1. The general system of their mythology was unsupported by any solid proofs; and the wisest among the Pagans had already disclaimed its usurped authority. 2. The description of the infernal regions had been abandoned to the fancy of painters and of poets, who peopled them with so many phantoms and monsters, who dispensed their rewards and punishments with so little equity, that a solemn truth, the most congenial to the human heart, was oppressed and disgraced by the absurd mixture of the wildest fictions,* 3. The doctrine of a future state was scarcely considered among the devout polytheists of Greece and Rome as a fundamental article of faith. The providence of the gods, as it related to public communities rather than to private individuals, was principally displayed on the visible theatre of the present world. The petitions which were offered on the altars of Jupiter or Apollo, expressed the anxiety of their worshippers for temporal happiness, and their ignorance or indifference concerning a future life. The important truth of the immortality of the soul was inculcated with more diligence as well as success in India, in Assyria, in Egypt, and in Gaul; and since we cannot attribute such a difference to the superior knowledge of the barbarians, we must ascribe it to the influence of an established priesthood, which employed the motives of virtue as the instrument of ambition.‡

We might naturally expect, that a principle so essential to religion, would have been revealed in the clearest terms to the chosen people of Palestine, and that it might safely have been entrusted to the hereditary priesthood of Aaron. It is incumbent on us to adore the mysterious dispensations of Providence,§ when we discover, that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is omitted in the law of Moses; it is darkly insinuated by the prophets, and during the long period which elapsed between the Egyptian and the Baby

The 6th book of the Odyssey gives a very dreary and incoherent account of the infernal shades. Pindar and Virgil have embellished the picture; but even these poets, though more correct than their great model, are guilty of very strange inconsistencies. See Bayle, Responses aux Ques-tions d'un Provincial, part iii., c. 22.

† See the 16th epistle of the first book of Horace, the 13th Satire of Juvenal, and the 2nd Satire of Persius: these popular discourses express the sentiment and language of the multitude.

If we confine ourselves to the Gauls, we may observe that they entrusted, not only their lives, but even their money, to the security of another world. Vetus ille mos Gallorum occurrit (says Valerius Maximus, 1. ii., c. 6, p. 10), quos memoria proditur est, pecunias mutuas, quæ his apud inferos redderentur, dare solitos. The same custom is more darkly insinuated by Mela, 1. iii., c. 2. It is almost needless to add, that the profits of trade hold a just proportion to the credit of the merchant, and that the Druids derived from their holy profession a character of responsibility, which could scarcely be claimed by any other order of men.

§ The right reverend author of the Divine Legation of Moses assigns a very curious reason for the omission, and most ingeniously retorts it on the unbelievers.

lonian servitudes, the hopes as well as fears of the Jews appear to have been confined within the narrow compass of the present life. After Cyrus had permitted the exiled nation to return into the promised land, and after Eza had restored the ancient records of their religion, two celebrated sects, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, insensibly arose at Jerusalem. The former selected from the more opulent and distinguished ranks of society, were strictly attached to the literal sense of the Mosaic law, and they piously rejected the immortality of the soul, as an opinion that received no countenance from the divine book, which they revered as the only rule of their faith.

To the authority of scripture the Pharisees added that of tradition, and they accepted, under the name of traditions, several speculative tenets from the philosophy or religion of the eastern nations. The doctrines of fate or predestination, of angels and spirits, and of a future state of rewards and punishments, were in the number of these new articles of belief; and as the Pharisees, by the austerity of their manners, had drawn into their party the body of the Jewish people, the immortality of the soul became the prevailing sentiment of the synagogue, under the reign of the Asmonan princes and pontiffs. The temper of the Jews was incapable of contenting itself with such a cold and languid assent as might satisfy the mind of a polytheist ; and as soon as they admitted the idea of a future state, they embraced it with the zeal which has always formed the characteristic of the nation. Their zeal, however, added nothing to its evidence, or even probability: and it was still necessary, that the doctrine of life and immortality, which had been dictated by nature, approved by reason, and received by superstition, should obtain the sanction of divine truth from the authority and example of Christ.

When the promise of eternal happiness was proposed to mankind, on condition of adopting the faith, and of observing the precepts of the gospel, it is no wonder that so advantageous an offer should have been accepted by great numbers of every religion, of every rank, and of every province in the Roman empire. The ancient Christians were animated by a contempt for their present existence, and by a just confidence of immortality, of which the doubtful and imperfect faith of modern ages cannot give us any adequate notion.

See Le Clerc (Prolegomena ad Hist. Ecclesiast., s. 1, c. 8). His authority seems to carry the greater weight, as he has written a learned and judicious commentary on the books of the Old Testament.

Joseph. Antiquitat., 1. xiii., c. 10. De Bell. Jud. ii. 8. According to the most natural interpretation of his words, the Sadducees admitted only the Pentateuch; but it has pleased some modern critics to add the prophets to their creed, and to suppose, that they contented themselves with rejecting the traditions of the Pharisees. Dr. Jortin has argued that point in his Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, vol. ii., p. 103.

FREE-THOUGHT: EXTRACT OF A LECTURE ON PARACELSUS. Ir a body of intelligent and earnest men assembled to deliberate upon the principles of inquiry, they would, without hesitation, decide that the first principle was freedom. They would at once declare that, without unbiassed and impartial evidence, not only would they arrive at no true result upon any subject, but that they would have no chance of arriving at a true result. The best or the ablest man, otherwise, might not be allowed to utter his evi. dence. The deepest and the truest thinker might be, from his very depth and truth, compelled to hold his peace. All, then, for the good of all, should have the right to an unpersecuted utterance; and as the object proposed to be obtained by association, and the end of all truthful thought, are the benefit of man, Free Inquiry ceases to be a right, and becomes a duty.

There is another method of reasoning by which this right and duty may be established. All men are gifted with powers of reasoning and expression in different degrees. These faculties are, to some extent, ever in action. The greatest men are those in whom they have been most active; and the greatest bene. factors of their species are those who have devised practical means by which the results of deep thought, the principles discovered by close reasoning, and the highest intuitions of a daring imagination, have been realised in the institųtions of nations. If this be the case-if individual man owe his grandeur, if society owe its usefulness, to extraordinary developments of the thinking and acting faculties-who shall dare to say to the waves of thought, as they come rolling on age after age, bearing richer and still richer treasures on their resistless crests, thus far shalt thou go and no farther? Who shall dare to say with impunity, 'This man shall not express his thoughts, that man shall not publish his researches this science is blasphemy, that society is pernicious?' Who shall dare violate, and expect no punishment, the laws of nature, which have said to man, through the medium of his aspirations, his intellect, and his power of utterance, 'Think, and Speak, and Act; for that thou art made ? Man is older than any records. Thought and speech preceded literature. There is in favour of free-thought the most ancient of all revelation—the revelation, direct and unmistakeable, contained in the constitution of man himself. All revelations, and deductions from revelations, which contradict this, must be spurious and incorrect. The great command utters itself, hour by hour, through the tendencies, the aspirations, and the necessities of the nature of man. Take away free-thought and free speech from man, and he falls to the level of other animals. With them, he climbs still higher and higher, age after age, cycle after cycle, in a magnificent development of progressive civilisation.

But freedom of thought, as a right, is conceded now-adays. Persecution is just now rather out of favour. The 'mission of tolerance,' as the condescending party call it, is now preached in the senate. The missionaries who have won for us this freedom, have been recognised as useful members of

society. But the law under which men can be imprisoned for a free expres sion of opinion still exists. The physical fires of Smithfield have long cease to burn, but the mental fires which blacken our reputation and wither ou character, these burn on as fiercely as ever. The spirit of priestly despotisn is not sleeping; the thirst for priestly power remains unquenched. We shall probably have one more great struggle with ecclesiastical domination; one more conflict with the powers of darkness to endure. When Puseyism fairly enters the field—when Oxford displays her treacherous intents—when the disciples of Ignatius Loyola, garbed in the robes of Pusey and Newman, array the priest openly against the people—then will the spirit of free thought and free speech, animating countless hosts of free men, overturn the priest and establish on the wrecks of superstition the foundations of mental freedom.

Freethinking has been defined as 'The use of the understanding in en. deavouring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of that evidence.' Freethinking does not mean levity of thought; it does not mean libertinism of thought; it does not mean irreverence of thought; it does not mean recklessness of thought;-but it means sincere, earnest, careful thinking, conducted in the spirit of reverence, and resulting in honest conviction. But, as I take it, this is less a right than a duty; and what I contend for is that we should not be impeded in doing our duty. Then a further duty results from performing this duty of thinking freely. Whenever we see an abuse in literature, in science, in politics, in religion, it is our duty to expose it fittingly and in fit season. We have then to perform these two duties-first to think freely, and secondly to express freely our honest convictions. No human duty can be more clearly defined. It is the very essence of love to man. It is the soul of all service. The most manful actions of the most manly men of all ages, have been those in which, risking property, character, and life itself, to do their great duty to mankind and to themselves-they have stood up before the world as freethinkers and as free speakers of their honest thoughts.

One of these men was Paracelsus. He lived in an age when freethinking was a far greater crime than it is now. He lived in an age when men believed in witchcraft, in magic, in supernatural appearances, in diabolical agencies, and miraculous events. But he lived also in an era when the human mind was bursting from the cerements of sepulchral ages, casting off the grave clothes of ignorance, and rising again into new life. It was the day of Luther; it was the hour of the reformation. Germany, Italy, Switzerland, swarmed with active minds. The old schools were daily attacked by the new teachers. Every man who could think a thought, aimed an arrow at authority. The wildest theories were propounded, and knowledge sought in the strangest ways. New theologies, new philosophies, new sciences, new

literature, then had their wondrous birth. Grave and thoughtful men bent anxiously over the furnace in search of the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone. So mighty was the recoil from the desolation of the dark ages that all things, even the perpetuation of life itself, seemed possible to the earnest seekers. Not wisdom, not knowledge, not goodness, it is true-but exhaustless wealth and unending life, were the priceless treasures for which men worked so desperately, and watched so long. In the monk's cell burned the glowing red furnace, by the lighted lamp the anxious watcher melted and fused his metals, and concocted draught on draught with infinite toil. Night waned, and morning dawned, still the seeker sought. His eyes grew bleared; his skin defaced, grimed, and wrinkled; his hair grey and thin, but still he toiled in the vain hope of acquiring the power of sustaining life immortally, and creating wealth which no extravagance could exhaust. But not only in the prosecution of these grand yet blind and unattainable aims was the energy of human life wasted away. The science of things, the strife to name the Infinite, and describe the indescribable; to search out the source of Being, to pierce through appearance to Reality, to sound and fathom the depths of all things; these mighty, solemn, ever-present, yet impotent desires, haunted like shadows the men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The possibility of acquiring sound metaphysical knowledge of things and causes per se was then a virtual belief. With all the ardour and energy of youthful combatants, the thinkers of that day who led the van of the reformation, in science as well as in theology, threw themselves into the arena and fought as for their lives. It was a glorious era, a splendid dawn, an outburst of dazzling and enduring light, which casts a strong glow, even through the vista of three centuries, upon the present age.

In the midst of all this turmoil and conflict of opinions, the rising sun of Truth gilding here and there the dark clouds of unconscious presumption and unimagined error, struggling through the mists of prejudice, and working on a foul yet fertile soil-at this advent and nativity of free-thought, Paracelsus was born.

The simple incidents which have reached us of the life of Paracelsus are soon narrated; but of the many adventures he must have met with in his travels, few of worth have come down to us. Paracelsus was born at Einsiedeln, near Zurich in Switzerland, in 1493. His father was an eminent chymist. Astrology, alchemy, magic—these were then the only roads to what knowledge existed in those days. Bishops and friars, as well as lay. men, pursued these obsolete studies. Paracelsus was regularly inducted into them, but he had no scholastic tuition. Early in life he set out on his travels, passing first into France, and successively into Spain, Portugal, England, Poland, Hungary, and the East. Everywhere he went he contrived to benefit by the teachings of all kinds of men, from the sages to the peasants, of those lands through which he wandered. His keen observation, retentive memory, and indefatigable spirit of inquiry, enabled him to profit