the Platonic doctrine of a future state.* Though the metaphysical notion of the immortality of the soul, had been inculcated and embraced in India, in Assyria, in Egypt, and in Gaul, and was believed with so influential and practical a faith, that its votaries would lend their money to be returned them again in the other world+ (a proof of sincerity less equivocal than martyrdom itself). Yet this doctrine appears to have been wholly unknown to the Jewish legislator, and is but darkly insinuated in any part of the prophetical writings. Hence the Sadducees, who, according to Josephus, respecting only the authority of the Pentateuch (or five books of Moses), had no belief in a resurrection, angels or spirits, or any such chimerical hypostases. Nor does the Christ of the New Testament seem to have had the least idea of the possible existence of the soul, in a state of separation from the body. All his attempts to alarm the cowardice and weakness of his hearers, are founded on the assumption, that the body must accompany the soul in its anabasis to heaven, or its descent to hell, and indeed that there was no virtual distinction between them. It must, however, be admitted to be a good and valid apology for the omission-that none of his followers have been able to supply the deficiency.

CHAPTER V.

STATE OF PHILOSOPHY.

THERE is nothing that can be known of past ages, known with more unquestionable certainty, than that in, about, and immediately after the epocha of time ascribed to the dawning of divine light, the human mind seems generally to have suffered an eclipse. The arts and sciences, intelligence and virtue, were smitten with an unaccountable palsy. The mind of man lost all its energies, and sunk under a generally prevailing

*The only reward proposed for obedience to the law of God, was, that attached to the fifth, which is called by the Apostle, the first commandment with promise" that thy days may be long in the land."

+ Vetus ille mos Gallorum occurrit (says Valerius Maximus 1. 2. c. 6. p. 10), quos memoria proditum est, pecunias mutuas dare solitos quæ his, apud inferos redderentur.

It is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell. It is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire.-Mark ix. 45. 47. Here was no idea of heaven, or the state of the blessed, above a hospital of incurables.

imbecility. We look in vain among the successors of Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, Horace, and Virgil, the statesmen, orators, and poets of the golden age of literature, for a continuation of the series of such ornaments of human nature. A blight had smitten the growth of men's understandings; not only no more such clever men rose up, but, with very few exceptions, no more such men as could have appreciated the talents of their predecessors, or possessing so much as the relative degree of capacity, necessary to be sensible of the superiority that had preceded them. After reasonings so just, and eloquence so powerful, that even so late after the revival of literature as the present day, mankind have not yet learned to reason more justly, or to declaim more powerfully; a race of barbarous idiots possessed themselves of the seat of science and the muses; and all distinction and renown was sought and obtained by absurdities disgraceful to reason, and mortifications revolting to nature. "The groves of the academy, the gardens of Epicurus, and even the porticoes of the Stoics, were deserted as so many different schools of scepticism or impiety, and many among the Romans were desirous that the writings of Cicero should be condemned and suppressed by the authority of the senate."*

The reasoning of which all men see the absurdity, when applied by the victorious Caliph to justify the destruction of the library of Alexandria,t appeared unanswerable when adduced on the side of the true faith.

Omar issued his commands for the destruction of that celebrated library to his general, Amrus, in these words; "As to the books of which you have made mention, if there be contained in them what accords with the book of God (meaning the Koran of Mahomet), there is without them, in the book of God, all that is sufficient. But if there be any thing in them repugnant to that book, we in no respect want them. Order them, therefore, to be all destroyed."-Harris.

Precisely similar in spirit, and almost in form, are the respective decrees of the Emperors Constantine and Theodosius, which generally ran in the words, "that all writings adverse to the claims of the Christian religion, in the possession of whomsoever they should be found, should be committed to the fire," as the pious Emperors would not that those things which they took upon themselves to assume, tended to provoke God to wrath, should be allowed to offend the minds of the pious. Mr. Gibbon, in his usual strain of caustic sarcasm, mentions the elabo

* Gibbon, ch. 16.

+ The destruction of this celebrated library gave safety to the evidences of the Christian religion.

See the decrees quoted in my Syntagma, p. 35.

rate treatises which the philosophers, more especially the prevailing sect of the new Platonicians, who endeavoured to extract allegorical wisdom from the fictions of the Greek poets, composed; and the many elaborate treatises against the faith of the Gospel, which have since been committed to the flames, by the prudence of orthodox emperors. The large treatise of Porphyry against the Christians consisted of thirty books, and was composed in Sicily about the year 270. It was against the writings of this great man especially, who had acquired the honourable addition to his name of THE VIRTUOUS, that the exterminatory decree of Theodosius was more immediately directed. There is little doubt, that had the discoveries his writings would have made been permitted to come to general knowledge, all the pretended external evidence of Christianity must have been given up as wholly untenable. But while what the virtuous Porphyry had really written, was committed to the flames, a worse outrage was committed against his reputation, by Christians, who, aware of the great influence of his name and authority, ascribed the vile trash which they had composed themselves to him, for the purpose of making him seem to have made the admissions which it was for the interest of Christianity that he should have made, or to have attacked it so feebly, as might serve to show the advantage of their defences. The celebrated treatise on the Philosophy of Oracles, which even the pious Doddridge, and the learned Macknight, have ascribed to this great man, and availed themselves of, for that fraudulent purpose, has, by the greater fidelity and honesty of Lardner, been demonstrably traced home to the forging hands of Christian piety.*

Before the Christian religion had made any perceptible advance among mankind, two grand and influential principles characterized all the moving intelligence that then existed in the world; and to these two principles, Christianity owed its triumph over all the wisdom and honesty that feebly opposed its progress. These principles were,-the SUPPOSED NECESSITY OF DECEIVING THE VULGAR, and THE IMAGINED DUTY OF CULTIVATING AND PERPETUATING IGNORANCE. Of the former of these principles, the most distinguished advocates were the whole train of deceptive legislators; Moses in Palestine, Mneues (if he be not the same) in Egypt, Minos in Crete, Lycurgus in Lacedæmon, Numa in Rome, Confucius in China, Triptolemus, who pretended the inspirations of Ceres, Zaleucus of Minerva, Solon of Epimenides, Zamolxis of Vesta, Pythagoras, and Plato. Euripides maintained that

Περ. της εκ λογιτον φιλοσοφιας. See this exposé in my Syntagma, p. 116. It will be seen that I have largely availed myself of my friend's printed but unpublished work on Deisidemony.

in the early state of society, some wise men insisted on the necessity of darkening truth with falsehood, and of persuading men that there is an immortal deity, who hears and sees and understands our actions, whatever we may think of that matter ourselves.* Strabo shows at great length the geneal use and important effects of theological fables. It is not possible for a philosopher to conduct by reasoning a multitude of women, and of the low vulgar, and thus to invite them to piety, holiness, and faith; but the philosopher must also make use of superstition, and not omit the invention of fables, and the performance of wonders. For the lightning, and the ægis, and the trident, and the thyrsolonchal arms of the gods, are but fables; and so is all ancient theology. But the founders of states adopted them as bugbears to frighten the weak-minded.”+

Varro says plainly, "That there are many truths which it is useless for the vulgar to know, and many falsities which it is fit that the people should not know are falsities."‡

Paul of Tarsus, whose fourteen epistles make up the greater part of the bulk of the New Testament, repeatedly inculcates and avows the principle of deceiving the common people, talks of his having been upbraided by his own converts with being crafty and catching them with guile, and of his known and wilful lies, abounding to the glory of God. For further avowals of this principle of deceit, the reader may consult the chapter of Admissions.

Accessory to the avowed and consecrated principle of deceit, was that of IGNORANCE. St. Paul, in the most explicit language, had taught and maintained the absolute necessity of extreme ignorance, in order to attain celestial wisdom, and gloried in the power of the Al mighty as destroying the wisdom of the wise, and bringing to nothing the understanding of the prudent; and purposely choosing the foolish things, and the weak things, and the base things, I as objects of his adoption, and vessels of his grace. And St. Peter, or whoever was the author of the epistles ascribed to him, inculcates the necessity of the most absolute prostration of understanding, and of a state of mind but little removed from slobbering idiotcy, as necessary to the acquisition of divine knowledge; that even as new born babes, they should desire the sincere milk of the word, that they might grow thereby.'

66

* Quoted in the pseudo Plutarchean treatise, de placitis philos. B. 1. chap. 7. † Dr. Isaac Vossius, when asked what had become of a certain man of letters, answered, bluntly," he has turned country parson, and is deceiving the vulgar.”August. De Cio. Dei. B. 4.

§ 2 Corinth. xii. 16.

Romans iii. 7.

¶ 1 Corinth. i. 27.

** 1 Peter ii. 2. 1 Thes. ii. 7, "Even as a nurse cherisheth her children." Compare also 2 Corinth. xi. 23, where Paul says, " I speak as a fool " which he need not have said.

Upon the sense of which doctrine, the pious and orthodox Tertullian glories in the egregious ridiculousness of the Christian religion, and the debilitating effects which the sincere belief of it had produced on his own understanding: his main argument for it being, "I reverence it, because it is contemptible; I adore it, because it is absurd; I believe it, because it is impossible." ""*

Nothing was considered more obnoxious to the cause of the gospel, than the good sense contained in the writings of its opponents. The inveteracy against learning, of Gregory the Great, to whom this country owes its conversion to the gospel, was so excessive, that he was not only angry with an Archbishop of Vienna, for suffering grammar to be taught in his diocese, but studied to write bad Latin himself, and boasted that he scorned to conform to the rules of grammar, whereby he might seem to resemble a heathen.† The spirit of superstition quite suppressed all the efforts of learning and philosophy.

Christianity was first sent to the shores of England by the missionary zeal of Pope Gregory the First, not earlier than the sixth or the beginning of the seventh century. Our King Alfred, who is said to have founded the University of Oxford, in the ninth century, lamented that there was not at that time a priest in his dominions who understood Latin, and even for some centuries after, we find that our Christian bishops and prelates, the "teachers, spiritual, pastors and masters," of the whole Christian community, were Marksmen, i. e. they supplied, by the sign of the cross, their inability to write their own names.§

Though philology, eloquence, poetry, and history, were sedulously cultivated among those of the Greeks and Latins, who in the fourth century still held out their resistance against the Christian religion, its just and honourable historian, Mosheim, admonishes his readers by no means to conclude that any acquaintance with the sciences had become universal in the church of Christ. "It is certain (he adds) that the greatest part both of the bishops and presbyters, were men entirely destitute of learning and education. Besides, that savage and illiterate party, who looked upon all sorts of erudition, particularly that of a philosophical kind, as pernicious, and even destructive of true piety and religion, increased both in number and authority. The ascetics, monks, and hermits, augmented the strength of this barbarous faction, and not only the women, but also all who took solemn looks, sordid garments, * De carne Christi Semleri, Edit. Halæ Magdeburgicæ, 1770, vol. 3, p. 352. Quoted in Syntagma, page 106.

+ Dr. Mandeville's Free Thoughts, page 152.

See History of England, almost any one.

§ Evans's Sketches.

Ecclesiastical History, Cent, 4, part 2, chap. 1, sec. 5, p. 346.