to the commission of every evil which their hearts can devise, and their hands perpetrate.

It is true that many deists in christian countries do in words deny the justice of this representation, and affect to consider themselves as accountable to the Supreme Being; but upon being closely questioned, and made to follow out their own principles into their ultimate and legitimate consequences, they invariably confirm by facts what they contradict in terms. They invariably swamp themselves in practical atheism, leaving their Deity to slumber supinely in apathy and indifference, while they pursue the career to which appetite impels or convenience invites, without regarding what may be the consequences in a future life. For a full and conclusive commentary on this position consult what are called "The philosophical works of Lord Bolingbroke."

Precisely in this situation; namely, that of popery having naturally gravitated into atheism, and that of protestantism having, for want of all proper and wholesome church-discipline, degenerated into deism; was nearly the whole continent of Europe for many years previous to the French revolution; and profligacy and intelligence being more universally diffused over France than over any other nation of continental Europe, the explosion necessarily took place there in the first instance. It was this state of society in which infidelity had untied all the ligaments of moral obligation, and let loose all the depravity of the human heart to find uncontrolled vent in the commission of every enormity, that made an effectual demand for the labors and writings of the French philosophists; of Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, Condorcet, Diderot, and many other most unprincipled men, who devoted their great talents, and greater information to the sole purpose of covering the earth with atheism and crime.

Of this state of society, and of the efforts of these

infidel-fanatics, the statesmen of France availed themselves in order to guide, (not to cause,) the career of the Revolution towards the exterior aggrandizement of France. A conclusive proof of the general depravity in France is the ease and readiness with which parents denounced their children, children dragged their parents to the guillotine, and no tie of kindred blood prevented the assassin's knife, even in the very first stages of the revolution; which event therefore did not cause the profligacy; it was previously existing, and itself caused the revolutionary explosion.

Take one fact out of a million as corroborating this statement; it is cited from "A Narrative of a three years' residence in France," &c. by Anne Plumptree, (a vehement admirer of Buonaparte,) 3 vols. 8vo. published in London in 1810. "The man who was executioner at Marseilles before the revolution peremptorily refused that office under the revolutionary tribunal; alleging that the prisoners being unjustly condemned he could not in conscience execute the sentence. On his refusal to execute the office his son accepted it, and the father for his refusal was the first person he guillotined." See also a detailed account of the atrocities of France in the first days of her revolution, in "A History of the Political Life of the Right Honorable William Pitt," by Mr. Gifford, in 6 vols. 8vo. published in London in 1809.

How different a picture of national habits and morals does the civil war between Charles the First of England and his parliament exhibit!!! The valor of either contending party was unstained by the butchery and fraud which make the main pillars of support to the present political and military system of revolutionary and imperial France. The contrast will most forcibly appear on a perusal of Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, and of Colonel Hutchinson's Memoirs, on the one side; and of any

account of the French Revolution whatsoever, whether written by royalist or regicide, on the other: perhaps the fairest history of this eruption, notwithstanding the author's adulation to Buonaparte, is to be found in the " Précis Historique de la Révolution Française," begun by J. P. Rabaut, and continued by Lacretelle Jeuné, in 6 volumes, 12mo. published at Paris in 1807.

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A venerable American statesman now living, and minister from the United States to France, more than twenty-five years since, before the revolution, had been accustomed, with many other good and reflecting men, to think that there could not be such a thing as a downright atheist. But when he arrived in France he found his mistake; and that what he had treated as a visionary speculation was a sober reality. He met not only with individual atheists, but with hordes of them. While in Paris he had an opportunity of seeing a French philosopher in Paris die; this illumined being gave up the ghost, with the same stupid insensibility as that with which a dog or a pig would lie down, and breathe his last breath. The American envoy observed that a brother philosopher of France, a professed, and most intimate friend of the man who had just died, stood looking on the dead body with as much unconcern as if he had been surveying a dead calf suspended in the shambles. He therefore entered into a conversation with this enlightened philosopher, of which the following is a very short example. The letter A stands for the American, and F for the Frenchman.

"A. Do you feel no anxiety about the future condition of your friend who lies dead here?

"F. No; there is no future state; Voltaire has settled that point long since.

"A. Do you think then that God will not call men to account hereafter for their actions on earth?

"F. No; there is no God; Diderot has clearly demonstrated that.

"A. If there be no God, then how can there be any moral obligation?

"F. Moral obligation! we want no moral obligation.

"A. No moral obligation! what then is to hold society together?

"F. Enlightened self-interest."

Consult the "Euvres choisies et posthumes de M. de la Harpe," in 4 vols. 8vo. published at Paris in the year 1806, for a vast body of facts, which confirm the foregoing account of the causes of the French Revolution; namely, that the total abandonment of religious principle and moral obligation throughout France had rendered the people of that country fully ripe for the explosion which was for a while to shatter into fragments all the forms of religion, and all the institutions of regular government.

Mr. Jefferson, the late President of the United States, has declared that when he was in Paris, atheism was the common table-talk of the French bishops.

See also the "Life of Lord Nelson," &c. by Messrs. Clarke and M'Arthur, two vols. royal 4to. published in London, in 1809, p. 88, 2d volume, where Capt. Trowbridge says in a letter to Lord St. Vincent, dated August 16th, 1798, "I have now upwards of twenty (French) officers on board, not one of whom acknowledges a Supreme Being, or seems to have any principle. Robbery and murder are no crimes with them," &c.

Mankind have been permitted by Divine Providence to make three great and decisive experiments of the effects necessarily resulting from their own uncontrolled depravity, on a very wide and ample field.

1. A revelation of the only true and pure religion was made to our first parents, whose posterity soon

swerved into the most horrible impiety and profligacy. The flood swept away these rebels against God; and genuine religion was again promulged through the instrumentality of Noah, whose posterity also, following the course of depraved free agency, speedily plunged into the abominations of paganism, which overspread the whole world, excepting one little spot where the oracles of God were miraculously preserved. The necessary and universal fruits of paganism were to cover the earth with the most awful darkness, ignorance, profligacy, and oppression.

2. In the fullness of time our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ came to introduce the last and most perfect dispensation of grace and truth, called in the sacred scriptures "the kingdom of Heaven," and within a few years after his ascension, the gospel was spread over nearly the whole surface of the earth. From the purity of evangelical doctrine and its inseparable companion, sound morality, men gradually declined into superstition and error, until popery covered the world with darkness and iniquity.

3. The Reformation by Luther, by Calvin, and some other chosen instruments of Divine Providence, again opened to mankind the sources of pure evangelical light, which also soon became again darkened, and almost entirely extinguished, at least on the European continent, by the rise and progress of infidelity, which third great, and far more terrible experiment in its destructive consequences, than those of paganism and popery combined, is now running its career of desolation over the miserable remnant of the christian world.

From the progress of infidelity, cutting away all the ties of moral obligation, breaking up every great cement of society, and scattering its fragments in scorn and derision to the four winds of heaven; we have every rational ground of expectation that the whole continent of Europe must ere long pass through