ide a. Be this as it may, I take the aforesaid Dialogues to be a most egregious banter on the ideal philosophy then in vogue.

Bacon did but attempt to bring back the class of natural philosophers to the experiments of the old simple people in the first ages of the world, from whom we have all the necessary or very useful arts, such as result from the properties of the elements; arts of agriculture, of spinning and weaving; of making saws, hatchets, augers; of discovering and applying medicines. The invention of these, and such like, must be ascribed either to revelation, or to experiments made by plain men, long before any thing was heard of in the world that durst assume the fastuous name of philosophy. The men who now plume themselves with this title, will by no means allow revelation to have had any hand in these discoveries, and therefore must grant that common sense, in the plainer part of mankind, hath far outgone their refinements, both as to ingenuity and utility; for what hath their philosophy to boast of, that it did not borrow? The fine arts you will say. Though I should give you these gratis, I must insist we could have done very well without them. You may say, you have improved them. In some sense it may be true that they have been improved, but not by philosophers surely; and it may be as truly said, particularly of music, that they have been debauched, debased. As to painting and sculpture, they came too early into the world, were the inventions of fools, and improved, before the rise of philosophy, by still greater fools, into such degrees of perfection, as later ages have not been able to arrive at. But both their inventors and improvers, however, were but artisans, not at all philosophers, ingenious fools indeed, who made gods for themselves.

If imagination and invention, requiring much regulation in poetry at the hand of common sense, are so foreign to philosophy, which pretends to build on cool reason alone, what must they be, or do, when intruding on religion? Can true religion have any other author than God? If it is his work, invention and refinement can have no place in it. As often as they have been admitted, they have perverted its truth, and undermined its authority. If the true religion was originally revealed to mankind, as undoubtedly it was;

and if the invisible things of God from the creation of the world were, or might have been, clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead;' if mankind, when they knew God, glorified him not as God, but became vain in their imaginations,' so that their foolish hearts were darkened,' and so that 'professing themselves wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image, made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things,' Rom. i.; and if after that in this wisdom of God,' laid clearly open in the works of creation, the world by its own vain wisdom' or philosophy, pretending to reason on the wisdom of God,' thus laid open, after all 'knew not God;' was it not agreeable to the goodness of God, that he should by some other method, such as the 'foolishness of preaching, save them that believe? If mankind had forsaken the true and only God, and had vulgarly and poetically fallen to worship stocks, stones, birds, beasts, creeping things, devils, as gods; and if the more knowing part of them had philosophically fallen into fatalism, scepticism, Atheism, was it not high time that the infinitely gracious God should invert the course of Nature, so miserably misunderstood, and by prophecies, miracles, and what philosophers called 'the foolishness of preaching,' reduce the world to common sense in the great article of religion? When the infinite wisdom of God, speaking in the language of his creation, was no longer understood by his blind and foolish scholars, did it not become the mercy of the good Being to descend and speak to them in their own language, as to little babes, here called the foolishness of God,' 1 Cor. in comparison of the wisdom displayed in the works of creation? Should he have sent the Aristotles or Newtons to teach these babes religion in crabbed, high-flown, and mathematical terms? No; his Son came to speak to them in words which they understood, and sent a company of poor farmers and fishermen to instruct them in terms familiar to them. Yet, intelligible as the system of our religion is in itself, and simple as the language is wherein it is delivered, all other knowledge, in comparison of it, is low and trifling; all other language feeble, grovelling, and unaffecting. Closely translated into any other language, it loses nothing of its native beauty

or force, which lie in the sentiments, without borrowing any thing, but bare expression, from the dress or diction. This, with other proofs (and there are many), shew it to be the work of God himself. To speak, or, as in the Book of God, to write down to the meanest capacity, and yet so far above the most soaring flights of human genius, must argue the true divinity of the Author. This point, without here producing instances, I can safely submit to the candour of every able critic.

On this occasion, some Christians may wonder, and all infidels object, the many divisions among the professors of a religion so fully and clearly set forth to common sense, as I insist our religion is. There will be no great difficulty in removing both, if we candidly consider, that the cause of these divisions may be found in the great obliquity and diversity of human reasonings, governed, for the most part, by vanity, sensuality, corrupt affections, violent passions, and wild imaginations of mankind. In other branches of knowledge, far less interfering than religion with the animal part of our nature, as great, and almost as many differences have arisen. I have hinted at some in natural philosophy, where neither passion nor prejudice have so much as a pretence for intruding. In law and distributive justice, interest hath produced ten thousand times more, and given our best judges a world of trouble in the decision. In mathematics, whereof the professors assume a Papal authority of infallible demonstration, not only paradoxes and mysteries, but palpable contradictions have been maintained by different mathematicians, and sometimes by one and the same mathematician; for instance, the infinity of parts, as to numbers, into which a cubical inch of space or gold is divisible, cannot be exceeded by any number, and yet two cubical inches of space or gold is divisible into twice as many parts as one. Here are two propositions, both mathematically demonstrable, and yet flatly contradictory in terms and ideas. Perhaps I should not have selected this out of a good many in algebra, fluxions, and logarithms, had not the mathematicians taken upon them to deal so largely in infinites and infinitesimals. If numbers of pretended Christians maintain there are three Gods, this will not prove that the unity of God is not revealed in his word with sufficient precision.

If a still greater number of pretended Christians pray to absent creatures, and fall down before carved images, this will not make it at all doubtful whether this sort of adoration, and that sort of devotion, is not expressly forbidden by the sole object of all adoration and devotion. I might, with equal force, instance in every other fundamental point of controversy among those who hold the Bible to be the word of God, and our rule of faith.

What right however the infidel part of mankind can have to object our religious differences I cannot see, since the all-sufficiency, in regard to religion, of their boasted light of nature retains them as advocates for all sorts of religion, or compels them to be enemies to all. We have latitudinarians among ourselves, who insist, that the understandings of men are as various as their faces, that therefore every individual man must either have no religion, or an individual religion, and that our Maker is better pleased with variety than uniformity in religion; a thing impossible, nay, blasphemous, if there is really a true religion, or if any one religion is nearer to truth than another. The celebrated dictator, Montesquieu, hath laid it down as a rule, that religions ought to be various, or to speak more precisely, climatical; that is, that warm climates must have warm, and cool climates cool religions, no great matter with him whether true or false. Christianity, he thinks, may suit well enough with the Europeans, especially the Northern nations, where cool reason is most apt to prevail; but can never rightly obtain in the East and between the tropics, where a more enthusiastic system would be more welcome. Welcome, or not welcome, I take his topical determination to be very much amiss, as to the point of utility, the chief, or rather only thing to be here attended to; for if he thought religion to be of any use, he ought to have assigned us in this cold climate the warmest species of religion, and to the inhabitants of hot countries the very coldest he could think of, to balance the excess, both here and there, of our local dispositions. What shall we think of this modern oracle? Was he wholly unacquainted with Christianity? Or did he only affect an ignorance, suitable to his indifference about all religion? Had he been willing to own a knowledge of religion, he must have confessed, that our holy religion carries with it

causes of conviction and of animation, sufficient for the inhabitants of all countries from the equator to the pole, on either hand. Montesquieu thinks as a certain preacher in the Highlands of Scotland did, who in a very pathetic sermon assured his audience, that if they did not repent of their sins, the Lord, at the last day, would set them stark naked on the top of one of their highest mountains, and send a north-wind to blow on them, and freeze their very hearts to icicles. The preacher being reproved for this mode of punishment by one of his hearers on coming out of the kirk, who alleged that fire and brimstone should have been threatened; answered, I am not such a fool as to tell the Highlanders there is a great fire in hell, lest they should all run thither headlong. In this instance, climate alone was considered; but it must be confessed by both the Frenchman and the Scotchman, that, if in order to an easy reception of religion, accommodation to the tempers, humours, and prejudices, whether natural or national, of mankind, alone is to be the rule, no religion threatening punishments in any degree of severity, can expect to be easily received, especially in minds where corruption and wickedness, in any degree, have taken place; and yet here it is, that damnatory principles and penalties are most wanted. So the Scotch preacher thought, and surely Mohtesquieu, as a great lawyer, must in regard to civil society and its laws, have been of the same opinion; and why not in regard to the laws of God, common sense cannot see. Religion is always welcome to carry the hopes of men as high as it pleases by promises; but if it threatens proportionable punishments, it then becomes an arbitrary and dreadful religion, dictates only, as all infidels insist, a mere mercenary morality, and ought to be rejected. But in whatsoever kind or degree a man of one climate may constitutionally differ from a man of another climate, men of all climates are so nearly the same as to both civil and spiritual society, that punishments, as well as rewards, become absolutely and universally necessary. So is human nature constituted by its wise and gracious Author, that it can commodiously subsist, I mean, as to bodily health and life, either in the hottest or coldest parts of the habitable world; and such uniformity hath he given,