a founder. He's allowed to stand firm in the list, in the right modern acceptation of the word.

But when our writer commends his virtues towards his parents, brethren, servants, humanity to all, love to his country, chastity, temperance, and frugality; he ought to reflect that he takes the character from Laërtius, a domestic witness, and one of the sect; and consequently of little credit where he speaks for his master. I could draw a picture of Epicurus in features and colours quite contrary; and bring many old witnesses, who knew and saw him, to vouch for its likeness. But these things are trite and common among men of true letters; and our author and his pamphlet are too contemptible to require commonplaces in answer.

But the noble quality of all, the most divine of his and all virtues was his friendship; so cultivated in perfection by him and his followers, that the succession of his school lasted many hundred years after all the others had failed. This last part is

true in the author from whom it is taken; but our gleaner here misunderstands it. The succession indeed continued at Athens, in the garden dedicated to it, longer than the other sects possessed their first stations. But it's utterly false that professors of it lasted longer in general than those of the others. Quite contrary: 'tis well known that the Platonists, Peripatetics, and Stoics, or rather a jumble and compound of them all, subsisted long after the empire was Christian; when there was no school, no footstep of the Epicureans left in the world.

But how does our writer prove that this noble quality, friendship, was so eminently cultivated by Epicurus? Why, Cicero, says he, though otherwise a great adversary to his philosophical opinions, gives him this noble testimony. I confess it raises my scorn and indignation at this mushroom scribbler, to see him by and by, with an air of superiority, prescribing to the whole body of your clergy the true method of quoting Cicero. "They consider not," says he, "he writes in dialogue, but quote anything that fits their purpose, as Cicero's opinion, without attending to the person that speaks it; any false argument, which he makes the Stoic or Epicurean use, and which they have thought fit to sanctify, they urge it as Cicero's own." Out of his own mouth this pert teacher of his betters: Αλλων ἰατρὸς, αὐτὸς ἕλκεσι βρύων.1

For this very noble testimony, which he urges here as Cicero's own, comes from the mouth of Torquatus, an Epicurean; and is afterwards refuted by Cicero in his own name and person.

1 Physician of others, himself teeming with sores. VOL. III

2 C

Nay,

so purblind and stupid was our writer, as not to attend to the beginning of his own passage, which he ushers in thus docked and curtailed: Epicurus ita dicit, etc. "Epicurus declares it to be his opinion, that friendship is the noblest, most extensive, and most delicious pleasure." Whereas in Torquatus it lies thus : "The remaining head to be spoken to is friendship; which, if pleasure be declared to be the chief good, you affirm will be all gone and extinct :" de qua Epicurus quidem ita dicit, "concerning which Epicurus declares his opinion,” etc. Where it's manifest that affirmatis, "you affirm," is spoken of and to Cicero. So that here's an Epicurean testimony, of small credit in their own case (though our writer has thought fit to sanctify it), slurred upon us for Cicero's; and where the very Epicurean declares that Cicero was of a contrary opinion. (From the Same.)