Both VOLTAIRE and HELVETIUS advocated the unlimited gratification of the sensual appetites, and the latter held that it is not agreeable to policy to regard gallantry (that is, unlawful intercourse with married women) as a vice in a moral sense; and that, if men will call it a vice, it must be acknowledged that there are vices which are useful in certain ages and countries! In other words, that in those countries such vices are virtues.1 Rousseau also had recourse to feelings as his standard of morality. "I have only to consult myself," said he, "concerning what I do. All that I feel to be right, is right. Whatever I feel to be wrong is wrong. All the morality of our actions lies in the judgment we ourselves form of them." And just before the French revolution broke out, it is a known fact that the idea of moral obligation was exploded among the infidel clubs that existed in every part of France. Such is the morality taught by some of those who in the last century claimed to be received as the masters of reason. It were no difficult task to add to their precepts many similar ones from the opponents of revelation in our own times; but as they only re-assert the atheistical and immoral tenets of their predecessors with increased malignity and grossness, we shall spare the reader the pain of perusing passages that cannot but shock the mind of every one who cherishes the least regard for decency or social order. Let us advert, however, for a moment, to the effects produced by these principles on an entire people, and also on individuals. The only instance in which the avowed rejectors of revelation have possessed the supreme power and government of a country, and have attempted to dispose of human happiness according to their own doctrines and wishes, is that of France during the greater part of the revolution, which, it is now well known, was affected by the abettors of infidelity. The great majority of the nation had become infidels. The name and profession of Christianity was renounced by the legislature and the abolition of the Christian æra was proclaimed. Death was declared by an act of the republican government to be an eternal sleep. The existence of the Deity, and the immortality of the soul were formally disavowed by the National Convention and the doctrine of the resurrection from the dead was declared to have been only preached by superstition for the torment of the living. All the religions in the world were proclaimed to be the daughters of ignorance and pride; and it was decreed to be the duty of the convention to assume the honourable office of disseminating atheism (which was blasphemously affirmed to be truth) over all the world. As a part of this duty, the convention further decreed, that its express renunciation of all religious worship should, like its invitations to rebellion, be translated into all foreign languages; and it was asserted and received in the convention that the adversaries of religion had deserved well of their country! Correspondent with these professions and 1 Helvetius De l'Esprit, tom. i. disc. 2. ch. 15. p. 176. et seq. 2 Emilius, tom. 1. pp. 166--163. declarations were the effects actually produced. Public worship was utterly abolished. The churches were converted into 'temples of reason,' in which atheistical and licentious homilies were substituted for the proscribed service; and an absurd and ludicrous imitation of the pagan mythology was exhibited under the title of the 'religion of reason. In the principal church of every town a tutelary goddess was installed with a ceremony equally pedantic, frivolous, and profane; and the females, selected to personify this new divinity, were mostly prostitutes, who received the adorations of the attendant municipal officers, and of the multitudes, whom fear, or force, or motives of gain, had collected together on the occasion. Contempt for religion or decency became the test of attachment to the government; and the gross infraction of any moral or social duty was deemed a proof of civism, and a victory over prejudice. All distinctions of right and wrong were confounded. The grossest debauchery triumphed. Then proscription followed upon proscription; tragedy followed after tragedy, in almost breathless succession, on the theatre of France; almost the whole nation was converted into a horde of assassins. Democracy and atheism, hand in hand, desolated the country, and converted it into one vast field of rapine and of blood.' The moral and social ties were unloosed, or rather torn asunder. For a man to aceuse his own father was declared to be an act of civism, worthy of a true republican; and to neglect it, was pronounced a crime that should be punished with death. Accordingly, women denounced their husbands, and mothers their sons, as bad citizens and traitors ; while many women, not of the dress of the common people nor of infamous reputation, but respectable in character and appearance, -seized with savage ferocity between their teeth the mangled limbs of their murdered countrymen. France during this period was a theatre of crimes, which, after all preceding perpetrations, have excited in the mind of every spectator amazement and horror. The miseries, suffered by that single nation, have changed all the histories of the preceding sufferings of mankind into idle tales, and have been enhanced and multiplied without a precedent, without a number, and without a name. The kingdom appeared to be changed into one great prison; the inhabitants converted into felons; and the common doom of man commuted for the violence of the sword and bayonet, the sucking boat and the guillotine. To contemplative men it seemed for a season, as if the knell of the whole nation was tolled, and the world summoned to its execution and its funeral. Within the short time of ten years, not less than three millions of human beings are supposed to have perished, in that single country, by the influence of atheism. Were the world to adopt and be governed by the doctrines of revolutionary France, what crimes would not mankind perpetrate? What agonies would they not suffer? Yet republican France is held 1 The details, on which the above representation is founded, may be seen at length in the Abbé Barruel's Memoirs of Jacobinism; Gifford's Residence in France, during the years 1792—1795, vol. ii. and Adolphus's History of France, vol. ii. VOL. I. 5 up in the present day as an example worthy to be followed in this country! With regard to the influence of deism on individuals, we may remark that the effects which it produces are perfectly in unison with the principles which its advocates have maintained. In order to accomplish their designs, there is no baseness in hypocrisy to which they have not submitted. Almost all of them have worn a mask of friendship, that they might stab Christianity to the heart; -they have professed a reverence for it, while they were aiming to destroy it. Lord Herbert, Hobbes, Lord Shaftesbury, Woolston, Tindal, Chubb, and Lord Bolingbroke, were all guilty of the vile hypocrisy of lying, while they were employed in no other design than to destroy it. Collins, though he had no belief in Christianity, yet qualified himself for civil office by partaking of the Lord's Supper; and Shaftesbury and others were guilty of the same base hypocrisy. "Such faithless professions, such gross violations of truth in Christians, would have been proclaimed to the universe by these very writers as infamous desertions of principle and decency. Is it less infamous in themselves? All hypocrisy is detestable; but none is so detestable as that which is coolly written with full premeditation, by a man of talents, assuming the character of a moral and religious instructor, a minister, a prophet, of the truth of the infinite God. Truth is a virtue perfectly defined, mathematically clear, and completely understood by all men of common sense. There can be no haltings between uttering truth and falsehood, no doubts, no mistakes; as between piety and enthusiasm, frugality and parsimony, generosity and profusion. Transgression, therefore, is always a known, definitive, deliberate villany. In the sudden moment of strong temptation, in the hour of unguarded attack, in the flutter and trepidation of unexpected alarm, the best man may, perhaps, be surprised into any sin; but he, who can coolly, of steady design, and with no unusual impulse, utter falsehood, and vent hypocrisy, is not far from finished depravity. "The morals of Rochester and Wharton need no comment. Woolston was a gross blasphemer. Blount solicited his sister-inlaw to marry him, and, being refused, shot himself. Tindal was originally a protestant, then turned papist, then protestant again, merely to suit the times, and was at the same time infamous for vice in general, and the total want of principle. He is said to have died with this prayer in his mouth: "If there is a God, I desire that he may have mercy on me." Hobbes wrote his Leviathan to serve the cause of Charles I., but finding him fail of success, he turned it to the defence of Cromwell, and made a merit of this fact to the usurper; as Hobbes himself unblushingly declared to Lord Clarendon. Morgan had no regard to truth; as is evident from his numerous falsifications of Scripture, as well as from the vile hypocrisy of professing himself a Christian in those very writings in which he labours to destroy Christianity. Voltaire, in a letter now remaining, requested his friend D'Alembert to tell for him a direct and palpable lie, by denying that he was the author of the Philosophical Dictionary. D'Alembert in his answer, informed him, that he had told the lie. Voltaire has indeed expressed his own moral character perfectly in the following words: Monsieur Abbé, I must be read, no matter whether I am believed or not."1 He also solemnly professed to believe the Catholic religion, although at the same time he doubted the existence of a God, and at the very moment in which he was plotting the destruction of Christianity, and introducing the awful watch-word of his party Ecrasez l'Infame,2 — at that very moment, with bended knee and uplifted eye, he adored the cross of Christ, and received the host in the communion of the church of Rome. This man was also a shameless adulterer, who, with his abandoned mistress, violated the confidence of his visitors, by opening their letters ;3 and his total want of all principle, moral or religious-his impudent audacity, his filthy sensuality - his persecuting envy, his base adulation, his unwearied treachery, -his tyranny, his cruelty, - his profligacy, and his hypocrisy, will render him for ever the scorn, as his unbounded powers will the wonder, of mankind. - The dishonesty, perjury, and gross profligacy of Rousseau, who alternately professed and abjured the Roman Catholic and Protestant religion, without believing either, and who died in the very act of uttering a notorious falsehood to his Creator, as well as of Paine and other advocates of infidelity, are too notorious to render it necessary to pollute these pages with the detail of them. VII. Since then the history and actual condition of mankind, in all ages, concur to show that a divine revelation is not only possible and probable, but also absolutely necessary to recover them out of their universal corruption and degeneracy, and to make known to them the proper object of their belief and worship, as well as their present duties and future expectations; it remains that we consider in what way such revelation would be communicated to the world. There appear to be only two methods by which an extraordinary discovery of the will of God may be made to man; viz. either an immediate revelation, by inspiration or otherwise, to each individual separately, or else a commission, accompanied with indisputable credentials, bestowed on some to convince others that they came from God in order to instruct them in those things which he has revealed. But it cannot seem requisite that the Almighty should immediately inspire, or make a direct revelation to, every particular person in the world: for either he must so powerfully influence the minds and affections of men, as to take away their choice and freedom of acting (which would be to offer violence to human nature); or else men would, for the most part, have continued in their evil courses and practices, and have denied God in their lives; though 1 Dwight on Infidelity, pp. 47, 48. 2 Crush the wretch! meaning Jesus Christ. 3 See the publication entitled Vie Privée de Voltaire et de Madame du Châtelet, Paris, 1820, 8vo. their understandings were ever so clearly and fully convinced of his will and commandments, as well as of his eternal power and godhead. But even if God were willing to vouchsafe some immediate revelation of himself to vicious and immoral persons, how can we be assured that they would be converted? Would they not rather find out some pretence to persuade themselves, that it was no real revelation, but the effect of natural agents, or of melancholy and a disturbed imagination? They might, perhaps, be terrified for the present; but there is every reason to apprehend, from the known infirmity and depravity of mankind, that such persons would soon stifle their terrors with their accustomed arguments for atheism and infidelity. Independently, however, of the inefficacy of immediate revelation to every man in particular, the supposing it to be thus made, would fill the world with continual impostures and delusions; for, if every one had a revelation to himself, every one might pretend to others what he pleased; and one man might be deluded by the pretence of a revelation made to another, against an express revelation made to himself. And this, we may conclude, would often happen from what we experience every day for if men can be perverted by the arts and insinuations of others, against their own reason and judgment, they might as well be prevailed upon to act against a revelation made to them; though revelations should be things as common and familiar among men as reason itself is. Immediate revelations, therefore, to every particular individual, would have been needless and superfluous; they would have been unsuitable to the majesty and honour of God; they would have been ineffectual to the ends for which they were designed; and would have afforded occasion for many more pretences to impostures than there are now in the world. The only other way by which the divine will can be revealed to mankind, is that which the Scriptures affirm to have actually been employed; viz. the qualifying of certain persons to delare that will to others, by infallible signs and evidences that they are authorised and commissioned by God. What those evidences are, will be discussed in a subsequent page. It is however but reasonable to suppose, that divine revelations should be committed to writing, in order that they might be preserved for the benefit of mankind, and delivered down genuine and uncorrupted to posterity. In fact, oral tradition is so uncertain and so insecure a guide, that if a revelation claiming to be divine be not transmitted by writing, it cannot possibly be preserved in its purity, or serve mankind as a certain rule of faith and of life. In illustration of this remark, we may observe, that writing is a more secure method of conveyance than tradition, being neither so liable to involuntary mistakes, through weakness of memory or understanding, nor so subject to voluntary falsifications, suppressions, or additions, either out of malice or design. "It is also a method of conveyance more natural and human. It is nothing extraordi |
