terior belief of a Deity bear with the strongest force upon that great point, which gives indeed interest and importance to all the rest,-the resurrection of the human dead ?"* To revealed religion, therefore, I shall draw your attention in my next letter; for its great and general object has been to bring gradually to light, as men were able to receive it, life and immortality, the preaching or publishing of which you will by and by find to be that, which, in the Scriptures of the New Testament, is emphatically called the Gospel.

* Paley's Natural Theology, Chap. xxvii.

LETTER VI.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE PROPER METHOD OF STUDYING THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.

HAVING pointed out to you the method by which it appears to me that the doctrines and duties of natural religion will be most advantageously studied, I proceed now to guide you, if I can, through the study of revealed religion.

As there never was a public religion in any civilized nation that did not lay claim to a Divine origin, and as there are, at present, in the world, at least three systems of public or national religion -the Christian, the Mahometan, and the Braminical, which their votaries believe to have been

I have not mentioned the Jewish, because it is not now, nor ever can again be, the national religion anywhere; and we shall see by and by, that originally it was intended to be only preparatory to the Christian, of which it was a typical representation, and must therefore be studied only as connected with it. We shall likewise discover, from the very nature and object of the Christian revelation, that it is the last revealed dispensation of its Divine Author that hath been or ever will be made to man.

revealed from Heaven, you may not unnaturally think, as many theologians seem to have thought before you, that, after studying what is called the religion of nature, you ought next to inquire which of those religions, that all lay claim to a Divine origin, have the best right to that claim. This, however, is surely not the proper way of conducting your studies; for no man can successfully inquire into the truth or origin of any religion, until he shall have acquired some knowledge of its doctrines, and of the duties which it prescribes. It is indisputable that no doctrine which clearly contradicts any truth which hath been demonstrated by the light of nature, can have been revealed by God -the father of all lights; though it doth not by any means follow, that whatever doth not contradict such demonstrations, must have been derived immediately from Him.

The claims which have been made for the Divine origin of all national systems of religion, however ill founded many of them may be, certainly add strength to the proofs, which I have already laid before you, that the first principles of religion must have been revealed to the progenitors of the human race; but it doth not follow, that we must therefore study all the systems, which vain and erring man has deduced from those principles, before we can adopt either of them as our own. The Christian religion, in various forms indeed, is received by all the nations of Europe as of Divine origin. Surely, therefore, it is that religion, which has the

best claim to our attention, and if we find that it contains many doctrines of the greatest importance, which human reason could never have deduced from the phenomena of nature, and, at the same time, nothing which is palpably contradictory to such deductions, it is unquestionably our duty to study it in the first place; and to adhere to it as to the religion of our fathers, if we find that its claim to a Divine origin rests on a stable foundation.

The doctrines and precepts of the Christian religion are all to be found in a series of revelations, which have successively been vouchsafed to mankind at sundry times, and in divers manners, since the beginning of the world; and all these revelations are recorded in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. These Scriptures, therefore, you must study with the closest attention, and without prejudice, either favourable or unfavourable, to the established creed of any particular Church; and the common advice given to students of theology, is to study them in the original languages. This, however, is an advice which is very seldom followed, or indeed capable of being followed; because few young men are sufficiently acquainted with the Hebrew language to read it with ease and facility. I therefore recommend to you a very different method of proceeding.

Our authorized version of the Old and New Testaments, though certainly not faultless, is universally acknowledged to be on the whole very accurate. You ought, therefore, in the first place, to

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revealed from Heaven, you may not unnaturally think, as many theologians seem to have thought before you, that, after studying what is called the religion of nature, you ought next to inquire which of those religions, that all lay claim to a Divine origin, have the best right to that claim. This, however, is surely not the proper way of conducting your studies; for no man can successfully inquire into the truth or origin of any religion, until he shall have acquired some knowledge of its doctrines, and of the duties which it prescribes. It is indisputable that no doctrine which clearly contradicts any truth which hath been demonstrated by the light of nature, can have been revealed by God -the father of all lights; though it doth not by any means follow, that whatever doth not contradict such demonstrations, must have been derived immediately from Him.

The claims which have been made for the Divine origin of all national systems of religion, however ill founded many of them may be, certainly add strength to the proofs, which I have already laid before you, that the first principles of religion must have been revealed to the progenitors of the human race; but it doth not follow, that we must therefore study all the systems, which vain and erring man has deduced from those principles, before we can adopt either of them as our own. The Christian religion, in various forms indeed, is received by all the nations of Europe as of Divine origin. Surely, therefore, it is that religion, which has the