responds to the imagination; the pendulum or balance, which corrects and regulates that motion, corresponds to the judgment; and the hand and dial, like the memory, record the operations.

"Now in proportion as these several faculties sleep, slumber, or keep awake, during the continuance of a dream, in that proportion will the dream be reasonable or frantic, remembered or forgotten.

"If there is any faculty in mental man that never sleeps, it is that volatile thing the imagination: the case is different with the judgment and memory. The sedate and sober constitution of the judgment easily disposes it to rest; and as to the memory, it records in silence, and is active only when it is called upon.

"That the judgment soon goes to sleep may be perceived by our sometimes beginning to dream before we are fully asleep ourselves. Some random thought runs in the mind, and we start, as it were into recollection that we are dreaming between sleeping and waking.

"If the judgment sleeps whilst the imagination keeps awake, the dream will be a riotous assemblage of mis-shapen images and ranting ideas, and the more active the imagination is, the wilder the dream will be. The most inconsistent and the most impossible things will appear right; because that faculty, whose province it is to keep order, is in a state of absence. The master of the school is gone out, and the boys are in an uproar.

"If the memory sleeps, we shall have no other knowledge of the dream than that we have dreamt, without knowing what it was about. In this case it is sensation, rather than recollection, that acts. The dream has given us some sense of pain or trouble, and we feel it as a hurt, rather than remember it as a vision.

"If memory only slumbers, we shall have a faint remembrance of the dream, and after a few minutes it will sometimes happen that the principal passages of the dream will occur to us more fully. The cause of this is, that the memory will sometimes continue slumbering or sleeping after we are awake ourselves, and that so fully, that it may, and sometimes does happen, that we do not immediately recollect where we are, nor what we have been about, or have to do. But when the memory starts into wakefulness, it brings the knowledge of these things back upon us, like a flood of light, and sometimes the dream with it.

"But the most curious circumstance of the mind in a state of dream, is the power it has to become the agent of every person, character, and thing, of which it dreams. It carries on conversation with several, asks questions, hears answers, gives and receives information, and it acts all these parts itself.

"But however various and eccentric the imagination may be in the creation of images and ideas, it cannot supply the place of memory, with respect to things that are forgotten when we are awake. For example, if we have forgotten the name of a person,

and dream of seeing him, and asking him his name, he cannot tell it; for it is ourselves asking ourselves the question.

"But though the imagination cannot supply the place of real memory it has the wild faculty of counterfeiting memory. It dreams. of persons it never knew, and talks with them as if it remembered them as old acquaintances. It relates circumstances that never happened, and tells them as if they had happened. It goes to places that never existed, and knows where all the streets and houses are as it it had been there before. The scenes it creates often appear as scenes. remembered. It will sometimes act a dream within a dream, and, in the delusion of dreaming, tell a dream it never dreamed, and tell it as if it was from memory. It may also be remarked, that the imagination in a dream, has no idea of time, as time. It counts only by circumstances; and if a succession of circumstances pass in a dream, that would require a great length of time to accomplish them, it will appear to the dreamer that a length of time equal thereto has passed also.

"As this is the state of mind in dream it may rationally be said that every person is mad once in twenty-four hours, for were he to act in the day as he dreams in the night he would be confined for a lunatic. In a state of wakefulness those three faculties being all active and acting in union constitute the rational man. In dreams it is otherwise, and therefore that state which is called insanity appears to be no other than a disunion of those faculties and a cessation of the judgment, during wakefulness, that we so often experience during sleep; and idiocity, into which some persons have fallen, is that cessation of all the faculties of which we can be sensible when we happen to wake before our memory.

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"In this view of the mind how absurd it is to place reliance upon dreams, and how much more absurd to make them a foundation for religion; yet the belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God, begotten by the Holy Ghost, a being never heard of before, stands on the story of an old man's dream. "And behold the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Joseph thou son of David, fear not thou to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." Matt. ch. 1. ver. 20.

"After this we have the childish stories of three or four other dreams; about Joseph going into Egypt; about his coming back again; about this, and about that, and this story of dreams has thrown Europe into a dream for more than a thousand years. All the efforts that nature, reason, and conscience have made to awaken man from it have been ascribed by priestcraft and superstition to the workings of the devil, and had it not been for the American revolu-" tion, which, by establishing the universal rightof conscience, first opened the way to free discussion, and for the French revolution which followed, this religion of dreams had continued to be preached, and that after it had ceased to be believed. Those who preached it

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and did not believe it, still believed the delusion necessary. They were not bold enough to be honest, nor honest enough to be bold.

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Every new religion, like a new play, requires a new apparatus of dresses and machinery, to fit the new characters it creates.-The story of Christ in the New Testament brings a new being upon the stage, which it calls the Holy Ghost, and the story of Abraham, the father of the Jews, in the Old Testament, gives existence to a new order of beings it calls Angels-There was no Holy Ghost before the time of Christ, nor Angels before the time of Abraham.-We hear nothing of these winged gentlemen, till more than two thousand years according to the Bible chronology, from the time they say the heavens, the earth and all therein were made:-After this, they hop about as thick as birds in a grove: -The first we hear of, pays his addresses to Hagar in the wilderness; then three of them visit Sarah ; another wrestles a fall with Jacob, and these birds of passage having found their way to earth and back, are continually coming and going. They eat and drink, and up again to heaven.-What they do with the food they carry away in their bellies the Bible does not tell us. Perhaps they do as the birds do, discharge it as they fly, for neither the scripture nor the church hath told us there are necessary houses for them in heaven,

"One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as scripture religion is, could never have obtained credit, yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism could do, and credulity believe.

"From angels in the Old Testament we get to prophets, to witches, to seers of visions, and dreamers of dreams, and sometimes we are told as in 2 Sam, ch. 9. ver. 15. that God whispers in the ear-At other times we are not told how the impulse was given or whether sleeping or waking-In 2 Sam, ch. 24. ver. 1. it is said, "And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say go number Israel and Judah."-And in 1 Chron. ch. 21. ver. 1. when the same story is again related, it is said, "and Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel."

"Whether this was done sleeping or waking, we are not told, but it seems that David whom they call " a man after God's own heart" did not know by what spirit he was moved, and as to the men called inspired penmen they agree so well about the matter, that in one book they say that it was God, and in the other that it was the Devil.

"Yet this is the trash, that the church imposes upon the world as the word of God; this is the collection of lies, and contradictions, called the Holy Bible! this is the rubbish called revealed religion! "The idea that writers of the Old Testament had of a God was boisterous, contemptible and vulgar.-They make him the Mars of the Jews, the fighting God of Israel, the conjuring God of their Priests and Prophets.--They tell as many fables of him as the Greeks told of Hercules.

"They pit him against Pharoah, as it were to box with him, and Moses carries the challenge: they make their God to say insultingly, "I will get me honour upon Pharoah, and upon his Host, upon his Chariots and upon his Horsemen."-And that he may keep his word, they make him set a trap in the Red Sea in the dead of night, for Pharoah, his host, and his horses, and drown them as a ratcatcher would do so many rats-Great honour indeed! the story of Jack the Giant-killer is better told!

"They match him against the Egyptian magicians to conjure with them, and after hard conjuring on both sides, (for where there is no great contest, there is no great honour) they bring him off victorious; the three first essays are a dead match- -Each party turns his rod into a serpent, the rivers into blood, and creates frogs, but upon the fourth, the God of the Israelites obtains the laurel, and he covers them all over with lice!-The Egyptian magicians cannot do the same, and this lousy triumph proclaims the victory!

They make their God to rain fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and belch fire and smoke upon mount Sinai; as if he was the Pluto of the lower regions.-They make him salt Lot's wife like pickled pork; they make him pass like Shakspeare's Queen Mab into the brain of their priests, prophets and prophetesses and tickle them into dreams; and after making him play all kind of tricks, they confound him with Satan, and leave us at a loss to know what God they meant!

"This is the descriptive God of the Old Testament: and as to the New, though the authors of it have varied the scene, they have continued the vulgarity.

"Is man ever to be the dupe of priestcraft, the slave of superstition? Is he never to have just ideas of his Creator? It is better not to believe there is a God than to believe of him falsely. When we behold the mighty universe that surrounds us, and dart our coutemplation, into the eternity of space, filled with inumerahle orbs, revolving in eternal harmony, how paltry must the tales of the Old and New Testaments, prophanely called the word of God, appear to thoughtful man! The stupendous wisdom, and unerring order, that reign and govern throughout this wondrous whole, and call us to reflection, put to shame the Bible!-The God of eternity and of all that is real, is not the God of passing dreams, and shadows of man's imagination! The God of truth, is not the God of fable; the belief of a God begotten and a God crucified, is a God blasphemed. It is making a profane use of reason.

"I shall conclude this Essay on Dreams with the two first verses of the 34th chapter of Ecclesiasticus, one of the books of the Apocrypha.

"Ver. 1. "The hopes of a man void of understanding are vain and false; and dreams lift up fools-Whoso regardeth dreams is like him that catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind." "I now proceed to an examination of the passages in the Bible

called prophecies of the coming of Christ, and to shew there are no prophecies of any such person. That the passages clandestinely styled prophecies are not prophecies, and that they refer to circumstances the Jewish nation was in at the time they were written or spoken, and not to any distance or future time or person,

"AN EXAMINATION OF THE PASSAGES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT,

Quoted from the old, and called prophecies of the coming of. Jesus Christ.

"THE passages called Prophecies of, or concerning, Jesus Christ, in the Old Testament, may be classed under the two following heads: First, those referred to in the four books of the New Testament called the Four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

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Secondly, those which translators and commentators, have, of their own imagination, erected into prophecies, and dubbed with that title, at the head of the several chapters of the Old Testament. Of these it is scarcely worth while to waste time, ink and paper upon, 1 shall therefore confine myself chiefly to those referred to in the aforesaid four books of the New Testament. If I shew that these are not prophecies of the person called Jesus Christ, nor have reference to any such person, it will be perfectly needless to combat those which translators or the Church have invented, and for which they had no other authority than their own imagination.

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"I begin with the book called the Gospel according to St. Matthew.

"In the first chap. ver. 18. it is said, "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise; when his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, SHE WAS FOUND WITH CHILD BY THE HOLY GHOST."-This is going a little too fast; because to make this verse agree with the next, it should have said no more than that she was found with child: for the next verse says, Then Joseph her husband being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily."-Consequently Joseph had found out no more than that she was with child, and he knew it was not by himself.

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"Ver. 20." And while he thought of these things (that is, whether he should put her away privily or make a public example of her) "behold the Angel of the Lord appeared to him, IN A DREAM, (that is Joseph dreamed that an augel appeared unto him, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son and call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins."

"Now without entering into any discussion upon the merits or de