how different must be the essential quality of his serious sentiments, as partly created, and wholly pervaded, by this mighty anticipation, from the order of feeling of the virtuous heathens, who had no positive or sublime expectations beyond death. The interior essences, if I may so speak, of the two kinds of excellence, sustained or produced by these two systems of principles, are so different, that they will hardly be more convertible or compatible in the same mind than even excellence and turpitude.-Now it appears to me that the enthusiasm, with which a mind of deep and thoughtful sensibility dwells on the history of sages, virtuous legislators, and the worthiest class of heroes of heathen antiquity, will be found to beguile that mind into an order of sentiments congenial with theirs, and therefore thus seriously different from the spirit and principles of christianity.* It is not exactly that the judgment admits distinct pagan propositions, but the heart insensibly acquires an unison with many of the sentiments which imply those propositions, and are wrong unless those propositions be right. It forgets that a different state of feeling, corresponding to a greatly different scheme of principles, is appointed by the Sovereign Judge of all things as (with relation to us) an indispensable preparation for entering the eternal paradise;†

• Should it be pretended that, in admiring pagan excellence, the mind takes the mere facts of that excellence, separately from the principles, and as far as they are identical with the facts of christian excellence, and then, connecting christian principles with them, converts the whole ideally into a christian character before it cordially admires, I appeal to experience that this is not true. If it were, the mind would be able to turn with full complacency from an affectionate admiration of an illustrious heathen, to admire, in the same train of feeling and with still warmer emotion, the excellence of St. Paul; which is not the fact.

I hope none of these observations will be understood to insinuate the impossibility of the future happiness of virtuous heathens. But a question on that subject would here be out of place.

and that now, no moral distinctions, however splendid, are excellence in his sight, if not conformed to his declared standard. It slides into a persuasion that, under any economy, to be like one of those heathen examples should be a competent fitness for any world to which good spirits are to be assigned. The devoted admirer contemplates them as the most enviable specimens of his nature, and almost wishes he could have been one of them; without reflecting that this would probably have been under the condition, among many other circumstances, of adoring Jupiter, Bacchus, or Esculapius, and yet despising the deities that he adored; and under the condition of being a stranger to the Son of God, and to all that he has disclosed and accomplished for the felicity of our race. It would even throw an ungracious chill on his ardour, if an evangelical monitor should whisper, "Remember Jesus Christ," and express his regret that these illustrious men could not have been privileged to be elevated into christians. If precisely the word "elevated" were used, the admonished person might have a feeling, at the instant, as if it were not the right word. But this state of mind is no less in effect than hostility to the gospel, which these feelings are practically pronouncing to be at least unnecessary; and therefore that noblest part of ancient literature which tends to produce it, is mexpressibly injurious. It had been happy for many cultivated and aspiring minds, if the men whose characters are the moral magnificence of the classical history, had been such atrocious villains, that their names could not have been recollected without execration. Nothing can be more disastrous than to be led astray by eminent virtue and intelligence, which can give a sense of congeniality with grandeur in the deviation.

It will require a very affecting impression of the

christian truth, a decided conception of the christian character, and a habit of thinking with sympathetic admiration of the most elevated class of christians, to preserve the genuine evangelical spirit amidst this ideal society with personages who might pardonably have been esteemed of the noblest form of human nature, if a revelation had not been received from heaven. Some views of this excellence it were in vain for a christian to forbid himself to admire; but he must learn to admire under a discriminative restriction, else the emotion involves a desertion of his cause. He must learn to assign these men in thought to another sphere, and to regard them as beings under a different economy with which our relations are dissolved; as wonderful examples of a certain imperfect kind of moral greatness, formed on a model foreign to true religion, and which is crumbled to dust and given to the winds. At the same time, he may well, while beholding some of these men, deplore that if so much excellence could be formed on such a model, the sacred system which gives the acknowledged exemplar for his own character should not have far more assimilated him to heaven.-So much for the effect of the most interesting part of ancient literature.

In the next letter I shall make some observations on modern polite literature, in application of the same rule of judgment. Many of them must unavoidably be very analogous to those already made; since the greatest number of the modern fine writers acquired much of the character of their minds from those of the ancient world. Probably indeed the ancients have exerted a much more extensive influence in modern times by means of the modern writers to whom they have communicated their moral spirit, than immediately by their own works.

LETTER VII.

To a man who had long observed the influences which tyrannize over human passions and opinions, it would not perhaps have appeared strange, that when the Grand Renovator came on earth, and during the succeeding ages, a number of the men whose superior talents were to carry on the course of literature, and promote and guide the progress of the human mind, should reject his religion. These I have placed out of the question, as it is not my object to show the injuries done to christianity by its avowed enemies. But it might have been expected, that all the intelligent men, from that hour to the end of time, who should really admit the truth of this religion, would perceive the sovereignty and universality of its claims, feel that every thing unconsonant with it ought instantly to vanish from the whole system of approved sentiments and the whole school of literature, and to keep as clearly aloof as the Israelites from the boundary that guarded the sanctity of Mount Sinai. It might have been presumed, that all principles which the new dispensation rendered obsolete, or declared or implied to be wrong, should no more be regarded as belonging to the system of principles to be henceforward received and taught, than dead bodies in their graves belong to the race of living men. To retain or recall them would therefore be as offensive to the judgment, as to take up these bodies and place them in the paths of men would be offensive to the senses; and as absurd as the practice of the ancient Egyptians, who made their embalmed ancestors their companions at their festivals. It might have been supposed, that whatever christianity had

actually substituted, abolished, or supplied, would therefore be practically regarded by these believers of it as substituted, abolished, or supplied; and that they would, in all their writings, be at least as careful of their fidelity in this great article, as an adherent to the Newtonian philosophy would be certain to exclude, from his scientific discourse, all notions that seriously implied the Ptolemaic or the Tychonic system to be true. Necessarily, a number of these literary believers would write on subjects so completely foreign to what comes within the cognizance of christianity, that a pure neutrality, which should avoid all interference with it, would be all that could be claimed from them in its behalf; though at the same time, one should feel some degree of regret, to see a man of enlarged mind exhausting his ability and his life on these foreign subjects, without devoting some short interval to the service of that which he believes to be of far surpassing moment.*

But the great number who chose to write on subjects

• I could not help feeling a degree of this regret in reading lately the memoirs of the admirable and estimable Sir William Jones. Some of his researches in Asia have incidentally served the cause of religion; but did he think that nothing more remained possible to be done in service to christianity, that his accomplished mind was left at leisure for hymns to the Hindoo gods? Was not this even a violation of the neutrality, and an offence, not only against the gospel, but against theism itself? I know what may be said about personification, license of poetry, and so on; but should not a worshipper of God hold himself under a solemn obligation to abjure all tolerance of even poetical figures that can seriously seem, in any way whatever, to recognise the pagan divinities or abominations, as the prophets of Jehovah would have called them? What would Elijah have said to such an employment of talents in his time? It would have availed little to have told him that these divinities were only personifications (with their appropriate representative idols) of objects in nature, of elements, or of abstractions. He would have sternly replied, And was not Baal, whose prophets I destroyed, the same?