fore, you unite the two sciences, or build any argument, or draw any conclusion from them, prove their truth, or you build on sand. Don't take them on trust. We know there is a variety of human faces and heads; but the question is, do these shapes form their different characters as these sciences teach? Your saying so does not prove it. Assertions or declarations are but empty, though I know they make the faith of some. It is easy to say the earth is immovable and made up of brass, that there is no such thing as gravitation, that Sir Isaac Newton was a flat, and that Sir Richard Phillips has destroyed his system. It is easy to say the Bible is a fable, and to make small wits believe it. It is easy to tell them the moon grows in their back,-easy to say any thing; but the proof is the thing, Sir. I must have proof, or give the doctrine to the winds. No sophistry, for I'm up to it. You may write with eloquence on anything; you may gloss over a bad argument, with smooth and learned words; "words with long tails," and "make the worse appear the better reason; but I'll examine it, compose, weigh, judge, dissect. I don't believe in Newton's philosophy, because he merely said 'twas true; but because he demonstrated-building it on nature, firm as the pillared firmament, firm as earth's base.(2) I don't believe in Christianity because my fathers did, and told me not to read Voltaire, Hume, Paine, nor a hundred more; but because I have examined it for myself, heard patiently all that can be said against it, read libraries of books on both sides, and find that infidels only laugh at what they can't disprove, calling Christians enthusiasts, idiots, slaves, while they themselves cling with superstitious veneration to hypotheses they may happen to have been taught, sanctioned by great men, and read the “Age of Reason," their household god, "THE GRANDEST BOOK AS IS," as the cockney infidels say, just as Southcotonians do read the "Book of Wonders," learning it by rote, and apeing it to every ninny they meet, or uttering it out in twopenny tracts, with one eternal bore about "Priestcraft," &c., without understanding the works they quote, or knowing what they really do believe-mere half reasoners, blind in one eye, dull in the other, and they call themselves philosophers, uncircumcised dogs! Put but a little water in a spoon, 'twill unbaptize 'em. They talk of their free thoughts, while they are tying the latchet of the sophist's shoe, and, like the man in the fable, dreaming of liberty in a dungeon. Neither, sir, do I believe in physiognomy, because Lavater has speculated; nor in phrenology, because a great deal is said in its support. But I won't say now what I do believe, till I have seen what you have to add to what is already advanced on these two sciences.

If you have no objection, Mr. Editor, if you'll insert my letters without alteration (except the spelling, which in my haste, and for want of practice, may sometimes be bad, which I beg you'll correct;) I say, if you'll show me fair play, I'll accept the invitation you have so often given, and trouble you with a letter once now and then, when I've time, and see necessity, in answer to some of your correspondents; and although I'm but an obscure individual, labouring under great disadvantages, yet I think I can defend Christianity from their attacks-limb 'em, and throw 'em to the dogs, like a giant in the land of Lilliput. (3) A RECLUSE.

NOTES TO THE LETTER OF "A RECLUSE."

(1) Certainly, "no matter," whether he be living or dead. Any discoveries made in physiognomy or phrenology, do not assume the absence of preexistent knowledge; do not detract from the knowledge of Socrates or Plato, Bacon or Malebranch, Locke, Priestly or Read, any further than Sir Isaac Newton's explanation of the cause of the rainbow detracts from its colours, or than as a discovery of the constituent gases of common water detracts from its properties. The properties of every science exist before they are detailed and reduced to a written system; nor are they often perfectly detailed in the first attempts. Where phrenology has not been understood, all that is argued is, that there has been a radical defect in treating on the moral properties of mankind. Does our correspondent mean to say, that a perfect system of moral philosophy has been presented to us by any of the persons mentioned, or by all put together? If he do not; then, it follows that my position is here good, and his reverie about Socrates, &c. a reverie.-R. C.

(2) Ah! quite as firm. There is no pillared firmament, the earth has no base; so there is no demonstration, but that of error, here.-R. C.

(3) We'll accept the letters of our correspondent; but we hope that he will follow his own advice, and give us more of demonstration and argument, and less of dogmatism, rant and reverie, than he has given us in the first. He has well proved his own statement, that it is more easy to make assertions, promises and threats, than to argue, to fulfil and to reason. Yes, we know this well; but it is necessary to bluster a little, to get some sort of opponents into the field of criticism, and this is more peculiarly the case with the Christian people, as common sense approaches them.-R. C.

LETTER XXI.-FROM THE REV. ROBERT TAYLOR,

PERSECUTION, PECULIARLY CHRISTIAN.

DEAR MR. CARLILE,-Strong and irresistible as is the demonstration of facts, to the proof that thus it hath been, even that demonstration, is of a relatively subaudinate cogency, when compared with the really overwhelming necessity, that thus it must be; that thus there is no alternative left in the compass of possibilities, but that thus it should be. Because, no other religion that ever was in the world, infinitely unnatural as the best, or the worst of them may have really been, did ever avowedly, overtly, and with intention, prepense of that intention, proclaim war on nature; and nature, I take it for granted, can never be outraged either by God or man, without her most ample revenge.

"All her laws subverted quite,

Great nature triumphs still."

It was Christianity alone that ever afforded humanity the abominable insult, of maintaining, that even the pure offenceless infant was by nature born in sin, and shapen in iniquity. It was a maxim of Paganism, even under the most egregious forms in which it ever existed; that all its forms were to be understood and respected only in subordination, and as ancilliary and subservient, always lending their intended aid, officious, or even mischievous as it might have been to nature, but never bearing arms against her. Not one of the thirty thousand Gods and Goddesses of pagan Greece and Rome, can be shown ever to have outraged

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humanity by so monstrous a precept, as Except a man hate his father, his mother, his wife, his children, (Oh Hell-kite! and his poor children) he cannot be my disciple." Luke xiv. 26. Not one of their religious systems had to fly to the pitiful subterfuge of pretending a mystical or metaphorical sense, to hide the outrageous deformity of such injunctions as those. "If thine hand offend thee, cut it off. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out." The Pagan satirist Juvenal, on the contrary, has left us in one single line, a principle, the punctual remembrance and invariable application of which for the guidance of our conduct, and our judgment in all cases, not only in theory cannot, but in experience never did fail, to rectify all that was wrong in the heart of whoever made it, the star of his eye's observance.

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Nunquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit." Literally, Wisdom never says one thing, when nature says another.

And hence it is, that in our Theatres, where there is really more truth to be gleaned, than from all the divinity lectures in Christendom, we have heard that beautiful apothegm :

"O holy nature, there is not a creature of our earth, around whose parent bosom thou hast not a cord entwined, of power to hold them to their offspring's claims, and at thy will to draw them back to thee. On iron pennons borne, the blood-stained vulture cleaves the storm, yet is the plumage nearest to her heart, soft as the cygnet's down; and o'er her unfledged brood the murmuring ring-dove sits not more tenderly."

But he who hath once wrought up his fool's mind to an imaginary conviction, of the utter depravity of nature, and hath taken that, which is not only in itself eternally and necessarily RIGHT; but the only test and criterion which its great author hath given us, by the comparison wherewith to discern and measure all other right; to be as eternally and necessarily wrong, i. e. the Christian, as a Christian, is always a savage, his gentlest affections are ferocious, his tender mercies are cruel.

The credit due to the tales of Christians, of cruel persecution inflicted on them," in ages long ago betid," if we had not means of detecting the imposture, would yet be open to a shrewd misgiving upon our observance of what it is, which we see at this day, that they represent as persecution, of which they are the victims, and what we feel of the persecution of which they are not the victims, and which of course they hold to be no persecution at all.

Though, through the lapse of the last sixteen hundred years and from the whole world's history of so vast a length of time, they are not able to quote so much as one single instance in which a sword was ever drawn, or even a key turned by infidel hands on Christian sufferers; though never, never yet did unbelievers pour down crusading armies on their shores, pillage

their fields, destroy their temples, or interrupt their worship. Yet, will they tell us, that it has been all the while-they, and they alone who have been victims of persecution and, that they, even they,-the greatest monsters of iniquity that ever breathed, wading in blood up to the ears,-reeking with slaughter, banquetting on crime-were the pretty innocent lambs of God, who all along were bearing witness only to the truth, attesting their sincerity by their sufferings, and glorifying a crucified Saviour by their deaths. We naturally ask who and where were the sanguinary tyrants who did it all? And we are told of the Trajans, Adrians, Antonines, and Julians, the most virtuous and philosophic emperors, of whom we only certainly know that they were never unjust even to their enemies, nor cruel to friend or foe.

And what was the mighty provocation that induced such men to depart from consistency, and to exhibit towards Christians alone an intolerance that they had never before shown towards any other religionists whatever?-Why to be sure, it was even the superior excellence of Christianity; its more than humanly inoffensive and amiable character. The problem however is somewhat relieved when we get further instructed as to what was the nature of the cruelties they suffered,-those hardships beyond example that they endured. Ah! well a day, among other things, there was the martyrdom of virginity, their dearest and choicest virtue; the merit of which martyrdom as well as of every thing else which they were called to suffer consisted in its being voluntarily incurred. Those flames to which they were committed, were the flames of lust which the Christian youth of both sexes, would sometimes venture to defy in all their fury, by venturing to sleep together in, the very arms of temptation. And often did it happen, that a crying shame bore witness to the victory of Satan over the handmaids of the Lord. When it happens to be not the case to exaggerate the number and renown of martyrs, even an apostle would betray counsel, so far as to give the truth-involving challenge-Who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good? A challenge in any reading of it, pregnant at least with the awkward alternative, that either they were not followers of that which is good, or were not persecuted. And after all the piteous tales that have been wrought up to the highest pitch of description, of hosts of martyrs, of the whole Roman empire and the government, of its most humane and philosophic princes, rendered one great slaughter-house of Christian carnage,-of ten thousand soldiers crucified in one day on Mount Ararat, by the command of Trajan or Hadrian; of eleven thousand virgins put to death at Cologne, and of the salamander martyrs of Lyons and Vienna, under the government of Marcus Antoninus; we stumble ever and anon on the most awkward and ill-graced admissions of the most

creditable Christian historians, that as it was necessary to supply the place which the Pagan demi-gods and heroes had held in the religious reverence of the people, for that lies of some sort the people would have, so these Christian lies were piously substituted in the room of Pagan lies. The holy caterers for the greedy credulity of the mobility, contrived to slide the butcher on heathenism, and made believe that, their Penates, Nymphs, Dryads, and Hamo-dryads, had all been martyrs for Christianity; but the truth on't was, there were few or no martyrs at all.

Of this sort of accommodation or compromise to the humour of the times, Mosheim presents us with an irrefragible and unanswered document, in the life of Gregory Thaumaturgus, i.e. the Miracle-worker: who among all his miracles, finding the miracle of reclaiming the common people from the idolatry in which they had been educated somewhat too much for omnipotence, most condescendingly received them into the arms of the Christian Church, their paganism and idolatry, in as gross a shape as ever, notwithstanding. So that the world was virtually converted without knowing it; and the rising generation grew up imperceptibly to the substitution of the Virgin Mary for Diana, of Peter for Neptune, Jehovah for Jupiter, and Jesus Christ for Hercules: without incurring the imaginary guilt of apostacy from the religion of their forefathers, or ever being able to trace the data or circumstances of their transition from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. "When Gregory perceived that the ignorant multitude persisted in their idolatry," (I give now the very words of the authority I quote), "on account of the pleasures and sensual gratifications which they enjoyed at the pagan festivals; he granted them a permission to indulge in the like pleasures in celebrating the memory of the holy martyrs, hoping that in process of time they would return of their own accord to a more virtuous and regular course of life. Thus translated in Mosheim's Eccles. History, vol. 1. p. 202.

This was indeed very obliging; but where forsooth were a sufficient number of Martyrs to be found?-Why-old rags, rotten bones, chips of wood, rusty nails, teeth, skulls, locks of hair,* were indisputable evidence of the Martyrs and Saints, by whose virtue they still retained the odor of holiness: and as for any more particular information on the subject-good God! who but the Clergy should think of "such knowledge as would be too wonderful and excellent for the people: they could not attain unto it." It is only since the seeptical art of historical criticism, and the skill of eliciting truth from the collision of conflicting statements, has come into vogue, that infidelity has been able to

In the Palace of the Escurial, the clippings of St. Peter's nails, and the identical Virgin Mary's pretty curl of hair that made Joseph fall in love with her-poor Joseph-the Amphytrion of the Gospel!