aass B»^ElU 
 
 Book .Ql 
 
MAN HH, 
 
 FROM 
 
 HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 
 NE^V YORK: 
 PUBLISHED BY CALVIN BLANCHARD, 
 
 16 NASSAU STREET. 
 ^^f 1859. . 
 
,^\ 
 
 ^^^ 
 
 Ehtfred, according to Act of Congress, in the year One Thousand Eight Hundred and 
 Fifty-nine, by CH. GRAHAM, in the Clerk's OflBce ol the District Court of the 
 United States, for the Southern District of New York. 
 
 L. HATJSER, Stereotyper & Pkintkr, 8 North William Street. 
 
TO THE 
 
 §tv, §mU W. ^xm, 
 
 the worthy and able President of Centre College^ who 
 is so perfect and pure, by nature, that no creed can 
 spoil him, the following reflections upon the char- 
 acter and actions of man, in his short march from 
 time to eternity^ are dedicated by his 
 
 Friend, the Author, 
 
 G. GRAHAM, M. D. 
 
 "These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace in the 
 ■world ; ye shall have tribulation : but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." 
 But sad it is to ask, how long did this victory, gained through the loving kindness, long 
 suffering and death of our blessed Saviour last, and where is the true religion amongst 
 the ten thousand diverse and warring creeds, now to be found. It is a most solemn and 
 grievous fact, beyond all quibble, that the selfish and vainglorious ambition of leaders 
 in the church of Christ, (as has been prophesied by him) have extinguished almost 
 every spark of vital religion, and substituted a puritanical and oppressive code of 
 dogmas and artistic forms in its stead. A cold and hollow hearted sectarian faith has 
 become the merit of a modern membership, which faith, I shall show, from the true 
 character of the human mind, is a thing that has no merit whatever in it. For where 
 is the great virtue in believing that two and two make four, or the crime in disbeliev- 
 ing that they make ten. And thus it is that human opinion or faith is governed alike 
 in all things. I shall teach that it is ."Safer to be good and not appear good, than to 
 appear good and not be good, and that religion is more in a simple and sincere heart, 
 than in the artifice and quibble of the brain. 
 
Wat thou, Lord, my council be, 
 
 Thy son my only guide, 
 
 That I the path of truth may tread, 
 
 Unlured by human pride. 
 
 Vain glorious man with bigota boast, 
 
 Of partial gifts from thee. 
 
 Has sore oppressed his fellow man 
 
 And pled high heavens decree. 
 
 No prelate, priest or pontiffs power, 
 
 Have I a wish to harm, 
 
 But bV the show of sad misrule, 
 
 Excite their own alarm. 
 
 My voice, I know, will soon be hushed. 
 
 While endless ages roll. 
 
 And mere than this, will then be doomed, 
 
 My never dying soul. 
 
 Can I then, with a conscious quiet, 
 
 Such crushing horrors brave. 
 
 When feeling death within my frame, 
 
 And sinking to the grave. 
 
 Hence, be my doctrines true or false, 
 
 Be them for woe or weal, 
 
 rhey are the dictates of my soul, 
 
 And may my fate forever seal. 
 
 My book shall not be built upon hypotheses or vulgar and degrading prejudices, 
 but upon the past history of man, and the demonstrated realities of life. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Preface ^ 
 
 latroduction ^^ 
 
 Sensation and Perception -. . . 101 
 
 Yolition 146 
 
 Reasoning 229 
 
 Conscience . , > • 2^^ 
 
 Instinct 286 
 
 Strictures upon a Sermon 319 
 
 Review of the Whole Subject 883 
 
 Death 435 
 
 Appendix 439 
 
 The Apostle sayi5 to the Christian Ephesians, Acts XX. 29, 30 : " I know that after 
 my departure, shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock ; also of 
 your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after 
 them." — This fact I shall abundantly show in various parts of the following work. 
 
 I believe with Origen, and am bold enough to teach it ; that " Most of the moral 
 evils of the world arise from the libeity the clergy take in interpreting Scripture to suit 
 their own views, and in adhering to the externals of religion to the neglect of its prac- 
 tical precepts and simple teachings." Knowing, as I do, that not only the life of the 
 Christian, but even his rapturous death which wings his soul for eternal joys, is worth 
 more than all the wealth and honor that earth can bestow, I can have no other object 
 in view than that of maintaining the principles of true religion ; which, I shall show, 
 has greatly degenerated through the vanity and ambition of the world. That genuine 
 religion, which heals the anguished heart and bids the drooping soul look up with im- 
 mortal hope, no longer exists ; but church divisions give to every dying man his un- 
 happy dreads and doubts. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Having intended for some time past, to embody my thoughts 
 upon the subject of mental and moral Philosophy, and of the 
 government of man, into a small volume, bearing the title of 
 "Man from his Cradle to his Grave"; but the cares of family 
 and the busy scenes of life, not yet admitting of sufficient time, 
 I have thought it well to first publish the outhnes in a pamphlet 
 — that if there should be any solid objection to my positions, 
 they may be discussed and corrected. My introduction will nec- 
 cessarily be lengthy, containing the development and workings 
 of mens^ minds from the earliest ages to the present time. This, 
 I hope, however, will form no serious objection, as I have said 
 something in every sentence, bearing upon the practical character 
 of man, and worthy of serious consideration. My work, whether 
 it may claim merit or not, will certainly be new and peculiarly 
 unique. Seeing that more than two thousand years of labor in 
 mental science and near the same in religious instruction had pro- 
 duced no practical influence whatever, either upon the minds or 
 the morals of men, I have determined that it is owing, first, to a 
 false position, and secondly, to an improper early education. As 
 it will be seen, I propose to discord the study of the dead lan- 
 guages — Mathematics, Logic, Rhetoric and Belles-Letters, which 
 have heretofore occupied almost the whole of the educational por- 
 tion of our lives. These thmgs may enable us to make a pedantic 
 and artistic exhibition of ourselves before our fellow-men, but 
 never through all time, can they anymore enable us than it does 
 the parrot or learned pig to make one step in science or in anything 
 
 1* 
 
10 PREFACE. 
 
 that will meet the wants of Hfe ; nor can it avail us, when we 
 appear naked before the bar of God after having spent a life in 
 such follies, to the neglect of those great laws of our own being 
 and the principles which bind us to God and to our fellow-men. 
 
 These are primordial truths far above the trite formulae of the 
 schools and of the pedagogues' dry and inanimate details of com- 
 mon-place things which have a narrowing and stultifying influ- 
 ence upon the youthful mind. 
 
 Instead of amusing children with ghost-stories and teaching 
 them to give way to their morbid and delusive feelings, we should 
 instruct them who and what God is — who and what man is, and 
 thus open their eyes to the phenomena- of the world in which 
 "we live and move and have our being". Children from then* 
 first lispings will ask who made the toy, the house, the tree, the 
 horse ? And if indulged by kind lectures and fireside conversa- 
 tions, children at fifteen years of age would know more of the 
 true relation of things as God has established them, than the 
 graduates of the Universities now do. 
 
 This being my firm conviction, I maintain it, though feebly, 
 yet with all the mind and earnest soul and strenght that God 
 has given me. 
 
 Having the greatest abhorrence even to the semblance of hy- 
 pocrisy, I shall write in the first person — I, myself — as being 
 more natural and unsophisticated in conversational style than 
 "we" — the false word of mock modesty. This "we'' is of Ame- 
 rican invention and reminds me of what a distinguished English 
 writer says of the extreme modesty of American ladies, "who 
 put pantalettes upon the naked legs of their pianos to prevent 
 them from being seen". 
 
 Many of my strong points will be not only new, but original, 
 and in regard to my mode of treating these, subjects of mental 
 and moral philosophy, they are most assuredly sui generis. 
 
 I have never read an author upon the subject of metaphysics 
 that did not at once obscure and perplex it by classifications, 
 divisions, sub-divisions and technical refinings neither understood 
 
PREFACE. 11 
 
 by the reader nor tlie writer. And this is the reason, that the 
 very name of Metaphysics has fallen into disrepute among sound 
 thinkers, as of no utility to the public, when in reality the laws 
 of mind are so few and simple that they may be fully under- 
 stood by a child in his first lessons. 
 
 In disregard, then, to the humbuggery of deep learning and 
 of artistic taste in bookmaking, I have shaped mine in confor- 
 mity with kind and simple nature — the author of its existence, 
 and to which alone it can look for its favorable reception and fut- 
 ure prosperity in this world, for in the next God will take care of 
 his own. 
 
 The reason why I have selected the subject of volition for 
 this Essay, is that it is the only one in the whole book, to which 
 any exception can be taken, although in almost every case I 
 disagree with all the authors whom I have ever read. I know 
 that in maintaining this subject in its true relations as estab- 
 lished by the Supreme, himself, that it requires a God-like for- 
 titude and sublime virtue in the author to bear up against the 
 outbreak of Puritanical prejudice that will be heaped upon him 
 as an infidel and hell-deserving sinner, but the sacred armor of 
 truth will be ample against all such billings-gate, violence, and 
 reproach. Having a heart to feel for the suffering of every 
 sensitive creature that God has made — from the fly of "Uncle 
 Toby" up to man, I have spoken with severity against the 
 authors of those horrid scenes of bloodshed and cruelty of man 
 to man. Nor have I spared the intolerant and erring clergy, 
 who have done more injury to the cause of religion by their im- 
 moral examples and distracted bickerings than scepticism and 
 all other enemies besides. But when I shall have occasion to 
 condemn them, it will not be en masse, for that would be to con- 
 demn religion, itself. 
 
 We have many truly pious and godly divines, who labor for 
 the honor of God and the good of souls, and yet there are many 
 foul hypocrites whose love of self and whose worldy passions 
 have brought religion into disrespect. We also haye some noble 
 
12 PREFACE. 
 
 and patriotic statesmen, who serve for the honor and pros- 
 perity of their country alone, and it is most grievously and 
 ominously true that we are also encumbered by a swarm of 
 canting demagogues — the veriest varlets of earth — who pounce 
 upon the gangrenous masses as a vulture upon his prey and 
 fatten upon the disordered condition of the body politic. 
 Against such I shall also level my club. 
 
 In regard to my thoughts — be they worthy or unworthy — 
 they are all my own — as I have no recollection of even having 
 received a valuable or lasting idea from reading. For, out of 
 near one hundred authors, whose works I have looked over, I 
 have found but one single thought running through the whole of 
 them. All the works of which I have any knowledge, are but 
 stereotyped copies of the one original falsehood — the authors 
 of Atheism, Deism, MateriaUsm, and Pantheism, who hold to 
 the other extreme of error, are not here included in this one-idea 
 system. 
 
 The controversy between Berkeley and Hume in regard to 
 the actual existence of the objective and subjective world and by 
 which Berkeley annihilated one and Hume the other — leaving 
 us without either soul or body, shows the two extremes that 
 still exist with shght shades of difference, only sufficient to give 
 names to the various schools and systems since gotten up and 
 now maintained. As General Jackson said in controversy 
 with an adversary, " a coward can never write himself into a 
 brave man ", nor can a book founded upon false principles argue 
 itself into sound conclusions. A learned author might take the 
 position that a child could beget itself and had no dependence 
 upon either father or mother for its existence. A second 
 author holds that the child has no power to create itself, 
 nor has any innate or self-existence, but is created by the 
 father ; and a third contends that they are both in great error — 
 tl)e child depending exclusively upon the mother for its being. 
 Now upon those false assumptions numerous large and learned 
 books may be written by the various parties, and yet no solid or 
 
PREFACE. 13 
 
 satisfactory results be obtained — which the sequence of many 
 thousand years of metaphysical labors shows. Those positions 
 are all false and no learning or labor of man can ever change 
 them. My ground-right in this case is not from deep erudition 
 or the hypotheses of schools, but from the simple observance 
 of nature, (the laws of God,) that it requires the union of both 
 father and mother to beget the child. 
 
 Now the laws of mind are just as simple as the laws of gen- 
 eration. Our ideas are conceived exactly as the child is, and 
 delivered to the world in like manner. For, without such 
 delivery they would never be made known to others. 
 
 And now with a full knowledge of these facts and with deep 
 and solemn sincerity do I say to the reader that, to this philo- 
 sophical error of a self-creating power in the mind may be traced 
 all those difficulties both in religion and in moral science, which 
 have perplexed the world for centuries past. If we will honestly 
 grant the fact that we come into the world without innate or 
 conjenital ideas, and that our after-ideas have no power to create 
 or beget themselves, the whole enigma of mind is at once 
 solved; for, we have nothing more to do than simply to observe, 
 as in the case of the child how our ideas are begotten. Against 
 the established and sealed law of God, however, men have re- 
 belled and given to themselves a self-creating power — a power 
 that the God of heaven cannot, himself, possess — as, for 
 a thing, to act and bring itself into existence before itself had 
 an existence, is wholly inconceivable. Hence God is held to be 
 not a self-created 'jut a self-existent being from all eternity — and 
 these fundamental facts I shall often recur to in the course of 
 my essay — to impress it more fully upon the mind of the 
 reader. To take from the mind those creative powers and bring 
 it under the universal law of causation is no degradation to 
 man, as has been asserted, for we are what we are by 
 the will of God whose authority I hold as more honorable 
 than the rebellious vanity of man. True, that in one case we 
 are little gods of ourselves acting, as we may elect, by our own 
 
14 PREFACE. 
 
 self-created and independent powers, while in the other we are 
 brought under the laws of the great God's own appokitmcni. 
 The reader will see before he is through, that this doctrine of a 
 self-created will with powers to ,act without a motive — choose 
 without a choice and decide without a difference, cannot be sus- 
 tained — and further that the mind itself occupies identically 
 the same position that the mother does in regard to conception, 
 neither having anything more than a mere susceptibility — and 
 that the external world is a father that begets through our sen- 
 ses every original idea of which the mind is susceptible. It is 
 vanity more than piety and a love of self more than of truth 
 that gives us all those supercillious and self-important 
 conceits. 
 
 It has been objected that if we rest the phenomena of mind 
 upon mere reason, and bring it under physical influences, that 
 we reduce man to a level with the brute. True, but because the 
 brute has a stomach and digestion like man, shall we refuse to 
 eat and starve, and in like manner shall we, because of God has 
 given to the brute senses through which alone their ideas enter, 
 shut ours to the external world and the Paradise of delights 
 that bounteous heaven has so profusely and kindly spread 
 around us. It is from this self-sovereignty and vain bigotry of 
 man, then, I again repeat it, that all the intolerance and cruelty 
 of man to man has had its rise. And thus has the world 
 for ages been distracted by our delusive feelings and vain 
 assumptions that we are Lords of the world and that all 
 Creation is for our benefit and must yield to our little views, 
 though our views may be as different as our faces and the ob- 
 jects that impress us. And thus it is that those arrogant 
 upstarts have ever opposed the knowledge of God and of his 
 will as received through our senses and by the light and laws of 
 nature of which God certainly is the author and cannot 
 mislead us. 
 
 It being taught by such vain bigots as above spoken of that 
 we possess internal and original powers independent of our brute 
 
PREFACE. 15 
 
 senses and of the external world, and that those powers are 
 above all reason and to be obeyed as the divine oracles and 
 sovereign arbiters of men's actions, I must be indulged a little 
 farther in exposing such sacrilegious and mischievous principles. 
 It is this doctrine of being led by our internal feelings or 
 promptings of a divine conscience that begets all the bitter feel- 
 ings and feuds between neighbor and neighbor, the legal 
 disputes — the Church divisions, and in short it is the author of 
 that Satanic intolerance and persecution of man by man — 
 amounting to more than all the other grievances of life, besides. 
 If the Devil has any agency in the opinions and actions of man, 
 this is certainly his strong and favorite hold upon the human 
 mind. By this feeling he reduced Eve, and by it he has 
 sustained the eternal bickerings and discord in the church 
 of God. If we will grant the fact, that we are differently 
 organized and that our feelings and opinions are prompted 
 by the unavoidable circumstances, under which we are 
 placed, we shall be inspu'ed with a truly Christian spirit of 
 forbearance and forgiveness one to another, while on the con- 
 trary just so long as we are taught to believe that we have 
 within us a divine and infallible prompter, we will be assured that 
 we are right and that all others who may disagree with us are 
 in wilful and punishable errors. Satan has ever flattered the 
 vanity of man and puffed him up with the belief, that he is a 
 God within himself and not subject to those fixed and fatal 
 laws by which all the other departments of God's vast Universe 
 are harmoniously governed, and hence the ignorant and arrogant 
 assumption, that we have power to frustrate God's immutable 
 and eternal designs and yet that we are favorites of God — that 
 he has made all things throughout all time for our special benefit, 
 and yet that we have kept him in a perpetual fret by undoing 
 or causing him to undo all he ever did and to keep up a long 
 and doubtful struggle between God and man for supremacy. 
 Demented and rebellious, indeed, must be the man, who can be 
 reduced by such supercillious and contemptible thoughts. Hence 
 
16 PREFACE. 
 
 it is that I disbelieve those records of man in the Bible that it 
 regretted God sorely, that he ever created man or that he ever 
 swore in his wrath to reverse his own designs. If man can be 
 brought to see himself aright, he will know that he is but a fated 
 link in the eternal cham of Causality — that all things originate 
 and terminate in God, who gave the first impulse to life and 
 motion and who holds firm and fast to the two ends of this vast 
 unbroken and eternal chain that binds his mighty Universe in 
 one harmonious and ceaseless round. That all things are held 
 in subordination to the accomplishment of one great end — God's 
 preconceived plans of creation. 
 
 The wisdom and power of God forbid the doctrine that he 
 has made any thing in vain, and that consequently he has not 
 regretted and whined, pined and petted at his own works, as 
 has been taught by many ignorant Christians and Divines 
 whose opinions have been taken from the mischievous mis- 
 translations and interpolations of the Bible. 
 
 All things bear a primary and kindred relation and are 
 means and ends in the one eternal design. God has not given 
 the power of self-creation to any being on earth, nor the ability 
 of counteracting and disappointing his sovereign will in the 
 realization of his first and final object of creation. It is the 
 principles then of the all-sufficiency of creative power and wis- 
 dom which I wish to teach, and to show that the doctrines 
 that God has done, things which he did not purpose to do, and 
 that his laws do not act in harmony and undeviating fate — • 
 and farther that those doctrines involve the grossest absurdity 
 and self-contradiction. 
 
 My only aim is to teach those demi-gods and haughty 
 monarchs of earth, that there is a great God in Heaven from 
 whose mandates there is no escape, and that all we have to do 
 is to study and obey his eternal and immutable laws as esta- 
 blished in nature. 
 
 It is by those rebel dins of discord and pretended heirs of 
 Heaven that nature has been excommunicated and wrested 
 
PREFACE. IT 
 
 from the hands of its creator, and a thieving monopoly of 
 God's best blessings to his children instituted and enjoined in 
 the cannons of holy faith as essential to salvation. 
 
 Though God gives sunshine, soil and rain to all on earth, 
 and spreads his blessings with a profuse and impartial hand 
 around us, those elect and especial favorites of God deny to 
 nine hundred and ninety-nine in the thousand of their brethren, 
 the great boon of heaven — eternal life. Thus have those thrice- 
 deformed images of their maker for whom Christ died, crucified 
 him anew and dared the wrath of Heaven. The sorrows of 
 their poor brother are looked upon with the cold indifference of 
 a bigot's heart, and yet can their disdained and toiling slave 
 say to them : " In the name of God and by the decrees of 
 eternal justice — am I not a brother and a man ?" Yea, and 
 cannot the humble dog which he calls a brute, say in piteous 
 tones of suffering neglect : " Am I not thy faithful friend ?" 
 Tupper, in his proverbial philosophy, expresses himself thus : 
 
 " What hath the generous dog less than reason, 
 Or the brute man more than instinct ?'^ 
 
 Oh, we mock monarchs, we worms of the earth and insects 
 of an hour ! Soon will we be brought low to commingle with 
 our brother emmets in the dust ! Yes, soon — very soon will 
 those proud forms be dissolved and mixed with the varying 
 elements to be wafted to the extremes of land and sea, and yet 
 will God's vast universe, created for the special benefit of us, 
 specks of earth, roll on in all his pristine youth and resplendent 
 glory through endless time. Gur hope, then, is not in our 
 strength or in the favoritism of a just and impartial God, but 
 in our weakness, ignorance and humbleness of heart. Then let 
 us not take from God nor from our brother more than our 
 rights — nor refuse to obey those ordinations of Heaven so 
 plainly written upon the face of nature. 
 
 It will be shown that man is brought into this world without 
 his knowledge or consent — that he is borne through the transit 
 of Ufe by the laws of necessity, and that his exit from time to 
 
18 PREFACE. 
 
 eternity is determined and fixed by the indissoluble chain of 
 causality. That life, itself, is a forced state, and would die out 
 as quickly without the vital air and the food that develope and 
 nourish it as would the flame without the fuel which sustains it. 
 That thought, in like manner, has no independent substantial 
 existence. It is an effect — a result. It is conditional — it is the 
 product of a subjective and objective unity. It, like life, has 
 no intrinsic, real or prior existence, but is a new creation, and 
 in turn is possessed of creative powers. For instance, powder 
 has an existence, and the spark, also, but explosion has none — 
 it is a new creation, a result, a product of the union of both. 
 But, when thus begot, becomes a real, yet momentary entity — 
 a power and a cause of other results. In like manner, the child 
 is not a real entity, has no separate or independent existence, 
 but is an effect, a product, the result of the union of father and 
 mother, or a subject and an object. Just so it is with life and 
 all organic existences. The grain of wheat that has been en- 
 veloped with the mummies of Egypt for three thousand years, 
 and from which whole fields of wheat have sprung, would re- 
 main through all times without the stimulus of light, heat, soil 
 and moistm'e that forces it into existence, and developes its in- 
 trinsic and inherent nature. In the acorn there are no limbs, 
 leaves, roots or bark to be seen, nor is there any chicken to 
 be seen in the egg, but by incubation, the magic power of na- 
 ture is made manifest. Just so it is with the mind which would 
 remain forever without ideas, unless it came in contact with 
 objects to beget and develope those ideas. 
 
 All the faculties of the mind, so called, will be tested in 
 turn, and it will be shown that this parade about external and 
 internal powers of mind, and that the enumeration of faculties, 
 as sensation, perception, consciousness, conception, memory, 
 imagination, reason, judgment, attention, taste, and the moral 
 faculty, are but lying sounds without an archetype, and dis- 
 tinctions without a difference, calculated only to confuse and 
 mislead the pupil. These are delusive and contradictory terms, 
 
PREFACE. 19 
 
 when carried out in their application. We might with equal 
 propriety add the faculties of hunger, thirst, cold, hatred, love ; 
 of fiddling and of dancing, and of all our endless thoughts, pas- 
 sions and emotions. At every turn of the mind, like that of 
 the Kaleidescope, there is a new form that might have a new 
 name for countless millions of times. The mind like the wax, is 
 a simple substratum that may be shaped to many forms and 
 stamped with endless impressions. Sensation, alone, constitutes 
 that substratum upon which the whole superstructure of mind 
 is founded. Feeling, alone, gives us a knowledge of all impres- 
 sions — of every thing that we can by any possibility be made 
 acquainted with. Now, from sensation arise pleasure and pain, 
 and next follow desire and aversion. This constitutes the whole 
 -^foundation and sum total of the human mind. God has im- 
 planted in mankind universally, a desire for happiness, and an 
 aversion to misery. This is steady, uniform and innate — it is 
 in all persons and in all ages — and it is the first law of our na- 
 ture and assented to by all— it is a law of our constitution, and 
 consequently intuitive and fatal. God has so inseparably 
 united virtue and happiness, that it becomes our interest to 
 sustain moral rule — our own property, life and liberty depend- 
 ing upon it. Mill says, in his logic page 13-34 : "A feeling 
 and a state of consciousness are equivalent expressions : every- 
 thing is a feeling of which the mind is conscious. Every thing 
 which it reels, or in other words, which forms a part of its own 
 sentient existence." For this httle fragment of divine truth 
 which he has dared to express in regard to mind, he has been 
 much abused. Though this single sentence is worth all his 
 book besides, though the best work on logic ever published, 
 it has suffered the censure of theology for reducing the mind and 
 the divine consciousness to a mere feeling — a thing which the 
 uneducated and even the brutes possess. Mill's fault is in 
 bringing truth and philosophy to the light — stript of its mystic 
 garb, and making it so simple and plain, that the common lay- 
 men see and understand it. Yulgar and degraded as sensation 
 
20 PREFACE. 
 
 may be, as represented by mystic and humbug writers, it will ap- 
 pear to the reader, before he is through with this little volume, 
 that without sensation or feeling, we could not be conscious of 
 a single idea, or even of our own existence. Feeling or sensi- 
 bility, in short, is the distinguishing, characteristic and high 
 boast of the soul, as rendering it susceptible of pleasure and 
 pain, and consequently the subject of rewards and punishments. 
 It must be granted by every close and unbiased observer, that 
 we cannot be conscious of a thing without feeling it, nor feel 
 'and know a thing without being conscious of it. It must then 
 be as Mill says, that feeling is the soul, and the substratum, and 
 sum total of mind ; yes, and the identical thing called divine 
 conscience, without which we could neither feel, nor know any- 
 thing, and why theology should so traiterously misrepresent 
 the simple laws of God, I cannot conceive, except it is to mis- 
 lead mankind in a knowledge of their own nature, and thus 
 perpetuate the necessity of learned imposters. It seems to me 
 impossible that any set of authors should be so stupid as to fill 
 their books, in good faith, with such gabble and gibberish as 
 they have done, and I, therefore, surmise that it is more fi'om 
 design than ignorance. 
 
 Holding as I do, that truth is the word and work of God 
 himself, in whatever department of his government it may be 
 found, I shall boldly pursue it with sacred fidelity, lead me 
 where it may ; regardless of vulgar hue and cry, and the bil- 
 lings-gate ribaldry that may be poured upon me, by the foul and 
 fallible mouth of that nut-shell, petty and party divinity, which 
 has ever been the bane of religion, and the clamorous and cling- 
 ing cure of science. In my condemnation of superstition, man- 
 worship, and all other conventional and artistic innovations upon 
 the pure and rational worship of God, it may be supposed, by 
 the craven devotees to human authority, that I am opposed to 
 religion itself, in which case, no inference could be more false ; 
 my efforts throughout, being to strengthen and confirm the 
 sacred bonds of reason and religion : not the religion of tho 
 
PREFACE. 21 
 
 Pope, nor of Luther — not of Calvinism, Armenianism, Maho- 
 metanism, or of Mormonism ; but the religion of God, the 
 creator and governor, not of a little sect, but of the vast universe, 
 wherein his son, our Savior Jesus Christ, shall be my preceptor 
 and exemplar. I shall not teach the god of a dark corner, nor 
 intriguer with any petty party — not a blind, mutable, partial 
 and passionate God, who does things one hour and regrets and 
 frets at his own acts the next, but a God of wisdom, power, 
 love and mercy. Believing as I do, that there are great and 
 grievous errors in all the schisms, isms and dogmatisms of man, 
 which are detestable in the eyes of God, I feel it my religious 
 duty to show the irrationality and enormity of such fatal folly. 
 In exposing the superstition and mummeries of men, I shall 
 expect the condemnation of fanaticism and blind prejudice ; but 
 God whose supremacy, I have maintained throughout, will give 
 me the reward of his smiling approbation. Believing that re- 
 ligion can be sustained by reason, I shall strive to show the 
 absurdity of basing it upon mysteries ; and, in supposing that 
 uninspired men can by any course of natural education, know 
 any more of those mysteries than the common ploughman. 
 The very name of mystery carries with it the impossibility of 
 human explanation ; and why, then, give such degrading cre- 
 dence to the vanity of our earthly imposters, who profess to 
 explain that which in its very nature is incomprehensible. I 
 know that all who may dare the sacredness of long-established 
 customs, must suffer popular censure, and I can now see So- 
 crates swallowing the poison, because he could not believe in 
 the corrupt religion of his day, and Galileo upon his knees be- 
 fore an ignorant and ungodly priesthood. I also can see the 
 mighty array of holy orders, and the thunder bolts of the 
 Vatican hurled at Martin Luther, who was anathematized and 
 pronounced by sacred custom, too base for dogs to eat with. 
 John Wesley too, in common with all others, who have labored 
 for the freedom of thought and the improvement of religion, 
 have in like manner been rewarded by the malevolence and 
 
22 PREFACE. 
 
 calumny of the church. The proper use of religion I hold to 
 be essential to the good order and happiness of society ; while 
 in the abuse of it, we have witnessed the most horrid scenes of 
 wickedness and inhumanity. The greatest blessings on earth, 
 we know, may be perverted to the most powerful engines of 
 destruction. The incendiary who, by fire burns whole cities, 
 and the Demon who, by the Bible, broils his brother alive, 
 should in common receive the condemnation and wrathful 
 detestation of all mankind. He who opposes the proper use 
 of religion, opposes the known will of God, as evinced in his 
 own constitution, for he has so interwoven religion into our 
 very nature that every creature on earth possesses it. Search 
 throughout the darkest ages and amongst the rudest nations of 
 earth, and it is there. In light and in shade it is seen and felt, 
 and fret it as you may, you cannot wear it out. Can I then, 
 with the conviction of these facts, as firmly fixed upon my soul, 
 as that of my own existence, impiously reject religion as an 
 imposter. Some kind of religion mankind always had and ever 
 will have, and being well assured, (speaking even as a heathen,) 
 that ours is better suited to the constitution and wants of man, 
 than any other, I thank my God for opening my eyes to its 
 boundless reign and its endless blessings. Man left in this 
 world of sorrows without that spark of light, is doomed to 
 darkness, misery, and hopeless despau'. He is born with the 
 seeds of destruction within him, and every step he takes in the 
 chase of pleasure, pain steps close upon his heels, and in a 
 speedy exit from all that is near and dear on earth, there is no 
 escape. The loathsome and yawning grave is ever open before 
 him, into which, without the hope of immortality, he sinks down 
 to that dark and dread abyss of eternal oblivion. Religion, on 
 the contrary throws a bright and heavenly halo around the 
 soul that lights up the dark chambers of the grave, and guilds 
 the empire of death itself. When the monster death is dealing 
 his last fell strokes, we can in rapturous joy cry ont with the 
 sainted Paul — '' death, where is thy sting, grave, thy vie- 
 
PREFACE. 23 
 
 tories !" Soon shall mj disembodied soul ascend from the dark 
 and dread abodes of dissolution to those bright realms of eternal 
 bliss, where sickness and sorrow, and parting will be no more, 
 for ever and for ever ; and where our dearly loved and long 
 lost children, kindred and friends will see and know us face to 
 face. Here, amidst perennial sweets and the undying love of 
 Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, will we endure in happy 
 bonds through ceaseless time. 
 
 " Lost in earth, in air or main, 
 Kindred atoms meet again." 
 
 A glorious resurrection. 
 
 Thus, as life speeds on, the confiding soul can look with calm 
 indifference upon the approach of death, as but a change of 
 form, aud a glorious transit to endless joys. Life at best is but 
 a dream — it is like the morning dew and the early flower, soon 
 gone from earth forever. It is but a shadow, a flitting sun- 
 beam, a bubble upon the stream of time, that rises and sinks 
 like nations, in endless succession. This earth is not our home, 
 we look to a higher dwelling, " a house not made for hands, 
 eternal in the heavens,^' To the poor heart-broken, friendless, 
 and cast down, religion is the only stay. In the midst of misery 
 and hopeless despair, it comes as a husband to the widow, and 
 a father to the fatherless. It is eyes to the blind and feet to 
 the lame. It is wealth, endless wealth, undying wealth to the 
 poor ; yes, a wealth and honor far beyond what all the empty 
 honors that a sordid strife and a vassalage of sin in this world 
 can bestow. The glare and pomp of this life, is but like the 
 thwarting meteor that catches the vulgar gaze, and sinks upon 
 the welkin's bound ; while the Christians' faith must endure 
 forever. The melting and transporting influence of holy love, 
 gives a more sincere and lasting joy than all that man and earth 
 besides can bequeath. Amidst the perils of life, surrounding 
 gloom and the pall of death, religion is our buoyant guide and 
 safe protector. Yes, when that inexorable death seizes upon 
 the fluttering heart and all earthy prospects fade from the 
 
24 PREFACE. 
 
 filmed eye and the curtain of eternal night falls upon us, no 
 spark of hope for the immortal soul is left but in the mercy of 
 that kind father who made us and calls us to our everlasting 
 home. The Christian's hope is for a better and a happier home, 
 beyond the confines of time, where his crown of glory is to far 
 exceed all earthly crowns, and even here, while breathing his 
 fervent prayers and praise to God, he enjoys a more sacred in- 
 dependence and tranquil delight than potentates can feel upon 
 their tottering thrones. God cannot then have left it to the 
 petty efforts of man to quibble away this holy principle — the 
 hope of immortality beyond the grave, that beats high in the 
 breast of every creature on earth ; and shall it be that I have 
 in any wise sacrilegiously robbed the Christian of one particle 
 of his faith ; thou, Father, the fountain of love and mercy, 
 who best knowest my heart, will pity and forgive. 
 
 I had thought to be done with my preface, but knowing the 
 influence which human authority has over the common reader, 
 I deem it well to make a short quotation from Sir William 
 Hamilton, certainly the most learned and pious writer of the 
 age, who, in his condemnation of the clergy for mystifying the 
 plain and unmistaken word of God, by their "learned ignorance," 
 as he calls it, writes as follows. In speaking of the vanity and 
 false teachings of theology, he says : " Humility thus becomes 
 the cardinal virtue, not only of revelation, but of reason. This 
 scheme, (that requires no mystic learning) proves moreover 
 that no difficulty emerges in theology, which had not previously 
 emerged in philosophy : that in fact, if the divine did not 
 transcend what it has pleased the deity to reveal, and wilfully 
 identify the doctrine of God^s word with some arrogant extreme 
 of human speculation, philosophy would be found the most 
 useful auxihary of theology. For a word of false, and pestilent, 
 and presumptuous reasoning, by which philosophy and theology 
 are now equally discredited, would be at once abolished, in the 
 recognition of this rule of prudent nescience, nor could it longer 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 25 
 
 be too justly said of the code of consciousness, as by reformed 
 Divines it has been acknowledged of the Bible : 
 
 " This is tlie book, where each his dogma seeks ; 
 And this the book, where each his dogma finds." 
 
 Specially, in its doctrine of causality, this philosophy fof 
 simple humility) brings us back from the aberrations of modern 
 theology, to the truth and simplicity of the more ancient church. 
 It is thus shown, by this great author, to be both irrational 
 and uTeligious, to theorize the Bible, and sacrilegiously draw 
 from the simplicity and unity of God's word, the many dog- 
 matic contradictory and destructing creeds, that have brought, 
 as he says, both philosophy and theology into doubt and dis- 
 respect. St. Chrysostom says that humility is the foundation 
 of knowledge, and it is certainly opposed to that vain and 
 "false knowledge that puffieth up," and which scripture 
 forbids. It is this superstitious and arrogant dogmatism of 
 mystic and controversal theology, that I hold in contempt 
 and will oppose throughout, as not only false in fact, but 
 libellous to God, and dangerous to the well-being and happiness 
 of society. This vain attempt of Divines to reach the infinite 
 by their uninspired and finite mind, is a gross and criminal 
 violation of what scripture forbids — the attempt to explain the 
 "secret things of God, past 'finding out." Believing as I do, 
 that the simple teachings of Christ and his pure example is all 
 we want, I have enlisted in the service of God, and will fight 
 to my last breath against the learned ignorance and the 
 sacrilegious vanity of man. 
 
 I had not intended, at first, to publish any thing more than 
 my article upon volition, but finding truth so simple and easy, 
 I soon ran through with that article, and have had time to 
 add several essays on other subjects. My solemn meditations 
 upon the past and present condition, and the future prospects 
 of man, will, I hope, arrest the attention of the reader, and 
 cause him to reflect upon who and what he is, and whence he 
 
26 PREFACE. 
 
 came, and whether he is bound. Mv whole life being spent in 
 active and out-door exertions, I have neither known nor at- 
 tempted any thing of the artistic rules of book-raaking, but 
 have simply followed my natural rejQections as they arose from 
 time to time, mostly in the open fields, the wild forests, and upon 
 the great high-ways of toiling life. The subjects upon which I 
 write being so nearly allied, there will doubtless be found some 
 repetition, owing to those reflections being made at distant inter- 
 vals, and under no continuous and studied system, for but 
 recently, when writing upon a certain subject, I found eighty 
 pages already written and laid away, which I had entirely for- 
 gotten, showing that the same trains of thought may occur 
 upon the same and similar subjects, though treated of under 
 different heads. 
 
 From the great irritability of my visual organs, I have not 
 for many years been able to read or look upon paper for any 
 length of time, without both cerebral and gastric distress, la 
 consequence of which I have neither reviewed nor corrected a 
 single line, after first recording my thoughts. It is not im- 
 probable, therefore, that I may have somewhat duplicated, 
 particularly as I wrote in detached numbers, just as time ad- 
 mitted and circumstances prompted me. This matters not 
 however, as the arguments and great principles involved in the 
 subjects treated of, are not thereby invalidated, or in any wise 
 less interesting. If, however, these dislocated reflections upon 
 spiritual subjects, brought forward under the most urgent, 
 incessent secular and common-place pursuits of life, shall find 
 favor with the thinking and discreminating community, I will 
 revise my thoughts, curtail and correct my eratic style, add 
 much that is valuable and invulnerable to all cavil, and thus 
 make a book in good earnest, not for the present age of 
 beings, who look to men for their religion, but for posterity, 
 for wliom I mostly labor ; for it is as sure as that there is a 
 God in Heaven, that superstition and idolatry will pass like our 
 mystic and idle dreams, when the minds of men will be left 
 
PREFACE. 21 
 
 free to read and appreciate the truth, that we have a common 
 father — a great and a good God, a God of honor, truth and 
 justice, who will not want only maltreat his children or punish 
 them without a fault, and who holds the simple-hearted and 
 faithful devotion of the uneducated, in higher esteem than all 
 the dead symbols and offensive dogmas of vain and arrogant 
 learning. The time, I say, is coming, when men of higher 
 thoughts and nobler feelings, will look back with as much con- 
 tempt upon the hypotheses of the schools and the formulas of 
 sects, as we now do upon the refined and sophistic schemes of 
 wily leaders who have deluded, degraded and enslaved man- 
 kind in ages past. Yes, as sure as the fatal march of time, 
 will the minds of men be lifted on high to see the resplendent 
 glory and eternal majesty of God, when their grovelling faith 
 will be lost in these poor erring demi-gods, such as Confucius, 
 Zoroaster, Mahomet and the Pope, with the more meagre "and 
 numerous train of little Pseudo gods, as Calvin, A^rminius, 
 Swedenborg, Campbell, Joe Smith, the divine inventor of 
 religion, and the great Brigham Young of world wide fame, 
 and lastly. Mother Ann Lee, the mother of the motherless and 
 the founder of the faithful inhuman annihilation. Yes, I 
 affirm that all faith in the vasselating opinions of such petty 
 and ephemeral beings will vanish before the mighty, immutable 
 and eternal works of God and the light of science, as does the 
 ghosts of night and the mists of morn before the rising sun. 
 Yes, and then, and not till then, will all eyes, to the uttermost 
 bounds of earth, be turned to the one great God, and to 
 Christ, the simple child of nature, as the archetype of perfec- 
 tion and their only guide to happiness here and hereafter. 
 
 Fearing that my calvinistic friends, of whom I have many, 
 ,both in and out of my own family, near and dear to my heart, 
 may think that I have, in my general melee against the errors 
 of education and the abuses of religion, in the human family, 
 aimed my blow more directly at them than at any of the other 
 ten thousand deluded and idolatrous parties ; I will say that 
 
28 PREFACE. 
 
 nature and common sense has, in spite of their religion, made 
 them just as good as other people, and that my aim is not at 
 them particularly, but against all who sacrilegiously tamper 
 with the simple and sacred word of God, and impiously adapt 
 it to their own selfish and sectarian purposes ; thus begetting 
 a bitter feeling of bigotry and intolerance amongst the people 
 of God, even to the destruction of each other. Believing as I 
 do, that there is a God, that he is a just and impartial God, 
 and that we are all his children, who he loves more dearly 
 than an earthly parent does his children ; I cannot believe 
 that he ever unconditionally created one portion for happiness, 
 and the other for eternal damnation ; and I have, therefore, with 
 the full conviction of those impious slanders and awful imputations 
 against the great Jehovah, solemnly and boldly, but respect- 
 fully condemned all such contracted uncharitable and irreverent 
 interpretations. As God has caused the sun to shine and the 
 showers to fall, for the benefit of every creature on earth, it 
 cannot be. that he has withheld the blessings of religion, parti- 
 cularly as he has commanded it to be preached to all nations, 
 in view of which facts, we cannot too openly detest those false 
 and presumptuous leaders of deluded parties for their attempt- 
 ing to monopolize those bounteous gifts of heaven. We know 
 that a sophistic and quibbling clergy can, by false assumptions 
 and the dexterous use of ambiguous terms, coupled with Jeho- 
 vah's high authority, call to their altar the craven and the 
 credulous, but they can never shake the confidence of those who 
 have communed with God in his sacred fanes of the silent forest, 
 or learned his character from the book of nature. Nor has the 
 mazes of superstition and the delusions of false theology any 
 charm for the man who has read the Bible for himself, and 
 learned from the simple precepts, and the pure and unostenta-^ 
 tious life of Christ, what constitutes true piety and unalloyed 
 religion. The study of theology and long training in the rules 
 of logic may enable a man to make a pedantic display before 
 his gaping congregation, who listen with wonder at his compli' 
 
PREFACE. 29 
 
 cated divisions, and are lost in the involutions of his subtle 
 refinings ; but such vanity and folly can never better the heart 
 nor satisfy the sincere and pious soul. As the distinguished 
 Butler says, when speaking of such Divines : 
 
 " For they a rope of sand can twist, 
 As firm as learned Sorbonist.'^ 
 
 Having reference to the celebrated theological school at Paris, 
 where, at the expense of religion. Satin had established an 
 institution in which the word of God was taught to be twisted 
 to suit the secular and sordid purposes of men. 
 
 It is such institutions as the above, always secretly got up 
 and headed by Satin, that I aim to expose, for they are cer- 
 tainly stumbling blocks and bones of contention in the church 
 of God, where there should be found but one faith, one people 
 and one church. That all theological institutions are equally 
 corrupt, is not here maintained, but that all tend to evil, by the 
 corruption of our morals and the destruction of our religion, is 
 as true as that, wars, bitter and satanic passions, with an 
 intolerant spirit of revenge, even to the burning of each other, 
 constitute an evil. One portion of those schools, where they 
 harness their pupils to the doctrines of the church, and drudge 
 and drill them in the presumptuous dogmas and fruitless in- 
 signias of the opinionated and vain men, are carried on through 
 honest delusion and ignorant and superstitious learning, while 
 the other is sustained purely by chicanery and trick. The 
 gargon of separate religions, as taught in these institutions, 
 founded upon the simple and harmonious unite Christ, is a gross 
 solecism, which conveys to the mind of every sound and im- 
 partial thinker a glaring inconsistency. 
 
 My whole object in writing is to introduce reason not only 
 as the corrective of the incongruous theological teachings of the 
 day, but as the only means of reconciling the inconsistencies of 
 the Old Testament, and the thieving temper and murderous 
 acts of the Jews, under the name and by the pretended au- 
 thority, of a truthful, just and feeling God. When we read 
 
30 PREFACE. 
 
 such inconsistencies as the following, what refuge is there, from 
 deism, yes, atheism, but in reason, for no one of sound mind 
 and correct heart could believe in such a ,God as the Jews 
 moulded to their own base purposes, and at last rejected and 
 murdered. The reader will please reflect upon the following 
 palpable contradictions, recorded, no doubt, to suit the feelings 
 and views of the individuals, for they cannot be the words of 
 the great and unerring God of the universe, who is full of truth, 
 of mercy and justice, and will not lie, steal or murder, as did 
 the God of the Jews, according to their own records. 
 
 " And Jehovah spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man 
 speakest unto his friend." Exod. xxxiii — 9, 11. "For they 
 have heard that thou, Jehovah, art amongst this people, that 
 thou, Jehovah, art seen face to face." Numbers xiv. Now it 
 is known without long quotations, that in other places, it is 
 recorded that no man hath seen God, or can behold him and 
 Hve, etc., etc. It is moreover said that the Lord put Moses in 
 the clift of a rock and hid him with his hand, while he passed 
 by, " and I will take away my hand, saith the Lord, and thou 
 shalt see my back parts ; but my face shall not be seen." 
 " And Moses returned to the Lord, and said : ' Lord, where- 
 fore hast thou so evil entreated this people ? Why is it that 
 thou hast sent me ? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak iu 
 thy name, he hath done evil to this people ; neither hast thou 
 delivered thy people at all.' " Pretty plain talk — but hear the 
 reply. "And Jehovah said unto Moses: 'I have seen this 
 people, and behold it is a stiff-necked people. Now, therefore, 
 let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, that I 
 may consume them.' '^ " And Moses besought Jehovah his God, 
 and said : ' Lord, why doeth thy wrath wax hot against thy 
 people which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt, 
 with great power and a mighty hand. Wherefore, should 
 the Egyptians speak and say, for mischief did he bring them 
 out to slay them in the mountains, and consume them from the 
 face of the earth ? Turn from thy fiery wrath, and repent of 
 
PREFACE. 31 
 
 this evil against thy people. — And the Lord repented of the 
 evil which he thought to do unto his people." He seems, 
 however, not to haye changed his mind and repented, till 
 Moses rebuked and reminded him of what he had forgotten : 
 " Remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel, thy servants, to 
 whom thou swearest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, 
 I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this 
 land that I have- spoken of I will give unto your seed, and they 
 shall inherit it forever. And the Lord repented of the evil 
 which he thought to do unto his people." Now, after this 
 solemn oath and the rebuke of Moses, have the Jews multi- 
 plied like the stars of heaven, or have they dwindled by civil 
 wars till scattered to the four quarters of the globe ; and 
 have they inherited the promised land forever, or are they 
 strangers to it ? Again, the immutable God of heaven never 
 forget his pledges or repents of his acts. — " For the word of 
 the Lord is right and all his works are done in truth. He 
 loveth righteousness and judgment " I know that whatsoever 
 God doeth, it shall be forever ; nothing can be put to it, nor 
 any thing taken from it. The strength of Israel will not lie, 
 nor repent ; for he is not a man that he should repent." 
 Yet, in other parts, as we have seen, he is made to repent. 
 And again — " And Jehovah said : ' Who shall persuade 
 Ahah that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-Gilead ? And 
 one said on this manner, and another said on that manner. 
 And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the Lord, 
 and said I will persuade him. And Jehovah said unto him, 
 wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a 
 lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, 
 thou shalt persuade him and prevail also : go forth and do 
 so.'" It is again said, in other parts, that God will not lie or 
 deceive, for — "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord; 
 but they that deal truly are his delight." " And Noah built 
 an altar unto the Lord, and ojffered burnt offerings on the altar. 
 And the Lord smelled a sweet savour ; and the Lord said in 
 
da PREFACE. , 
 
 his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for 
 man's sake." As though the smell of cookery should alter or 
 determine the eternal purposes of Almighty God, the maker 
 of the universe. — '' But ye shall offer the burnt offering for a 
 sweet savour unto the Lord." " And ye shall offer a burnt 
 offering, a sacrifice made by fire of a sweet savour unto the 
 Lord, thirteen bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs of the 
 first year." Now comes the contradiction of all this culinary 
 tricking, by the pretended order of the Lord, for the benefit 
 of the luxurious priests, for it will soon appear that the Lord 
 did not himself need it. " I will take no bullock out of thy 
 house, nor he-goats out of thy folds ; for every beast of the 
 forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. If I 
 were hungry, I would not tell thee ; for the world is mine, and 
 the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the 
 blood of goats. Offer unto God thanksgiving. Psalm 50 : 
 9 — 14. "For thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give 
 it : thou delightest not in burnt offerings. Psalm 51 : 16. 
 "To what is the. multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith 
 the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams and the 
 fat of fed beasts ; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks or 
 of lambs or of he-goats." Isaiah, 1 : 11. — "Wherewith shall 
 I come before Jehovah and bow myself before the high God ? 
 Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of 
 a year old ? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of 
 rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil ? Shall I give my 
 first born for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the 
 sin of my soul ? He hath showed thee, man, what is good ; 
 and what doeth Jehovah require of thee but to do justly, to 
 love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.' Micah, 6 : 
 6 — 8. " And the Lord said unto Moses, speak now in the 
 ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbour, 
 and every woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver and jewels 
 of gold. And the Lord gave the people favour in the sight 
 of the Egyptians. And the children of Israel did accordingly 
 
PREFACE. 33 
 
 to the word of Moses ; and they borrowed of the Egyptians 
 jewels of silver and jewels of gold and raiment. And Jehovah 
 gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that 
 they lent unto them ; and they spoiled the Egyptians." Ex. 
 iii., 21, etc. Here again, God is made the author of great 
 deception and base ingratitude ; to borrow, and not return is 
 ingratitude, and when we gain a favor by deception, intending 
 to abscond with it, it is theft. 
 
 Now the above apparent inconsistencies in the character 
 of God (and there are others too numerous to name) can only 
 be reconciled by that " poor human reason" so much abused. 
 The promises of God to the Jews which have never been ful- 
 filled, were conditional. They were covenants, all of which 
 the Jews on their part violated. But we are wasting time 
 upon these colateral points, and I will close my preface by 
 insisting that God is in earnest when he rejects all forms and 
 sacrifices, and declares that all he asks is to "do justice, love, 
 mercy, and walk humbly before him." 
 
 All the children of God should stand upon one platform, 
 as firm and immovable as the foundations of the earth, 
 agreeing that he is wise, powerful and just, and under this 
 granted position, farther agree that reason shall be the test of 
 disputation and our only guide to truth. Thus, when it is 
 said that God is an impotent and short-sighted botch, who does 
 and undoes, who resolves and repents, who waxes hot, fiery 
 and revengeful towards his children and plunges them into 
 eternal hell-fire, without a crime or provocation ; reason tells 
 us that it is untrue, it matters not by whom said, or from 
 what authority it may come. And when it is recorded of 
 God, who made and owns the universe, that he has been 
 guilty of the lowest deception to obtain jewels and petty 
 bawbles, by putting lies in the mouths of the unbelieving, 
 thieving and blood thirsty Jews, to swindle the more generous 
 and kind hearted Egyptians ; reason tells us that it is false. 
 And again, when it is known that " lying lips are an abomina- 
 
 2 * 
 
34 PREFACE. 
 
 tion to the Lord," the idea of Jehovah putting a lying spirit 
 into the mouths of false prophets for the basest of purposes, 
 becomes as abhorrent to reason, as it is abominable to the 
 Lord. It is moreover threatened to a vain woman, that God 
 would hoist her coats and expose her secrets, which would 
 be such low stooping for a God, that reason says it is not the 
 word of God, but the word of a man, of gross and vulgar 
 thought. Seeing these then, and many other passages, evinc- 
 ing both the language and thoughts of men, why is it that 
 the inspirational and canonical infalUbility of every thought 
 and word in the Bible, should be so streneously contended 
 for, but for the want of reason. This " poor human reason," so 
 scoffed at by Divines as incompetent to the mystery of things 
 unseen, is the very bully so swaggeringly brought up by them- 
 selves to brow beat their antagonal creed-makers in points of 
 disputation — with the catholics for instance, who contend for 
 a literal construction in the eucharist, where Christ said of the 
 bread, " take, eat, this is my body," and of the wine, " this is 
 my blood." The protestant says, this, taken literally, is false, 
 and exultingly taunts the catholic with reason and common 
 sense. For, say they, every boy ten years old, by the use of 
 reason, knows that there is not meat in bread nor blood in 
 wine, and thus it is that they can call reason to their aid, 
 when it serves their sectarian purposes, and yet cry out 
 infidel to those who are governed by reason. In short, for I 
 must close, the only way to do justice to God and good to 
 man, is to descriminate between what is of God and what of 
 man, which can only be done by reason : God's sacred gift 
 and guide to man. Those uninspired and obvious discrepan- 
 cies introduced into the Bible, it matters not whether by 
 ignorance or design, are clinging curses upon the pure, simple 
 and sublime word of God, and grossly offensive to an elevated, 
 chaste and sensitive soul, that entertains a God far above the 
 petty ribaldry and foul frivolities of man. My object and 
 only object in writing, is to rid our faith of those stumbling 
 
PREFACE. ' 35 
 
 blocks and clogs to the church, and introduce in their place, 
 the Supreme Lord of heaven and earth, the pure fountain of 
 life, of love and mercy. I think it black and revolting ingra- 
 titude, to cast aside the Sublime God of nature and the author 
 of our being, and preach as a scar crow to the people, the* 
 supremacy of fiery, vindictive 'and malicious Gods ; and parti- 
 cularly, when the great God of heaven has said — " Thou shalt 
 not have no other Gods before me ;" admitting that there 
 were other Gods in the minds of men, who by the by, have in 
 these latter days been preached up, both to the terror and 
 the hatred of the people. If the clergy can be brought to 
 preach a one supreme and universal God and kind, impartial 
 and patient father, who esteems the sincere soul and feeling 
 heart more than the pompous and learned pretentions of 
 those blind and ludicrous expounders of things beyond their 
 reach, God will be loved, and the millenium commenced. Yes, 
 when they will preach that we are to become as little children, 
 by a heart of unfeigned sincerity and of simple and unalloyed 
 devotion, then will the spirit of God, and not of fashion attend 
 their preaching, and sweep from the churches, as with the 
 bosom of distraction, all that hollow-hearted pomp, pride and 
 parade of our modern church paraphernalia. Yes, I most sin- 
 eerily and solemnly affirm, under the promptings of sacred truth, 
 that if morality, honest dealing and charity were preached to 
 the people as more acceptable to God than faith in creeds, 
 church formalities, and pay to the preacher, that we should 
 have a much more honest community, and that the news 
 columns would have something better to publish, than that we 
 are a mass of murderers and swindlers. In confirmation of this 
 opinion, let us hear what the unmistaken words of inspu-ation 
 says, in regard to what constitutes religion. " Though I speak 
 with the tongues of man and of angels, and have not charity, I 
 am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though 
 I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all 
 knowledge ; and though I have all faith, so that I could re- 
 
36 PREFACE. 
 
 move mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And 
 though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I 
 give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me 
 nothing. Charity suffereth long and is kind ; charity envieth not, 
 charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up (like our modern 
 creed-makers), doeth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her 
 own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in 
 iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." Thus, after going on 
 farther to say that all prophecies, knowledge and tongues, may 
 fail and vanish away, but that charity, which is immutable and 
 eternal, must abide for ever. The Apostle closes his remarks 
 upon this subject, in the following words : " And now, abideth, 
 faith, hope, charity, these three ; but the greatest of these is 
 charity." Now in modern times, we have reversed the thing, 
 by believing that faith in creeds, church-membership and a 
 fashionable resort to church constitutes religion. There is no 
 repenting in sack-cloth and ashes seen, but a self-sufiBciency, 
 with fine broad cloth and costly linen, has been substituted in 
 its place. Faith and fashion have actually driven charity and 
 good works from the prcceints of the church. The crime is 
 now the want of creed ; for a man may abound in charity and 
 good works, and yet except, He attaches himself to some one of 
 the discrepant and waring creeds, he is counted out as a har- 
 dened sinner. In the days of Paul, and under the instruction 
 and practice of Christ, charity and piety was every thing ; but 
 amongst our sovereign interpreters and creed-makers, Christ 
 and his teachings are forgotten, and charity is hooted at as a 
 thing that may be exercised as well out of the church as in it. 
 In truth, charity is no longer known in the church : for where 
 was the charity of John Calvin or any of his party, when his 
 creed of eternal destiny was introduced ? Was there charity 
 enough then left, I ask, to save the learned and pious Servetus 
 from the torturing flames ? Where, where, I ask again, was 
 that charity which burnt a pious and godly man for the con- 
 scientious exercise of his own opinion. And now let me say to 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 37 
 
 the reader who has any knowledge of the selfish and party- 
 passions of man, that but for the conservative power of scepti- 
 cism and chm'ch divisions the horrid and heart sickening scenes 
 of Smithfield and Bartholomew would be enacted over and over 
 again. Yes, the fiendish fires of human sacrifices would be 
 kindled, and the bloody sword, clotted with human gore, would 
 again be unsheathed. And though there cannot now be a 
 sufficient concentration of power in any one of the waring sects 
 to carry on those vengeful acts of inhumanity, there rankles in 
 the heart a secret enmity that lacks but numbers to make itself 
 known, and let preachers drum as much as they may about the 
 necessity of their creed faith and church-membership ; I con- 
 front them with sacred truth, in saying, that whenever such 
 faith enters the church, charity flies out at the windows ; and 
 that charity, which, by the positive declaration of God is para- 
 mount to everything else, (for though we had faith to move 
 mountains, and were to give our bodies to be burnt, without it 
 we are nothing,) does not attend such preaching. Where now, 
 is that charity which suffereth long and is kind, that envieth 
 not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up and behaves not 
 unseenly, that thinketh no evil, and is not easily provoked? 
 It is gone from our modern churches, and a theology of faith 
 in the dogmatisms of creeds and church-formalities, with an 
 uncharitable intolerance and a puffed pride of party that be- 
 haveth itself most unseemly with its neighbors, have taken its 
 place. 
 
 If faith be a merit, the devil surely has it, for he believes 
 and trembles, and doubtless would make a very good routine 
 member ; yes, and albeit, attends in the person of many an 
 arrogant and fashionable a confessor. Enter a modern fashion- 
 able church- and what — why the pugnacious creed-maker and 
 logical defender is there — the latest style of fine bonnets, and 
 the hoops and hip-strops are there — the empty forms and artistic 
 taste of cold criticism is there, and the eyes that wonder to the 
 ends of the world, are everywhere, while charity, lovely charity, 
 
38 PREFACE. 
 
 divine and modest charity which vaunteth not and is not puffed 
 up, is nowhere. 
 
 These are facts, solemn facts, facts worthy of the serious consi- 
 deration of the moralist and well wisher of human harmony and 
 happiness. And now, in view of all these facts, why should a 
 man be censured for not swearing allegiance to any one creed, 
 when, in so doing, he would violate his own conscience in giving 
 up the simple precepts of Christ for the presumptuous creeds of 
 men. But few have ever reflected that there is no difference 
 between a sovereign law-giver, and a sovereign interpreter of 
 that law ; and in fact, the interpreter is paramount to the law- 
 itself. For instance, we have the law of God, but men, dissa- 
 tisfied with the simplicity of a law which every man can read 
 and understand for himself, and ambitious for party power and 
 worldly fame, get up creeds to lead some this way and some that 
 way, till the mem-bers of Christ are dislocated and torn asunder ; 
 man, the interpreter, certainly, has more power than God, the law- 
 giver, the God of heaven having thus had his unity destroyed 
 and his flock led distractedly astray. Were it possible for an 
 intelligent Bible reader of conscientious piety, to subscribe to 
 all the articles of any one faith, he could not be bettered 
 thereby, and would most certainly lose his confidence in 
 Christ, and his charity for his brethren of other denominations, 
 which facts are amply proven by all history, both sacred and 
 profane ; for why otherwise the bloody wars and -fiery trials of 
 the various sects. These are grave and momentous verities 
 that keep the best and most moral of men from associating 
 themselves with any of the distracted and self-named parties, 
 preferring to bear with the arrogant and unseemly tauntings of 
 bigotry, rather than to desert the simple and unostentatious 
 teachings and pure examples of Christ. We know that popular 
 favor and secular gain may be obtained by a church going 
 membership, but it can never better the heart or serve us before 
 the bar of heaven, where the searcher of all hearts will be 
 
PREFACE. 39 
 
 present, and is not to be blinded by tlie artistic forms and pre- 
 tentious displays of this world. 
 
 Thus have I given my views to the clergy and to the public 
 upon one of the most important subjects that can possibly 
 engage the investigation of man, and should they not return to 
 me their gratititle, I will not be disappointed, in as much as I 
 too well know the vanity of the world, to expect much for my 
 correction of it. I have given a few quotations from the Bible, 
 in proof of my position, and might have given many more, 
 were I better versed in its pages, but having read this holy 
 book purely for its precepts and principles, and not for quibble 
 or quarrel with my neighbor, I have memorized but little of 
 it, I will here very properly object to the common remark, 
 that one who is not versed in the Bible has no right to talk 
 about it, for it is quite certain that the humble and uneducated 
 ploughman may gain more from the legitimate object of the 
 Bible than the learned Divine, with all his controversal knowl- 
 edge. If biblical learning constitutes any part of piety or 
 religion, then the ox-trained clergy, and particularly the 
 Jesuitic Bible devourers, have greatly more piety than the 
 common reader, and the devil who was an angel, is doubtless 
 well versed in Scripture. This though, having a mystic charm 
 with the weak and credulous, I do not grant, nor do I believe, 
 that the deeply learned and great Divines of Europe, who tire 
 their journeymen to do the drudgery of preaching, while they 
 luxuriously remain at home to drink wine and crack jokes 
 with their titled friends, are a whit better than our little 
 popinjays and pretenders, as they call them of this country. 
 And though, according to the principle, so much harped upon, 
 that scriptural learning is a virtue, and though the erudite and 
 well fed clergy of England, may look with contempt upon our 
 embrowned and meager Httle circuit riders, before whose 
 hungry coming the chickens fly with instinctive terror, they 
 are, in the eyes of God no better. In fine, if divine learning 
 makes a man the better, then are the clergy, who I have seen 
 
40 PREFACE. 
 
 crowd the bull-baitings, the cockpits and the gambling tables, 
 greatly better than the humble Christian, who only knows the 
 precepts and aims to follow the examples of Christ. The 
 lawyer, whose profession it is to know the law, is no better 
 man than he who is ignorant of that law. Be assured, my 
 reader, for I must close, that even " the gentiles, which have 
 not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, 
 these having not the law, are a law unto themselves, which 
 show the work of the law written in their hearts, their con- 
 science bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile 
 accusing, or else excusing one another." All experience shows 
 that the Apostle, in the above quoted words, was correct ; for 
 God, our kind and eternal father, foresaw that all his children 
 could not be learned, and consequently printed upon their 
 hearts his law, and fixed upon their consciences the right 
 thereof, if not misled by creed-makers. One word more, in 
 regard to the efficacy of preaching, which is a good thing to 
 keep up a social resort with virtuous intentions, but it is not as 
 some suppose, like patent pills, ample for the cure of all cases, 
 but is only an auxiliary and palliative to our infirmities, and 
 not to be depended upon where the soul's salvation is at stake. 
 As I have before insisted, for it is my duty, and the duty 
 of every honest man to give warning and good advice ; that iu 
 the language of Paul preaching with the " tongues of men and 
 with the tongues of angels, is nothing," and moreover, in lan- 
 guage of a great Divine, a preacher may be a dictionary of 
 theological follies and a living concordance, and yet know 
 nothing and practice less of religion. We must watch and 
 pray, and depend upon our own exertions, for though it is be- 
 lieved that the clergy have prayed thousands out of hell, and 
 more out of purgatory, it can only be done where there is 
 plenty of money, so that after all, such clergy are of but little 
 service to the poor, who are left to work out their own salva- 
 tion in fear and trembling. Nine hundred and ninety-nine iu 
 the thousand of mankind, being dupes to their leaders in the 
 
PREFACE. 41 
 
 various religions of the world, and drones upon society, my 
 aim is to show that their divine leaders are men and but men, 
 as shown by our own leaders, being daily had up before the 
 tribunals of justice, for their free-love spirits, trying to convert 
 their sisters to the practice of Mormonism, which from Bishop's 
 down, appear to be the revival of the day. I advise then 
 the attendance upon divine public worship, as a religious habit, 
 and a moral example to society ; but be watchful not to forget 
 that the preachings of Paul and of Christ, with their pure 
 examples, are ample for the salvation of every soul on earth. 
 One fact more, and I shall have closed my tedious preface: 
 Much importance is given, and virtue attached to preaching 
 in consequence of the divine command to preach in the days of 
 the apostles, during which time, and till near four hundred 
 years after Christ, there was no other possible means of making 
 the gospel known. Now, however, since all the gospels and 
 epistles have been collected together and published to all the 
 world, and every man can read for himself, we are not depend- 
 ent, as in the days of Christ, upon oral testimony, for we have 
 God's law and all he has requested of us, printed and in plain 
 language before us. That good book asks the question : — 
 ''What can man conceive more than God can do ?" And I ask, 
 what can man say more or better than God has said ; and 
 more than all, what right has man to tamper with the words 
 of God or pervert them to his own contracted and vile 
 purposes. Had the Clergy had any regard either for the 
 words or the meek and lovely examples of Christ, the sun 
 would not have rosen upon the mangled bodies of seventy- 
 thousand Christians, men, women and children, who had been 
 butchered between midnight and day, at the memorable Bar- 
 tholomew's feast, by the perfidious treachery and permission of 
 the clergy, their professed brethren in Christ ; nor would the 
 children of God have murdered each other, to the number of 
 four hundred, within a short period, during Mary's reign in Eng- 
 land, two hundred of whom were burnt at the stake. Bishops 
 
42 PREFACE. 
 
 burnt Bishops, and no one was safe, who professed religion 
 that did not suit the fiendish and fiery fanaticism of ruling par- 
 ties. These are but small items, compared with the hills of 
 slain and the rivers of blood that have fallen and flown in the 
 name of God, our kind and heavenly father, and I only name 
 them, to show that except human nature has changed, that the 
 clergy are no more to be trusted now than in the bloody days 
 which have passed. Indeed, 'their divisions are getting greater, 
 and their pretended learning in the Bible with their creeds and 
 party-professions only tend to destroy the unity of Christ and 
 beget bickerings and bitter feelings in his church, and would to 
 God that the pure in heart, and humbly, pious in soul would 
 spurn from the church all controversal divinity, and look to 
 the Bible instead of men for their religion. This is what I 
 most sincerity labor for, as then and never till then will the 
 children of God have peace of mind, and full, firm and un- 
 shaken faith in the unity, wisdom and goodness of God. 
 
 In farther showing that without inspiration, all speculations 
 in religion, but lead us into darkness and doubt, and that the best 
 of men may err, by passing the bounds of reason and common 
 sense, I will make it appear, for the benefit of the common 
 reader, that even the primitive fathers, to whose labors we 
 owe much in handing down to us the New Testament, greatly 
 erred in evincing towards each other an unchristian spirit of 
 intolerance and persecution. At the Council of Nice, where 
 Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, and Areus, disgracefully 
 quarrelled about what was inspired and what not, the various 
 gospels and epistles were, for the first time, collected into a 
 volume called the New Testament; and the history of this 
 council will, by the by, justify me in saying that there may 
 have been many errors embodied in with the simple and un- 
 mistaken word of God, particularly, when uninspired men, like 
 ourselves, full of doctrines, of prejudices, and of wordly pride 
 of party, were the assorters, who threw out about one-half of 
 the gospels as spurious, which have since been collected into a 
 
PREFACE. 43 
 
 volume, called the Apocryphal New Testament. In farther 
 proof of the position I hold in regard to the corruptions of the 
 Bible, see the letters of Sir Isaac Newton, published by 
 Bishop Horsley, in which he points out many forgeries and 
 corruptions, even long since the Council of Nice, I quote 
 only a few remarks of Sir Isaac, in a letter to a friend, as 
 published by Bishop Horsley. "If the ancient churches, in 
 debating and deciding the greatest mysteries of religion, knew 
 nothing of these two texts, I understand not why we should be 
 so fond of them, now the debates are over. And while it is the 
 character of an honest man to be pleased, and of a man of in- 
 terest to be troubled at the detection of fraud, and of both to run 
 most into those passions, when the detection is made plainest, 
 I hope this letter will, to one of your integrity, prove so much 
 the more acceptable, as it makes a further discovery than you 
 have hitherto met with in commentators." He goes on to 
 speak of many gross and grievous interpolations and corrup- 
 tions committed both by the Latins and the Grreeks, as well as 
 by our modern creed-makers, too numerous, to admit notice 
 here. But wbat does Sabinus, Bishop of Heraclea, say of this 
 Nicene Council, which distracted and split asunder the Christian 
 world. He says of this council, ''That with the exception of 
 Constantine and Eusebius Paraphilus, they were a set of illite' 
 rate simple creatures that understood nothing." And Pappus, in 
 his Synodicon to that council, makes known that "tbey having 
 promiscuously put all the books that were referred to the 
 council, for determination under the communion table in a 
 church ; they besought the Lord that the inspired writings 
 might get upon the table, while the spurious ones remained 
 underneath, and that it happened accordingly." 
 
 These facts must convince every reader, of observation, 
 that those men of the Nicene Council, who selected and handed 
 down to us our religion, were men and nothing but men, who, 
 in the language of the Bishop of Alexandria, himself, as ap- 
 plied to Arius and his party, that they were " heretics, apos- 
 
44 PREFACE. 
 
 tates, blasphemous enemies of God, full of impudence and 
 impiety, forerunners of Antichrist, imitators of Judas and men 
 who it was not lawful to salute or bid God speed." Yes, and 
 what might be expected in retalliation, from men of selfish 
 feeling and vile party religion, the same gross and disgraceful 
 language was hurled back with satanic piety upon Alexander 
 and his monopolizing party. 
 
 The spirit of Christ did not attend this censorship of 
 waring Divines, every word of whose blind and selfish selec- 
 tions we are, by the dictatorial and despotic spirit of modern 
 Divines, bound to believe, or suffer the odious and proscribed 
 charge of an infidel and an enemy to religion. No, nor did 
 they respect the commands of that very book over which they 
 set with carnal pride and most arrogant presumption. " Let 
 them that is greatest among you be as the younger, and he 
 that is chief, as he that doth serve." " He that is greatest 
 among you, shall be your servant ; and whosoever exalteth 
 himself, shall be abased, while he that humbleth himself shall 
 be exalted." Where was the spirit of meekness, of humility 
 and of brotherly love those days, and where is it now to be 
 found in the profession of antagonal creeds. Mosheim, in his 
 Church history says, that the " divine maxims of Christ and 
 the teachings of the New Testament, were entirely disregarded 
 by the Ecclesiastics who modeled the church under Constan- 
 tine." And farther — that " scarcely any two things could be 
 more dissimilar than was the simplicity of the gospel dispensa- 
 tion from the hierarchy established under Constantine the 
 Great." Mosheim, farther goes on to say, " Let none con- 
 found the Bishops of the golden age of the first two centuries, 
 with those who came after them, for though they were both 
 distinguished by the same name, yet they differed extremely, 
 in many respects ; the first acting with the humble zeal and 
 diligence of a servant, and with the most fervent christian 
 affection one toward another, and sympathyzing in their sor- 
 rows and distresses, fulfilled the Lord's command of brotherly 
 
PREFACE. 45 
 
 love and kindness.'' Would to God that Satan had not cor- 
 rupted this spirit of unity, and kindred and pious affection 
 amongst the Clergy, that we might have more peace of mind and 
 a fuller confidence in the religion we profess ; for it is as sure as 
 there is a God in heaven, that had we the firm and undeviating 
 faith which the anxious soul so much desires, we should neither 
 have a horror of death nor a doubt of consequences, but would 
 welcome with exulting triumph our exit from time and the 
 toils of life to our happy abodes of eternal bliss, to unite again 
 the tender ties with departed kindred and friends, where sick- 
 ness, sorrow and parties will be known no more, forever and 
 forever. Then could we with calm and christian resignation 
 look upon death as our greatest friend, and cry out with the 
 sainted Paul, death, where is thy sting, grave, thy vic- 
 tories ! But, alas, alas ! for the pride of human nature, and 
 the unstaid and incorrigible perversity of man, whose sensual 
 appetites and hankerings for domination over his poor dying 
 fellow mortals, keeps him in perpetual strife with himself and 
 with others, to the destruction of his own happiness, as well 
 as that of others. Instead of the spotless purity of example 
 in the Apostles, and the divine spirit of Christ, which breathed 
 with humility, unity, brotherly love and friendship in earlier 
 ages of christian piety, our leaders have become proud, pro- 
 fligate and litigious in their temper. Riches, ease and worldly 
 honors have now become the gods of this world. The spirit of 
 pride, avarice, ambition and dominion have proved fatal to the 
 piety, peace and happiness of the kingdom of Christ. Humility, 
 self-denial and charity is no longer found among the clergy, 
 but now they rankle in malice, and vauntingly set in judgment 
 upon the consciences of others, as did Calvin upon the broiling 
 of poor Servetus. The infernal foe of religion has given to 
 those partisan Divines a blind and furious fanaticism which 
 spurns the meek and lovely examples of Christ, and persecutes 
 to death his humble and faithful followers. The abodes of in- 
 nocence and simplicity are rudely invaded by the same cruel 
 
46 PREFACE. 
 
 spirit, and the natural amusements of the youthful heart, 
 prompted by God himself, are blighted by the stern and 
 rinkled brow of the puritanical professor, while all social 
 courtesies and generous emotions of soul must yield to the 
 censorship of church-conventionalities and dwindle down to a 
 cold, selfish and one-sided church profession, or be cast out of 
 society to bear the frowns of all the waring leaders, who have 
 become more arrogant and ostracizing in their despotic career, 
 than even those detestable demagogues themselves, who are 
 destroying the morals and peace of society. 
 
 All history, both sacred and profane proves the above 
 representation to be no exaggeration ; as otherwise, why the 
 cruel persecutions and bloody wars of the religious world ? I 
 will say in fine, that there never can be a full and undoubting 
 faith, as long as Divines make creeds and keep up divisions in 
 the church, for it is certainly axiomatic, that where there are 
 many adverse guides aiming at the same point, that distraction 
 and doubt must exist amongst their followers. There is a 
 shallow, dishonest and dishonorable shift made by the clergy, 
 when these objections are proposed against their creed-making, 
 and in favor of the simple and unmistaken teachings of the 
 New Testament, in answering that all creeds are the same and 
 of equal virtue in the eyes of God ; for if so, why spend so 
 many millions of money in keeping up party-schools ; and as 
 a distinguished Divine says, " Why spit hell-fire and damnation 
 at each other ?" 
 
 These are things belonging to human nature, and will be 
 freely treated of in my little book of "man from his cradle to 
 HIS grave." I shall speak with modest diffidence of the grievous 
 abuses in the church, nor will I use the gross and vulgar 
 language against the authors of those errors, which they have 
 heaped with billings-gate abuse upon each other. Knowing 
 as well as I do, the wordly pride and sordid interests of party, 
 I look for no return of gratitude for my efforts to prune the 
 
PREFACE. 47 
 
 church of its morbid excrescences which hang as a clinging 
 curse upon it. 
 
 Now, as the title of my book makes it my duty to give the 
 true history and nature of man, and to expose the evils and 
 grievances of society, I shall do so with conscious fidelity, and 
 with kind feelings, even to the authors of and actors in the 
 errors of life, having charity enough to believe that almost all 
 men act from the unavoidable promptings of their education 
 and the circumstances that hourly surround and control them. 
 I do not then blame any man for his conscientious opinions 
 howsoever destructive to the peace and happiness of society ; 
 but it is the evil itself which I reprobate ; and in so doing, 
 cannot, as an honest man, avoid naming the authors and ac- 
 tors, and strive, by exposing their doctrines to lessen their 
 influence. I do not blame Confucius, the demi-god of China, 
 for the millions of his fellow-beings he has led astray. Zoroaster 
 for his millions of blind followers, nor Mahomet for the millions 
 of mankind who he has led in a different direction. The Pope 
 was not to blame for holding certain doctrines, nor was Martin 
 Luther, for dividing his flock and distracting them with doubts 
 and heretical schisms, l^o, nor do I blame John Calvin, as a 
 man, for his opinions, -though President Shannon, a Divine of 
 learning and piety, boldly proclaimed from the pulpit, that the 
 doctrines of John Calvin had sent more souls to hell than scep- 
 ticism and all other causes besides. Nor was this conscientious 
 Divine in turn to be blamed for beating the poor old Bible, 
 from which such doctrines could be taken with a fist of ven- 
 geance, for he did it with tears in his eyes, and with a counten- 
 ance that bespoke the indignant sincerity of his soul. These 
 are grave facts, both of history and of every day's observation, 
 and I relate them to show the distracted and alarming condi- 
 tion of mankind, and to justify myself in saying what I have. 
 "We hear the clergy constantly speaking of such and such doc- 
 trines, which words, when understood, are a direct contradiction 
 of the truth of rehgion itself ; for truth is a unit, and if the 
 
48 PREFACE. 
 
 Bible be true it is a unit ; and as a unit admits of no divisions 
 or doubts ; it is a presumptuous and gross solecism to speak of 
 drawing contradictory doctrines from the direct absolute and 
 unconditional word of God himself Things certain, as that 
 two and two make four, and that the whole is greater than a 
 part, admits of no doubts, doctrines, or divisions of opinion ; and 
 in like manner, if the religion of the Bible be certainly true, 
 Divines, who adopt it as such, ought not to get up disputes 
 about what is or is not religion, and whether the word of 
 God or the word of man shall prevail. If the word of God be 
 uncertain and admits of doubt and doctrines, then indeed will 
 there ever be that lamentable confusion that now exists in the 
 church of God, and the doctrines of Grecian Mythology, of 
 Heathenism, and fabulisms of all kinds are just as safe for the 
 soul as Christianism, doubt being doubt, and upon equal footing 
 with doubt. To doctrinize, or in other words, to theorize the 
 Bible, is to destroy it positively, and yet does every upstart in 
 theology, who fancies to lead ofip a party to himself, find a text 
 for some new doctrine ; in other terms, doubt of God's word, 
 If such tamperings with the positive statutes of God be tole- 
 rated, the pettifogger is superior to the law-giver, and forsooth, 
 as I have before said, the sovereign interpreter of a law, is cer- 
 tainly superior, in the result of such exercise, to the original law- 
 giver himself, as the dictum of the demi-god becomes the law of 
 idolatrous man, which plainly shows the reason why all the 
 monkish mysteries and miracles with the biblical learning of 
 papal supremacy has done nothing for religion. Be assured, 
 then, my reader, that the only corrective to ignorant delusion 
 and to sorcerous design, is the free and independent exercise 
 of that sacred reason, which God has given us for a knowledge 
 of himself and for the enjoyments of heaven. Our senses are 
 given us as inlets of knowledge and the only correctives of those 
 wild delusions that haunt us in our dreams, but which are quickly 
 corrected by the awakened senses. In like manner, but awaken 
 reason, and all the wild delusions of superstition and the vagaries 
 
PREFACE. 49 
 
 and phantasms of our blind and impotent leaders will vanish like 
 the ghosts of midnight before the rising sun. But I must drop 
 these reflexions, and close my tedious preface ; and, in so doing, 
 say to my clerical friends, that I have no other object in view, 
 but to give them less labor and more religion. And now, may 
 the unity, the might and the majesty of Jehovah, our great and 
 eternal father claim the undivided gratitude and the heart-felt 
 and unfeigned worship of every creature in existence. And, 
 0, may his glorious manifestations of love and mercy in his 
 bleeding son, soften the asperities of christian hatred, and melt 
 us into one millennial brotherhood, that we may have a heaven 
 instead of a bedlam and hell m earth. The reader will excuse 
 me, in again aflBrming that my object is not to lessen the dignity 
 and influence of the clergy, but to elevate them, and the people 
 with them, to that high standard of moral perfection and of 
 rational religion, which God has intended for them, and which 
 the very name of unperverted divinity legitimely claims. And 
 now, in conclusion, let me say, that 1858 years of experience 
 has convinced me that the preaching of men's creeds and the 
 hypotheses of the schools, will never make an honest commu- 
 nity, nor a sincere and unpretending Christian, and hence it is, 
 I insist upon the support of preachers, and the preaching of 
 the gospel, not according to Calvin, to Wesley, to Campbell, 
 Mother Ann Lee, or to Brigham Young and the ten thousand 
 other theological doubts and distractions, manufactured in our 
 schools, but according to the unsophisticated, unmistaken and 
 simple hearted religion of Christ. In short, it is that sacred 
 truth, and honest and even handed justice, the brightest attri- 
 butes of the eternal Godhead, I aim to sustain, and not the 
 ever vacillating, vicious and waring. — Yes, and I may add, 
 the damning controversial theology of our party-schools, got 
 up by the artifice of man, and sustained by that worldly pride 
 and ambition which destroy the kingdoms of earth as well as 
 that of Christ. That kind-hearted, meek, benevolent and 
 forgiving religion of the early church, has been driven from it, 
 
 3 
 
50 PREFACE. 
 
 by heartless creeds and the pomp and pride of party, and in 
 its stead there prevails a revengeful malignity of persecution, 
 even to death. 
 
 It would be dishonest to say that I have exaggerated, and 
 that all parties go hand in hand with one harmonious, kind and 
 brotherly feeling, for if so, why are our religious papers filled 
 with billings-gate virulence, and why so many abusive books 
 and so much heated discussion in our open pulpits. Finding 
 empty pews and scant tythes in our little town overflowing 
 with creeds, the clergy, very naturally, (for it is my business 
 to teach nature,) became touched in the most tender parts, 
 and resolved, at once, and for J;he first time, to unite their 
 forces in one common and necessary cause, and thus rouse up 
 that laggard spirit of revival which seemed slow to its duty. — • 
 And now it is that my delicate sensibility would be silent, but 
 my ardent desire for a universal brotherhood, and my duty as 
 a true historian, urges me to record the fact — that when all 
 the traps were set, and the teams harnessed, for a long pull 
 and a strong pull, and the hill of Zion full in view, the oldest 
 horse in the holy team kicked up and broke the chains. — The 
 spirit now subsided, the waters calmed down, and not a bubble 
 was seen to ruffle the quiet surface of the pool. One of the 
 most intellectual and learned ministers of the calvinistic creed, 
 in the United States, forbid his people to ''Homologate " Now, 
 I shall not take up time in searching back through the dark 
 portals and lenghtened corridors of past eternity, to see from 
 those most ancient of records, whether his people had there 
 and then obtained from the hand of God himself, their irre- 
 vocable passports for heaven, but take it for granted, that he 
 honestly thought so, and consequently, as a sensible man, 
 pronounced it a folly to be kicking up such a fuss, at this late 
 period of time, and in truth, in so doing, seeming to doubt the 
 word of God in taking care of his own. These may seem to 
 be small and local matters, with the unreflecting, but they are 
 
PREFACE. 51 
 
 items in the history of religion, that speak volumes upon the 
 subject of mystic creeds and monkish craft. 
 
 The lofty view I have of God is not from the contemptible 
 opinions of men, but from his glorious and harmonious works, 
 and consequently could not teach as do his chosen ministers, 
 that — 
 
 He resolves and regrets^ 
 
 That he snubs and he frets, 
 And yet after all, is quite elever ; 
 
 For now fret as he may, 
 At the world and its way, 
 
 He hangs to his elect forever. 
 
 The great error in the theological teachings of the day, is 
 that the contracted and selfish feelings of men induce them to 
 interpret scriptures to suit their own vile and selfish views, 
 thus bringing God down to a level with the worst of men. 
 They represent him as a short-sighted botch, who has made, 
 been disappointed in results, fretted and unmade. That he is 
 captious, partial and unjust, selecting a few, from all eternity, 
 as favorites of heaven, "not according to their works, but 
 according to his own purpose." Such exhibitions of Deity 
 may make us fear him as we do the Devil ; but it can never 
 beget that sincere hearted and unalloyed love which a lovely 
 object will invariably and unavoidably command. God is 
 made more cruel and neglectful of his children than any parent 
 on earth — yea, more hard-hearted than a dog, for the Saint 
 Bernard dogs will risk their own lives through snow and storm 
 to save the life of even the stranger who has lost his way ; while 
 God is said to send all his children, children made by his own 
 hand, (for they did not make themselves) to perdition. This is 
 hard upon the unconscious infant and upon the poor heathen, who 
 has faithfully sought his father in the dark, but got lost, because 
 that father afforded him no light, as an excuse to thrust him in 
 the burnings of hell, forever and forever ! These doctrines are 
 promulgated from a false interpretation of scripture, and my 
 object here is to defend our kind and ever adorable Creator 
 
62 PREFACE. 
 
 from such heinous and mischievous slanders. I hold that when 
 we meet with passages of scripture that, if taken literally, 
 contradict each other, and which would be disgraceful to an 
 honorable man, that we are bound in our duty to the holy 
 character of God, and to every just rule of reason, to inter- 
 pret it, not according to our scurrilous creeds and base party- 
 purposes, but according to the wise, just, and ever to be 
 adored attributes of our kind and loving father, as learned 
 from his own laws, the book of nature, where we read that 
 he has given, even to the brute creation, a loving care for 
 their offspring, and that he cannot, therefore, neglect his own 
 The fishes of the sea, the birds of the air and the beasts of the 
 forest, will die for their young, and can it be, that God who 
 gave this heavenly love and kind protection, will neglect or 
 maltreat his own offspring. 
 
 And now, Lord, the Clergy bless, 
 
 Whose hearts are doubtless pure ; 
 
 But curse, curse their cursed creeds, 
 
 And make religion sure. 
 
 And deal not hard with them, Lord 1 
 
 But strike in love a balance sheet, 
 
 That they may figure up and meet. 
 
 They labor hard ia Satan's cause, 
 
 Not knowing what they do ; 
 
 And sure as two and two make four, 
 
 My words are strictly true. 
 
 And say, now Lord, can all be true, 
 
 Of tales they tell and teach of you, 
 
 That millions from an early date, 
 
 Thou hast doomed to saddest fate, 
 
 Without a cause to them made known. 
 
 And that without a crime their own. 
 
 And tell us, Lord, if it can be. 
 
 That three make one, and one makes three, 
 
 For if not so, the truth I'll tell. 
 
 That all creed-makers go to helL 
 
 But have this, Lord, just as thou wilt. 
 
 And punish not their creeds as guilt, 
 
 But save thou. Lord, from such dread ate, 
 
 By pointing out their sad estate • 
 
 Next show to them their wicked way, 
 
 Of leading aU thy sheep astray, 
 
 Then curse, O Lord, their quips and quirks, 
 
 And turn their creeds to honest works. 
 
PREEACE. 53 
 
 The reader must excuse me for writing in this vein of good 
 humored sarcasm, as it is not intended, either to be disrespectful 
 or reproachful ; but as the most simple and efficient corrective 
 of those ludicrous theological dogmas, which have wormed 
 themselves into the very vitals of religion, and that are not only 
 adverse to the true spirit of religion and contrary to the simple 
 teachings of Christ, but shocking to the sense of common jus- 
 tice and abhorrent to sacred reason. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 As the object of the work spoken of in the preface will be 
 to solve the enigma of mind — the great desideratum of all meta- 
 physical philosophy, I have thought it well to pursue man in 
 his mystic march, and to exhibit him in his varied phases as he 
 has from age to age, appeared upon the stage of life. — And as 
 sadly tragic as may be the drama, I will bring it in review be- 
 fore the reader, that he may see himself as in a mirror, and 
 profit from the picture. That man has ever been in error, both 
 in regard to his temporal and eternal well-being, will be seen 
 from the distracting and destructive doctrines maintained upon 
 those points. The perpetual oscillations of human opinion with 
 the palpable contradictions and astounding falsehoods pro- 
 pagated by learned men and leaders of their distracted parties 
 are all in proof of an error — a most grievous error in the educa- 
 tion of man, who, it will be shown, is a creature of circum- 
 stances or education, and whose eyes may yet be opened to the 
 paths of truth and his soul elevated to that high standard of 
 moral perfection which is to be obtained alone by the study of 
 nature — God's benign, immutable and eternal laws. Truth is of 
 God, it is a unit, is grounded in the course and constitution of na- 
 ture, and is as imperishable as God himself. Sir William Hamilton, 
 the most profound philosopher and critic of the day, says "that 
 the past history of philosophy, has in a great measure been only 
 a history of variations and errors." A volume of such quota- 
 tions might be made, but I will bring up the facts, facts incon- 
 testible and above all authority. We need not go back to 
 Brahminical sages, nor to Oriental Pantheism, to Egyptian 
 Astrology, Heathen Mythology, or the endless shades of Pag- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 55 
 
 anism, to show that man has been chained to the grossest and 
 most degrading errors, and led as an ox by the despotic opinion 
 of others. This may seem a bold and degrading assertion, but 
 it is one in which the history of facts will bear me out. To 
 grant the mighty influence which the opinion of one man may 
 have over millions of his fellow-mortals for ages in succession, 
 we have but to learn that Confucius gave religion and laws to 
 China, Zoroaster to Persia and Mahomet to Arabia, and 
 thousands of instances are to be found in the same history of 
 man, where mind has held despotic dominion over mind. Mil- 
 lions languished under a most grievous malady — all from the 
 formulae of a' single corrupt mind ; and yet no one could think 
 for himself till Martin Luther rose up and prescribed for them. 
 Strange and starthng it is to think of, that he alone broke those 
 adamantine^jhains that* bound both the political and the reli- 
 gious world to the shrine of a corrupt and degrading hierarchy. 
 There is still an individual in Italy, who, by his dictum wields 
 the minds of a large portion of the Christian world, with as 
 much ease as a boy whirls his top. Joe Smith, the Mormon 
 imposter, is a lamentable instance of the want of correct educa- 
 tion and independent thought amongst our fellow-mortals. His 
 craft and wiley tricks have already grasped the four quarters 
 of the globe, and creatures of all languages and nations are 
 crossing stormy seas and traversing forests wide and wild to 
 worship at his shrine. Thousands of smaller leaders have risen 
 up from time to time, to lead captive the unthinking - in the 
 various isms and dogmas of the day. Juggling demagogues and 
 metaphysical fanatics have also entered the vortex of mental 
 distraction, and swelled the scene of unhallowed bickerings and 
 revelings without charity. No brotherhood is found on earth : 
 no bonds of union or ties of friendship to be felt. No one God, 
 one people, one church is granted, all is left in darkness and 
 doubt, and each little party, impiously arrogating to themselves 
 the special gift of heaven, withdraws themselves within their 
 own bewildered and bewildering webb. All have agreed to 
 
56 INTRODUCTION'. 
 
 disagree in all things, save, only, that reason is to be condemned 
 as the enemy of mystery and the faith in things unseen, and 
 that the bulls and thunder bolts of the church are to be hurled 
 with pious fury against poor nature and the works of God, or in 
 less offensive language, the progress of science which is most 
 assuredly the sublime and glorious work of God. To justify 
 every sentiment I may utter and render incontestible every 
 statement I may make, I refer to the record of facts. Here 
 the reader will find the trial and condemnation of Galileo — one 
 of the greatest and best of men for casting off the factitious and 
 libellous estimates of nature, and bringing the mighty and mar- 
 vellous works of God to the light of day. Here it is, reader, 
 ponder over it, and weep for the ignorance and fanaticism of 
 man, but dispair not, for great celestial luminaries as Galileo, 
 Newton, Bacon and Comte will rise from time to time, and 
 will extinguish those flickering and ephemeral little lights, that 
 like the ignis fatuus, but lead us into bogs and brush : — 
 
 " I, Galileo Galilei, aged seventy years, and on my knees 
 before you, most reverend Lords, Cardinals and General Inquisi- 
 tion of the Universal Church against heretical depravity, having 
 my eyes on the holy Gospels, which I do touch with my lips, 
 do swear that I beheve, always have believed, always will be- 
 lieve every article which the Holy Catholic, Apostolic Roman 
 Church holds and teaches and preaches ; and as I have written 
 a book in which I have maintained that the sun is the center, 
 which false doctrine is repugnant to the holy Scriptures, I with 
 sincere heart, do abjure, curse and detest the said error and 
 heresy, and generally every other error, and heresy, and sect con- 
 trary to said holy Church." 
 
 This and the burning of the philosophic and pious Servetus, 
 by John Calvin and his compeers are but as sands upon the 
 sea-beach, compared with the widespread butcheries and misery 
 inflicted in the murdering of thought in the name of God. 
 Every aspiring effort of the soul to free itself from the fetters 
 of superstition, and rise to the throne of God by his demon- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5t 
 
 strable laws of science has been closely watched and bitterly 
 denounced as heretical and contrary to the cannons of the 
 Church. The power of the magnet and the discovery of the 
 compass and navigation were supposed to be the work of evil 
 spirits. The discovery of gunpowder by Roger Bacon, was 
 condemned as an unquestionable work of the devil. The 
 presence of sulphur being too odorous for denial. Printing 
 was certainly of Satan, and the author sought to be put to 
 death by the learned Clergy. His house in which he printed, 
 paper and type were all burnt and a guard set by those deeply 
 learned and pious Divines to prevent the devils from escaping. 
 These are undeniable facts in history ; and farther, Harvey's 
 discovery of the circulation of the blood was reviled by the 
 learned Clergy, as false and highly dangerous to the vitals of 
 religion, "For," said they, "if the bounding spirit (pulse) 
 so plainly felt and seen struggling to escape from its ten- 
 ement of clay, be nothing but the circulation of a fluid, it will 
 render all those glorious doctrines of the immateriality of the 
 soul doubtful, and God's holy Scriptures null and void." 
 Where, now, I seriously ask you, reader, is the result of such 
 learned and alarming predictions of Divines. " If,'' said these 
 same learned prelates who burnt the first book on Astronomy, 
 "it should be shown that the sun is not a lamp that turns 
 around this world to give it light, it will destroy the Bible- 
 faith, which says that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still 
 for a given time, and it obeyed." I now ask the honest reader 
 whether these learned decisions, or the word and mighty works 
 of God are true ? 
 
 This same and privileged body (almighty with the people) 
 strove to put down the science of geology as wholly incom- 
 patible with the Mosaic account of Creation, but their bab- 
 blings against the formation of the earth as well as against its 
 movements have passed as an idle breath to be laughed at by 
 boys in the science of nature. The writings of Puflfendorf and 
 of Grotius were in like manner denounced as unsafe, because 
 
 3 * 
 
58 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 their maxims and morals were taken from the laws of nature 
 as grounded in our constitutions by our Creator, and not from 
 their interpretation of the Bible — a book not intended to teach 
 us science or politics, but humble and unpretending piety, 
 which, by the bye, did not suit the cupidity of the Church 
 officials. Unfortunately for the progress of science and of 
 morals, and for the happiness and dignity of man, the Clergy 
 have held a degrading and stultifying influence over the minds 
 of the masses. Even the gifted and pious Wm. Paley, author 
 of " Moral Philosophy" and the " Religion of Nature," has not 
 escaped the censure of the Church, simply because he ap- 
 proaches the throne of God through his works and teaches his 
 attributes from the constitution and nature of things as seen 
 in the world around us. If those ignorant and narrow-minded 
 Clergy were not blinded by a gross and degrading superstition, 
 they would see that the Bible does not throughout its whole 
 course, give a single argument even for the existence of a God, 
 but assumes and asserts it as a fact demonstrable from the 
 design and wonderous wisdom of his works. "The heavens 
 declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth forth his 
 handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto 
 night showeth knowledge." Thus and thus ' alone through 
 evident design, infinite wisdom and boundless power do we 
 infer a God — and why then be so jealous of nature, and the 
 things of the world as impiously to deny it ? Shakespeare 
 says with equal truth and eloquence : " There are sermons in 
 stones, texts in trees, books in running brooks and good in 
 every thing." As we quote from memory we may not give 
 the exact words of the passage. 
 
 As I aim not to censure any unjustly or give offense to a 
 single brother, I here most distinctly and without disguise as- 
 sert that my remarks in regard to the clergy are not generic, 
 and that when I speak of juggling demagogues, I do not include 
 all statesmen, and in like manner do I grant an honorable 
 exception to the classification of an ignorant, corrupt and 
 
INTRODUCTION. 59 
 
 knavish priesthood. I am as sincere and as ardent an ad- 
 vocate for the true teachings of the Bible as those quibbling 
 triflers who, by applying its teachings to science, politics and 
 things in general, have shown its glaring inapplicability, and 
 consequently brought it into doubt and disrespect among a 
 large portion of the community. As I have said in my stand, 
 point there is a great error and a grievous wrong in the teach- 
 ings of those guardians of the divine law. And here, as else- 
 where, I, in proof, refer to the history of facts. 
 
 God has from the days of Adam to the present been devising 
 ways and means for the conversion of man, even to the degra- 
 dation, suffering and death of his only begotten son, and 
 startling, most grievously startling to sum up eighteen hun- 
 dred and fifty-nine years since that vicarious and redeeming 
 death, and yet after all, the incorrigible depravity and wick- 
 edness of the world is as unstayed as ever, while the Devil, 
 according to the preachings of the day, is reaping almost the 
 entire harvest cultivated by* God's own hand and watered by 
 his blood. These are facts, ominous facts of deep and awful 
 import. God has called, but* his call has been responseless 
 and ineffectual, and why ? The fault cannot be in God him- 
 self, but that the preachers of Satan are more effectual a hun- 
 dred to one than those of God. It would be a libellous per- 
 sonality upon God to say that he connives at or gives his ap- 
 probation to the supremacy of the Devil, which leaves the 
 fault with man alone. Then accuse me not of exaggeration 
 or beating too loudly the tocsin of alarm, as the heralds of the 
 pulpit daily proclaim the same, and the columns of our religious 
 papers are filled with it. I here make a quotation from an 
 able sermon delivered a few days since, upon "the alarming 
 increase of crime," and that in the midst of our churches and 
 colleges : " It is true that there are in the world six hundred 
 and seventy millions of our fellow-creatures who are still 
 bowing down to stocks and stones, ignorant,.of the living and 
 true God, and all this in a time emphatically called " the age 
 
60 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of missions." Our Sabbaths are openly and legally violated by 
 liquor and other trafic, open railways and excursion parties 
 with many other " habitual customs.'' I here relate an incident 
 full of the philosophy of mind and applicable to the present 
 discourse, that occured amongst an upright and honest tribe 
 of Northwestern Indians with whom I was spending some 
 time. A missionary applied to the chief for permission to es- 
 tablish a mission, upon which the chief asked him "what he 
 expected to do for his people ?" and the answer w^as: "To 
 make them Christians." The chief, not understanding exactly 
 his meaning, farther questioned "whether he could make them 
 honest, sober and truthful ?" The missionary answering in the 
 affirmative, he rejoined: "Then, go back to your own people 
 who understand your language better than mine, and when 
 you make them honest, sober and truthful, call upon me, and 
 I will aid you. You, Christians come amongst us and make 
 my people drunk, debauch our wives and daughters, rob us of 
 our furs, and if we resist, shoot xts and get up border wars." 
 
 In my review of religious persecutions, I but sound the 
 sad knell of departed time, and could I call up the victims of 
 misrule and dread oppression from their gory beds, the shud- 
 dering scene would be beyond the power of pen to depict. 
 When I look back at the hills of slain and rivers of blood and 
 listen to the widow's sorrowful lament and the orphan's 
 piteous cry, I feel — yes — when I look back through moulder- 
 ing ages at the rolling tide of man bursting upon the rocky 
 shores of time and sinking to oblivion without a name, and 
 how nation has swept nation as with the besom of destruction, 
 I feel for their wrongs and am deeply conscious that that wrong 
 is in man, and that it is my solemn and religious duty to give 
 my feeble efforts to the discovery and exposure of such wrongs. 
 But let the pious reader look back upon the reign of terror 
 with a heart that can feel for the woes of others and he will 
 witness with myself the horrid and appalling scenes that arose 
 from an erring rule in the church of God. He will see those 
 
INTRODUCTION, 61 
 
 professed followers of the meek and lowly Jesus unfurling their 
 bloody banners and fanning the flames of persecution. Then 
 let him gaze upon the malignant and scowling features of those 
 fiery demons as they stood in grim array around their broiling 
 victims, gloating upon their agonizing struggles and protracted 
 groans, and he will assert a wrong, an impious and detestable 
 wrong, a wrong that my pen cannot slander. Yes, a wrong 
 that Satan himself could not wrong. My blood runs chill and 
 my heart sinks within me in contemplating the scenes of blood" 
 shed and horror under the reign of inquisitorial power. Every 
 holy aspiration was choked, and the freeborn soul that struggled 
 for its high destiny was ground to earth. The pall of death 
 was spread upon the family altar, and a mournful, silent and 
 melancholy gloom enshrouded the sacred circle, dreadful and 
 appalling became the name of religion, and blight and desola- 
 tion was in the wake of its holy fathers. 
 
 Those saints of God, instead of being the salt and savor 
 of earth, have become the spoilers, and their tracks, from early 
 ages, have been clothed with blood. The malignant cruelties 
 of the Jews in their slaughter of innocent women and children, 
 gave a license to the Saints in Mexico and South America for 
 the wide spread rapine and murder where thousands upon 
 thousands of our meek, innocent and unoffending brothers, 
 children of the one great and eternal Father, were hunted 
 with blood hounds and cut in pieces and fed to the dogs. 
 And here is the falsely interpreted authority under which 
 they acted : ''Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, 
 and a two-edged sword in their hand to execute vengeance 
 upon the heathen and punishments upon the people, to bind 
 their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron, 
 to execute upon them the judgment written. This honor have 
 all his Saints, praise ye the Lord !" Psalm 149. 
 
 Thus have I summed up a few graphic facts in the history 
 of man, to show the mischief which may result from a false 
 education and the misinterpretation of the rights of man and 
 
62 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of the will of God. But it may be said that I have exhibited 
 the dark side of the picture, and that the world has become 
 more pious and less cruel. This, every honest man will find who 
 observes for himself and sees the sordid of the sharp grasp and traf- 
 ficking world around him, how neighbor strives to overreach neigh- 
 bor, and brother to cheat brother, is not so. Besides, he will read 
 but little else in our daily news than cruel wars, from combined 
 powers down to fillibustering and plundering parties. The 
 bloody dagger and the burglar's hand are rife in their midnight 
 deeds, while forgeries, defalcations and debaucheries from the 
 sacred preceints of divinity and the high functionaries of govern- 
 ment, down to the street scavenger, have become common. All 
 this may be accounted for from the false training of our youths, 
 who should be taught meekness, piety, brotherly love and friend- 
 ship, and to bestow those kind and social courtesies that bind man 
 to man, and contribute to the harmony and happiness of society. 
 But, on the contrary, we find that the mere tyro in our theo- 
 logical schools, with high notions of chivalry and the honors of 
 the world bears deadly arms about his person, and only recently 
 a pupil of divinity in a neighboring school shot his brother and 
 killed him. The vice-regents of God and holy teachers, them- 
 selves, become the inflaraers of war, and join in the struggles of 
 political mobs and embroiled elements in human strife. No 
 honest man can deny that we live in an age of reckless extrav- 
 agance and lawless ambition, nor will it be a slander to affirm 
 that the world has ever been governed by knaves and fools, 
 and that it is under the supremacy of their influence that we 
 are now suffering. The brainless devotee of fashion becomes 
 almighty over the minds of men, and as well might the friend to 
 humanity attempt the stay of time as the march of fashion. As 
 arise those delusive lights from the beds of physical decay that 
 but involve their followers in bewildering mazes so from the 
 hotbeds of moral corruption and depravity, may arise in Paris 
 a glare of fashion that catches the eye of the vain and giddy 
 world. Princes and peasants bow alike to its mandates, and 
 
INTRODUCTION. 63 
 
 countless millions are paid for its formulae. The veriest varlet 
 in a prescribed and artistic garb receives more attention from 
 and has more influence in the fashionable world than a Howard 
 or a man of the finest attainments, while the giddy whirls and 
 amorous wiles of the ball-room hold an unquestioned supremacy 
 over moral worth and modest mien. Books of science and 
 moral teaching meet with no encouragement while works of 
 fiction that feed only the degenerate and sensual passions of the 
 day are devored as they issue from the press. Those who do 
 not fall under the dominion of fools are led captive by juggling 
 priests and knavish demagogues. By sermons in Latin and 
 tricks of hocus-pocus men are brought with their tithes to the 
 feet of their leaders, while women are led, as it were, by the 
 hand of love to the altar of confession. The snickering demag- 
 ogue, too, knows well how to bait his hooks and set his snares. 
 He smiles with compassion upon the people, tells them of the 
 oppression and wrong of party till swelling with generous emo- 
 tions of honest indignation and bursting out in clamorous 
 denunciations, he is soon found riding on the car of state and 
 enjoying the gifts of popular favor. Ko anecdote, too low and 
 loathsome, no falsehood, too gross and glaring for the public 
 taste. The prognosis from such a gangrenous state of the body 
 politic must be unfavorable — yes, fatal ; but I have not room 
 to depict the anticipated results, my only object being to show 
 a low state of morals in all the departments of life, that man is 
 a creature of circumstances, and consequently that he may be 
 improved by a different course of education, which course I 
 shall, in the end prescribe. Talk to a high functionary of 
 Government as I have done, just sttaggering out from a dog- 
 gery and gambling-house about the dark and lowering sky that 
 obscures the star of state, and of the probable fate of our 
 happy Government's going, as all others have done, through 
 successive ages, and he will exultingly respond, as is usual for 
 our deluded people to do, that "our Government has never 
 fallen, and it has a growing strength that must endure forever.'' 
 
64 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Poor fool — he might as truthfully have said : " I have never 
 died, and therefore, I never will die," when the sturdy oak, 
 deeply rooted for five hundred years, has its time and is doomed 
 to decay, in common with all things subject to the fate of 
 time. Where are the numberless governments that have had 
 their rise, progress and power through past ages ? Where is 
 proud Babylon with her hanging gardens and towering walls ? 
 And where her Kimrods and her men of mighty fame ? Where 
 Balbec, Nineveh, Tyre, and Sidon ? And the fathers who gave 
 them birth ? They, hke Sparta, Athens and Rome, with their 
 heroes, orators, statesmen and philosophers have been crushed 
 by the hand of time. 
 
 To show more fully the many and mischievous errors in the 
 teachers and trainers of the human mind, and how parasitical 
 and degraded we may become by man worship, or founding our 
 faith on the opinions of others, I will make a few quotations from 
 the best authorities. As man in all ages are governed by then* 
 opinions, and particularly in matters of religion, I shall first 
 refer to the errors of the Bible, whence almost all our views of 
 right and wrong are derived. These quotations will bring up 
 the whole of the discrepant testimony there recorded, face to 
 face, and upon cross-examination will show to the reader that 
 their pretended divinity, and inspiration, and infallibility are 
 wholly incompatible with the attributes of a wise, just and im- 
 mutable God, and consequently how it is that nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine out of the thousand of the world's jury have either 
 disbeUeved or disregarded this testimony. And here I wish it 
 distinctly understood that my aim is not against the Bible, but 
 it is to prune it of those many and foul excrescences that have 
 well nigh destroyed its vitals. These passages of Scripture 
 will show that the doctrine of the canonical and inspirational 
 infallibihty of the entu-e Bible, is most assuredly false. The 
 natural defects of men through whose hands the Scriptures 
 have passed — with their passions, prejudices and varied interests, 
 have necessarily made it so. Those men were not all inspired 
 
INTRODUCTION. 65 
 
 and no better than the Divines of the present day, who under 
 strong prejudices and adverse interests, drag each other to the 
 stake, which could not be the case, were the word of God made 
 plain, and men were intelhgent and sincere. It is against this 
 awful error, then, that has torn the vitals of religion asunder and 
 kept up deadly feuds amongst the followers of Christ, that I, 
 upon the peril of my eternal death, have and will forever fight : 
 
 " That the not adhermg to those notions, reason dictates 
 concerning the nature of God, has been the occasion of all 
 superstition, and all those innumerable mischiefs that mankind, 
 on account of religion, have done either to themselves or one 
 another. Having in general shown the absurdity of not being 
 governed by the reason of things in all matters of religion, I 
 shall now in particular show the fatal consequences of not ad- 
 hering to those notions reason dictates concerning the nature of 
 God. Chavron, though a priest of that Church which abounds 
 with superstition, the most pernicious as well as absurd, seems 
 to have a right notion of superstition, as well as justly to abhor 
 it in Saying that " superstition and most other errors and defects 
 in religion are owing chiefly to a want of becoming and right ap- 
 prehensions of God : We debase and bring him down to us, 
 we compare and judge him by ourselves, we clothe him with 
 our infirmities, and then proportion and fit our fancy accord- 
 ingly. What horrid profanation and blasphemy is this !" 
 
 "It is men's not being governed by the reason of things 
 which makes them divide about trifles and lay the utmost stress 
 on such things as wise men would be ashamed of. It is on the 
 account of these that the different sects set the highest value 
 on themselves and think they are the peculiar favorites of 
 heaven, while they condemn all others for opinions and prac- 
 tices not more senseless than those themselves look on as essen- 
 tials. And were it not in so serious a matter, it would be 
 diverting to see how they damn one another for placing religion 
 in whimsical notions and fantastical rites and ceremonies without 
 making the least reflection on what, they, themselves are doing. 
 
66 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 " What reason has a Papist, for instance, to laugh at an 
 Indian who thinks it contributes to his future happiness to die 
 with a cow's tail in his hands, while he lays as great stress on 
 rubbing a dying man with oil ? Has not the Indian as much 
 right to morahze this action of his and show its siguificancy, as 
 the Papist any of his mystic rites, or hocus pocus tricks, which 
 have as little foundation in the nature or reason of things?" 
 
 The great Dr. Scott says : " While men behold the state 
 of religion thus miserably broken and divided, and the profes- 
 sors of it crumbled into so many sects and parties, and each 
 party spitting fire and damnation at its adversary, so that if all 
 say true, or indeed, any two of them in five hundred sects which 
 there are in the world, (and, for aught I know, there may be 
 five thousand, ) it is five hundred to one^ but that every one is 
 damned, because every one damns all but itself, and itself is 
 damned by four hundred and ninety-nine. 
 
 The pious Bishop Taylor says : " We could not expect that 
 but God would some way or other punish Christians by reason 
 of their pertinacious disputing of things unnecessary, undeter- 
 minable and unprofitable and for their hating and persecuting 
 their brethren which should be as dear to them as their own 
 lives, for not consenting to one another's follies and senseless 
 vanities." 
 
 " And can we," says Dr. Burnet, " think without astonish- 
 ment that such matters as giving the sacrament in leavened or 
 unleavened bread, or an explication of the procession of the 
 Holy Ghost, whether it was from the Father and the Son, or 
 from the Father by the Son, could have rent the Greek and 
 Latin Churches so violently one from another, that the Latins 
 rather than assist the other, looked on till they were destroyed 
 by the Ottoman family." 
 
 "The banditti and bravos most religiously observe the 
 orders of their Church about not eating flesh, etc., and in- 
 stances of this nature might be produced from the most im- 
 moral in all churches, who, not satisfied with practicing such 
 
INTRODUCTION. 6T 
 
 things themselves, think it highly meritorious to compel others 
 to do the same. And, indeed, the substance of religion has 
 been destroyed in most places to make room for superstition, 
 immorality and persecution, which last when men want reason 
 to support their opinions, always supplies its place. And are 
 there not numbers in the best Reformed Churches of the same 
 sentiments, with those Dr. Scott complains of? "Who,^^ he 
 says, " persuade themselves that God is wonderfully concerned 
 about small things, about trifling opinions and indifferent actions 
 and the rites, and modes, and appendages of religion, and under 
 this persuasion they hope to atone for all the immoralities of 
 their lives by the forms and outsides of religion, by uncom- 
 manded severities and affected singularities, by contending for 
 opinions and stickling for parties, and being pragmatically 
 zealous about the borders and fringes of religion. And I am 
 afraid it is too true as is observed in the " Letters concerning 
 Inspiration," that men have thought it an honor to be styled 
 that which they call zealous, orthodox, to be firmly linked to a 
 certain party, to load others with calumnies and to drown by 
 absolute authority the rest of mankind, but have taken no care 
 to demonstrate the sincerity and fervor of their piety by an 
 exact observation of the Gospel morals : Which has come to 
 pass, by reason that orthodoxy agrees very well with our pas- 
 sions, whereas the severe morals of the Gospel are incompatible 
 with our way of living. And one would be apt to think that 
 zeal for speculative opinions and zeal for morality were scarce 
 consistent, should he form his judgment from what he sees most 
 practiced in the Christian world. Moral goodness is the great 
 stamp and impress that render men current in the esteem of 
 God, whereas, on the contrary, the common brand by which 
 hypocrites and false pretenders to religion are stigmatized, is 
 their being zealous for the positives, and cold and indifferent as 
 to the morals of religion. 
 
 And in general, we find mere moral principles of such weight 
 that, in our dealings with men, we are seldom satisfied by the 
 
68 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 fullest assurance given us of their zeal in religion, until we hear 
 something farther of their character. If we are told a man is 
 religious, we still ask what are his morals, but if we hear at 
 j&rst that he has honest, moral principles, and is a man of 
 moral justice and good temper, we seldom tliink of the other 
 question — whether he is religious and devout ? " 
 
 " It is a general observation in history, where anything has 
 had only the appearance of piety, and might be observed with- 
 out any virtue in the soul, it easily found entertainment amongst 
 superstitious nations. Hence, Tacitus says: " Men, extremely 
 liable to superstition, are at the same time as violently averse 
 to religion." Le Clerc not only makes the same remark, but 
 says : " That those who had a confused notion of Christian 
 piety, believed it could not maintain itself without the help of 
 outward objects; and I know not what heathenish pomp which 
 at last extinguished the spirit of the gospel, and substituted 
 Paganism in its room." 
 
 • "A man who has or pretends to have a blind zeal for those 
 things which discriminate his sect, though he be ever so im- 
 moral, too often finds countenance and credit from them, and 
 though thought a devil by others, passes for a saint with his 
 own party, so that the superstitious lie under temptations to 
 the vicious, and the vicious to act superstitiously. Nay, the 
 way that men are apt to take to pacify God, "is," as Arch- 
 bishop Tillotson observes, " by some external piece of religion. 
 Such as were sacrifices amongst the jews and heathens. The 
 jews pitched upon those which were most pompous and solemn 
 — the richest and the most costly — so that they might but 
 keep their sins, they were well enough content to offer up any- 
 thing else to God. They thought nothing too good for him — 
 provided he would not oblige them to become better." 
 
 " What advantage have not the Popish priests gained by 
 their arts of reconciling the practice of vice with the prospect 
 of heaven." The Jesuits, though the youngest order, yet 
 flourish most, being the most expert in this artifice, as may be 
 
INTRODUCTION. 69 
 
 seen in Mr. "Paschal's Provincial Letters." But all the Popish 
 priests agree in defending their superstition by fire and fagot, 
 while their churches are open sanctuaries for the most flagi- 
 tious — which shows how sensible they are, that superstition 
 and immorality support each other. And, perhaps, it is but 
 reasonable that the places where they learn vile things should 
 protect them when they have committed the vilest. It is by 
 these means that holy Church gets a terrible party who can- 
 not refuse to maim or murder as their spiritual protectors 
 direct; for fear of being delivered up to civil justice, and not 
 only your mean rogues, but even the greatest have been fre- 
 quently screened this way. The supposing indifferent things 
 equally commanded with matters of morality, tends to make 
 men believe they are alike necessary. Nay, the former will, 
 by degrees, get the better with the superstitious, and acquire 
 such a veneration by age, and to make men have a recourse 
 to them upon all occasions, though ever so unseasonable. If 
 people can be so far imposed on as to admit such things into 
 their religion, they will as easily be persuaded to put a greater 
 stress on things though of some use in religion than their 
 nature will bear, to the confounding things of the greatest 
 moment with those of the smallest; and if this is reckoned 
 superstition, much more ought the other to be thought so." 
 
 ''It is to these principles, we owe the most cruel persecu- 
 tions, inquisitions, crusades, and massacres, and that princes 
 have endeavored not only to destroy their subjects, but to 
 disinherit their own issue, and to make room for supposititious 
 children. And it is to this principle, we also owe innumerable 
 tumults, seditions, and rebellions even against the best of 
 princes as well as endless feuds and animosities in private fami- 
 lies, and among the nearest relations. The Jews, as they were 
 the most superstitious, so were they the most cruel, and as 
 the Papists have beyond all other Christians introduced into 
 religion things which are far from contributing to the good of 
 mankind, so they have exercised a matchless cruelty for the 
 
10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 support of them; and, no wonder, since their priests gain by 
 the superstition of the people, and consequently inspire them 
 with a proportionate hatred against all who will not comply 
 with it." So much for the great Dr. Scott's views. 
 
 "Archbishop Tillotson says that "it will be hard to deter- 
 mine how many degrees of innocence and good nature, or of 
 coldness and indifference in religion are necessary to over- 
 balance the fury of the blind zeal, since several zealots had 
 been excellent men, if their religion had not hindered them, if 
 the doctrines and principles of their Church had not spoiled 
 their disposition," Oh, what a solemn satire upon the fashion- 
 able, outward profession of religion I Here we have the reason 
 which the celebrated Chillingworth gives for turning papist: 
 " Because the Protestant cause is now and hath been from the 
 beginning maintained with falsifications and calumnies whereof 
 the prime controversy writers are notoriously and in a high 
 degree guilty" — and upon his return to the Church he says: 
 'Iliacos intra muros peccatur et txtra^ which is in plain English, 
 Priests of all denominations will lie alike. 
 
 If Mr. Locke reasons justly, no mission can be looked on 
 to be divine, that delivers anything derogating from the honor 
 of the one only true and visible God, or inconsistent with 
 natural religion and the rules of morality; because God having 
 discovered to man the unity and majesty of his eternal God- 
 head, and the truths of natural religion and morality by the 
 light of reason, he cannot be supposed to back the contrary by 
 revelation, for that would be to destroy the evidence and use 
 of reason, without which men cannot be able to distinguish 
 divine revelation from diabolical imposture. 
 
 Locke is assuredly right, for whatever is true by reason can 
 never be false by revelation. And if God cannot be deceived 
 himself, or be willing to deceive men, the light he has given 
 to distinguish between religious truth and falsehood cannot, 
 if duly attended to, deceive them in things of so great moment. 
 They who do not allow reason to judge in matters of opinion 
 
INTRODUCTION. Tl 
 
 or speculation are guilty of as great absurdity as the Papists 
 who will not allow the senses to be judges in the case of trans- 
 substantiation — though a matter directly under their cognizance 
 — nay, the absurdity, I think, is greater in the first case, 
 because reason is to judge whether our senses are to be de- 
 ceived. And if no texts ought to be admitted as a proof in 
 a matter contrary to sense, they ought certainly as little to be 
 admitted in any point contrary to reason. In a word, to sup- 
 pose anything in revelation inconsistent with reason, and at the 
 same time pretended to be the will of God, is not only to 
 destroy that proof on which we concluded it to be the will of 
 God — but even the proof of the being of a God — since if our 
 reasoning faculties duly attended to, can deceive us, we cannot 
 be sure of the proof of any one proposition, but everything 
 would be alike uncertain, and we should forever fluctuate in a 
 state of universal scepticism. 
 
 We must suppose that there have been many things intro- 
 duced into the Bible that are not the clear and demonstrative 
 words of God, when Dr. South says that " it is a mysterious 
 and extraordinary book, which perhaps the more it is studied 
 the less it is understood — as generally — finding a man cracked 
 or making himself so." 
 
 Another writer says: "That had not the Mahomedan 
 Divines had the knack of allegorizing nonsense, fools and frantic 
 persons would not have been held in such honor and reverence 
 amongst the Mussulmen, only because their revelations and 
 enthusiasms transported them out of the ordinary temper of 
 humanity." Therefore, upon the whole, I must needs say, 
 happy is the man who is so far at least directed by the law of 
 reason, and the religion of nature, as to suffer no mysteries or 
 unintelligible propositions, no allegories or hyperbolees, no me- 
 taphors, types, parables, or phrases of an uncertain signification 
 to confound his understanding. And certainly the common 
 parent of mankind is too good and gracious to put the happi- 
 ness of all his children on any other doctrines than such as 
 
•72 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 plainly show themselves to be the will of God — even to the 
 ignorant and illiterate, if they have but courage and honesty 
 to make use of their reason — otherwise the scripture would not 
 be plain in all necessary things — even to babes and sucklings. 
 
 The same writer goes on to say that ''it is not enough to 
 be certain that the scripture writers were not imposed upon, 
 but we must be certain they would not, on any occasion what-' 
 ever, impose on others; or in other words, were not men of like 
 passions and infirmities with other mortals. Does not the 
 scripture give very many instances of inspired persons as much 
 governed by their passions as uninspired ? Was not Abraham, 
 though a prophet and so dear to God that he would not destroy 
 a neighboring town without acquainting him with it, guilty of 
 an incestous marriage, his wife being his sister by the father's 
 side ? And did he not betray her chastity to two kings in 
 disowning her to be his wife ? By which conduct he got from 
 one of them, who entertained him well for her sake, men and 
 maid servants, sheep, oxen, asses, and camels; and from the 
 other a thousand pieces of silver, besides sheep, oxen, men and 
 women servants, and immediately after his faith was accounted 
 to him for righteousness. Did he not doubt of God's promise 
 till God spoke to him in a deep sleep ? 
 
 Was not David, though a prophet and a man after God's 
 own heart, guilty of many enormous crimes ? from the time he 
 designed to have murdered all the males in Nabal's family, be- 
 cause he would not pay contributions to him, and those men who, 
 out of debt, discontent and distress joined him, though Nabal, 
 by so doing, might have incurred the fate of those priests from 
 whom David, by several falsehoods, got both shew-bread and 
 Goliah's sword. What could be more treacherous than his in- 
 vading people, that were at least in peace, if not allies of the 
 king of Gath, to whom he fled for safety, and having neither 
 saved man nor woman alive to bring tidings, told his generous 
 protector he had been making an inroad into Judea ? 
 
 In a word, not to mention his treatment of Uriah, and the 
 
INTRODUCTION. t3 
 
 debauching of his wife, which no brave man can think of with- 
 out horror, did he not leave the world in a very unforgiving 
 temper, when the last thing he commanded his son, Solomon, 
 was to put Shemei to death, though he had sworn before the 
 Lord that he would not put him to death, and that he should 
 not die? 
 
 Solomon, though inspired with wisdom from above and had 
 conferences with God himself, yet his passion for women made 
 him guilty of gross idolatry. And not to multiply instances, 
 we find one man of God lying to another in the name of God, 
 purely for the pleasure of making him eat bread and drink 
 water with him. And if we go to the New Testament, it is 
 plain by what our Savior says to those who had prophesied, 
 and cast out devils, and done many wonderful works in his 
 name — "Depart from me, ye that work iniquity" — that neither 
 prophesies nor miracles are absolute securities for men to 
 depend on. Nay, do we not find one of the apostles, though 
 he with the rest had the power of doing miracles even to the 
 raising of the dead, betraying his Master for the paltry sum 
 of thirty pieces of silver, and the other apostles not only fled 
 and deserted him, but the chief of them foreswore him as oft 
 as he was asked about his being one of his followers, and he, 
 as well as Barnabas, w^as afterwards guilty of a mean piece of 
 dissimulation. And Paul and Barnabfs had such a sharp con- 
 tention, though about a very indifferent matter, as to cause a 
 separation. And even St. Paul says, the good I would do, I 
 do not, but the evil which I would not do, that I do, but I see 
 another law in my members warring against the law of my 
 mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is 
 in my members. 
 
 I could give a volume of quotations from Divines, them- 
 selves, all to the one undeniable fact that the human family has 
 been torn asunder and distracted by religion, and that doubts 
 and divisions are daily on the increase, notwithstanding the 
 amount of money and missions employed at home and abroad 
 
Y4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in the cause. And farther, that the name of religion has be- 
 come, if not a reproach, at least of noneffect, for, as we have 
 already quoted from a pious prelate. Dr. Scott, " when we have 
 to do with a man, though he may bear the name of being 
 religious, we are sure to ask whether he is an honest and good 
 man ; but, on the contrary, if he comes with the name of being 
 by nature an honest and good man, we never ask the other 
 question, whether he is religious ?'' No greater reproach could 
 be put upon religion than is daily exhibited by the most ob- 
 Berving men in their doubts of the profession, when it is to 
 be twisted in business transactions, and yet how little do we 
 observe the fact, or philosophically infer from it what is to be 
 the ultimate and melancholy result. These are facts, de- 
 grading facts, that no honest man, in the community will dare 
 deny, and can it then be that religion in itself tends to make 
 men hyppocrites and swindlers or fanatics and cruel persecutors 
 of their brethren ? Or, is it possible that God has given a 
 guide to mislead us, or a law, the violation of which is to be 
 our eternal damnation, and yet that he has withheld from us 
 the capacity to understand it ? As the book now stands, it is 
 not the book of salvation, but the book of damnation ; for, ac- 
 cording to the preachings of the Clergy themselves, in their 
 condemnation of their distracted and warring parties, they send 
 nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand to hell. These 
 glaring and startling facts should be solemnly looked into by 
 every man who feels for his fellow-man, and for the harmony 
 and happiness of society. 
 
 The references given of the human frailties of scriptural 
 writers, and even the Apostles and Disciples themselves, having 
 acted with great ingratitude and faithless duplicity to their 
 Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, should be ample in proof that 
 they were not all the time inspired, and that they were neither 
 impeccable nor infallible, but subject like other men to err, and 
 consequently that he who may deny the fact, sins against sacred 
 truth and against reason and the light of nature. I must here 
 
INTRODUCTION. 75 
 
 introduce another quotation, from Mr. Chandler, one of the 
 great advocates for the Christian religion : He says, "that na- 
 tural religion is the only foundation upon which revelation can 
 be supported, and which must be understood before any man 
 is capable of judging either of the nature or evidence of 
 Christianity ; and I am persuaded," says he, " that it is to the 
 want of a due knowledge of the first principles of all religion, 
 those mistakes about the Christian are owing — that have 
 obscured the simplicity of it, and prejudiced many against 
 entertaining and believing it." If natural religion is not part 
 of the religion of Christ, it is scarce worth while to enquu'e at 
 all what his religion is. If it be, then, the preaching of natural 
 religion is preaching Christ, The religion of Christ must be 
 understood before it can or ought to be believed, and that it 
 must be proven to be a consistent and rational religion before 
 they can be under any obligation to receive it. 
 
 And, indeed, why should not every man insist upon those 
 things ? The only consequence, that I can imagine can flow 
 from it, is not that the cause of Christianity will suffer, which 
 will stand the test of the most impartial enquiry, but that the 
 rigid directors of the faith and consciences of men will loose 
 their authority, and human schemes and creeds that have been 
 set up in the room of Christianity, will fall into the contempt 
 they so justly deserve. It is my hearty prayer to the Father 
 of lights and the God of truth that all human authority in 
 matters of faith may come to a full end, and that every one 
 who hath reason to direct him and a soul to save, may be his 
 own judge in every thing that concerns his eternal welfare, 
 without any prevailing regard to the dictates of fallible men 
 or fear of their peevish and impotent censures. We also give 
 you what the reverend and judicious Mr. Bullock says : " A 
 revelation coming from God, unless it be known to be such, is 
 in effect the same as having none at all. Shall a man embrace 
 the first religion that offers itself to him and without seeking 
 any farther stick close to the principles of his education, if 
 
lf6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 this were safe, then all the contradictory notions that are in 
 the world, would be equally safe and true, and there would be 
 no such thing as a false religion or the spirit of error anywhere. 
 But this will not be admitted. Is truth, then, confined to any 
 certain country or to any particular set of men ? No ; but, if 
 it were, still there would remain this difficulty to be assured to 
 what country or to what sort of men it belonged. If this were 
 all the rule we had to go by, every man, no doubt, would be 
 partial to his own country, and those men he is best acquainted 
 with. And so the principles of education must prevail every- 
 where, instead of true religion. We are well assured that God 
 is the author of our beings and all our faculties, and we cannot 
 but acknowledge that our understanding is the most excellent 
 faculty he has given us. It is in that we excel the beasts 
 that perish, and it was plainly given us with this intent that 
 by a due use and application thereof, we might discern truth 
 from error, that which is just and fit to be done or observed by 
 us from that which is not. Should we, therefore, admit any- 
 thing as a revelation coming from him which contradicts the 
 evident dictates of our reason, we sacrifice one revelation, that 
 which God gave us with our very beings to make way for 
 another, which is inconsistent with it. It is in effect admitting 
 that the judgment of our own minds is in no case to be de- 
 pended upon ; that the faculties, thereof, the very best gift 
 which God has given us, are of no use or service to us ; no, 
 not even in discerning which doctrines come from God and 
 which do not." 
 
 Let us hear what another able writer says in regard to the 
 fallibility of the Bible writers : "There are innumerable texts 
 which in the plainest manner words can express, impute human 
 parts, human infirmities and human passions, even of the worst 
 kind, to God. Does not this suppose'that even all have a right 
 to examine, and consequently sufficient understanding to judge 
 when texts taken in their plain, obvious meaning are, or are 
 not consistent with what the light of nature teaches them the 
 
INTRODUCTION. *l*l 
 
 character of the supreme being. What notions must the vulgar 
 have of God, if the hght of nature cannot direct them right, 
 when they find he is said to be jealous and furious. And God 
 himself says : " My fury shall come up in my face, for, in my 
 jealousy, and in the fire of my wrath, have I spoken," with a 
 number of other expressions of a like nature. Nay, does not 
 the scripture, if taken literally, suppose that God does things 
 of the greatest moment in anger and fury? Was it not 
 thus he gave his favored people statutes which were not good 
 and judgments by which they could not live ? And does not 
 St. Peter, (to mention no other Apostle) though a Jew, call 
 the Jewish law given by God, " a yoke that neither we nor our 
 forefathers could bear ?" In what a number of places is God 
 said to do things to try people, and yet, notwithstanding this 
 caution, how often is he said to repent ? Does he not even 
 repent of the first action he did in relation to man ? He 
 repented that he made man, and it grieved him at his 
 heart!" Nay, does not the Scripture suppose he has so often 
 repented that he is weary of repenting? What strange notions 
 must the bulk of mankind, could not their reason dh'ect them 
 right, have of the Supreme Being, when he is said to have 
 rested and to be refreshed. And that "wine cheereth both 
 God and man." And wbat is yet stranger, such actions are 
 attributed to him as can only belong to the lowest rank of 
 creatures, such as hissing. God being in three places of the 
 prophets said to hiss, and in one place to " hiss for a fly, that 
 is in the uttermost parts of the river of Egypt, and for a bee 
 that is in the land of Assyria." 
 
 These quotations may seem wearisome to the reader, but I 
 have introduced them to show the necessity of a discriminating 
 judgment in things involving our duty to God, and that ap- 
 pertain to our own salvation. Reason is an unquestionable 
 revelation of God to man, and with it he has a standing 
 miracle in his own constitution and marvellous connection of 
 mind and body over which God has placed reason, his best 
 
T8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 gift, as its only guide and protector, and we assuredly sin 
 against both God and reason, when we suffer God's unraistaken 
 revelation to be brought into captivity by mysticisms and mum- 
 meries or any system of belief, that does not bear equal proof 
 of its being also of God. 
 
 Here are things, reader, that are neither reasonable nor 
 can be by the authority of God : "I saw," says the prophet, 
 Michaiah, " the Lord sitting upon his throne and all the host 
 of heaven, standing on his right hand and on his left. And 
 the Lord said : " Who shall entice Ahah, King of Israel, that 
 he may go up and fall at Ramoth Gilead ?" " And one spake, 
 saying after this manner, and another spake saying after that 
 manner." Then there came out a spirit and stood before the 
 Lord and said, I will entice him. And the Lord said unto him, 
 wherewith ? And he said, I will go out and be a lying spirit in 
 the mouth of all his prophets. And the Lord said, thou shalt 
 entice him and thou also shalt prevail. Go out and do even so." 
 
 Are there not examples in Scripture which, when taken in 
 their literal sense, seem to make God break in upon the com- 
 mon course of nature and the ordinary rules of his providence, 
 to punish men for crimes they are not guilty of? as God's 
 cauvsing in the latter end. of David's reign, a famine for three 
 years, together for the crime of Saul and his bloody house in 
 slaying the Gibeanites, and that God smote Israel and de- 
 stroyed seventy thousand of them for David's fault, in causing 
 the innocent sheep as he justly calls them, to be numbered." 
 But again : " Can God change his mind, and suddenly, too !" 
 Yet it is said, " God sent an angel to destroy Jerusalem, 
 meanwhile the Lord beheld and repented him of the evd." 
 
 Again, as Grotius says, " That as Curtius observed of 
 old, the multitude, ensnared by superstition, are more apt to 
 be governed by their priests than princes, and that the kings 
 and emperors have learned this at their cost, insomuch that 
 to produce examples of this kind, would in a manner, be to 
 transcribe the history of all nations." And farther, as St. 
 
INTRODUCTION-. T9 
 
 Jerome, a great luminary of the Catholic Chm'ch, says : " A 
 false interpretation of the Gospel of Christ may make it become 
 the Gospel of men. Nay, which is worse, of devils ; how can 
 they, who, not understanding the original, must trust to the in- 
 terpretation of others, be certain, had they not a sufficient in- 
 ward light to direct them, what doctrines are from God, what 
 from men, and what from devils." 
 
 Bishop Taylor quotes Osiander for saying, " There are 
 twenty several opinions concerning justification, all drawn 
 from the Scriptures by the men only of the Augustine Con- 
 fession, and there are sixteen severalopinions concerning 
 original sin, and as many distinctions of the sacraments as there 
 are sects of men that disagree about them." Though there are 
 so many various readings, yet does not that great critic. Dr. 
 Bentley, in his proposal for printing by subscription a new 
 edition of the New Testament, assure the world " That out of a 
 labyrinth of thirty thousand various readings, which crowd the 
 pages of our present best editions, all put upon an equal credit, 
 to the offense of many good persons, that his clue, as he calls 
 it, so leads and extricates us that there will be scarce two hun- 
 dred out of so many thousands that can deserve the least consi- 
 deration." Again, Mr. Whiston, in speaking of restoriLg the 
 text of the Old Testament, says, ,'that it has been greatly cor- 
 rupted, both in the Hebrew and Septuagent by the Jews to 
 make the reasonings of the Apostles from the Old Testament 
 inconclusive and ridiculous." Listen farther to the case of 
 Abimelech, who, upon both Abraham and Sarah's lying to him, 
 took Sarah, as the- Lord himself owns, in the integrity of his 
 heart, and though he sent her back untouched, and gave consi- 
 derable presents to both wife and husband, yet neither he nor 
 his were to be pardoned, till Abraham, the offending person, 
 being a prophet, was to pray for him. So Abraham prayed 
 unto God, and God healed Abimelech and his wife, and maid- 
 servants, and they bare children. And yet this holy pro- 
 phet was soon after guilty of a very barbarous action in send- 
 
80 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ing out Hagar, whom Sarah had given him to wife and his own 
 son, Ishmael, to perish in the wilderness." In closing mj refer- 
 ences to authorities, I give that of Mr. Gregory, of Oxford, 
 who says in his preface to some critical notes on the Scriptures, 
 that he published, " There is no author, whatsoever, that has 
 suffered so much from the hand of time as the Bible has." 
 
 No advantage can ever be taken of the plain and simple 
 word of God, to bring men into a slavish obedience to the 
 craft and cunning of the priesthood, and this is the reason that 
 the Clergy have so pertinaciously held to the allegorical and 
 enigmatical mysticisms of the Bible, by which they gain so much 
 pelf and power from deep and mystic learning. And hence the 
 mystic rites and homs-jpocus tricks that have robbed the cre- 
 dulous and gaping masses of their hard earnings. It is against 
 such venal craft and debasing practices in the Church of God 
 that I have entered the sacred arena against these hydra-headed 
 monsters, but such is the incorrigible and deplorable credulity 
 of man, that I have but little hope of success. Of this, how, 
 ever, I am well assured, that the substantial and intrinsic worth 
 of the Bible, must soon be rid of its grievous and disgraceful 
 incumbrances, and the people of their ecclesiastical tyranny and 
 taxation, or the Christian world is doomed to undergo a speedy 
 revolution and the Mormon movement may now prove the en- 
 tering wedge. Since the great heresy of Luther, (so called^ 
 there have been ten thousand dissentions and heresies, till the 
 Christian Church is in a perfect state of anarchy, which must, 
 (judging from the past history of man,) bring it under the do- 
 minion of some new imposter or great leader, as it did in past 
 ages under the Pope of Home. Those who can observe, have 
 often observed what countenance it will give to an unworthy 
 man to be introduced in company with a great and good man, 
 and we even entertain the lowest of wretches rather than offend 
 a friend with whom they may be connected, and by the aid of 
 this trait in the character of man do thousands desecrate the 
 pulpit and the sacred name of religion, yes, and even invade 
 
INTRODUCTION. 81 
 
 the chastity of their otherwise virtuous and spotless sisters. 
 The blackest crimes that ever disgraced God's earth have been 
 committed under the cloak of religion and in his holy name. 
 The same powerful association in the mind of man, has given 
 tolerance to the many intolerable and incredible things of the 
 Bible, because grafted upon those known to be inherently holy. 
 For instance, it would not be possible for a moral and decent 
 community to beUeve that a virtuous woman could sell her 
 <3hastity for money, or that an honorable husband w^ould bring 
 it about by the most debasing falsehoods, were not such acts 
 associated with sacred things. 
 
 And again, is it the lofty language of the God of heaven, 
 or the lowest obscenity of man, to say, when quarrelmg with a 
 woman, that he will hoist her coats, and expose her secrets, or 
 that he will exhibit his back-side instead of his face ? The 
 man who will say this is the language and conduct of the great 
 God of the Universe, is a slanderer, and must forfeit all claim 
 to the mercy which he may ask of the offended Deity. These 
 are little mistakes, it is true, and have nothing to do with the 
 substantial merits of the Bible, yet they are mistakes, and mis- 
 takes that create doubts and disrespect for the entire book, and 
 consequently should be omitted as of no practical utility, what- 
 ever, either in the faith, or in the practice of its holy precepts. 
 Can it be that God directed the Jews to steal or borrow with- 
 out the intention to return, and instructed them to falsify as to 
 the object of their journey, or is it a mistake ? Moreover, to 
 take up a notorious harlot as Rahab, and entice her to lie and 
 betray her country into the hands of its most cruel enemies, 
 and after these acts of immorality and base perfidy that shocks 
 all civilized nations, to make her a favorite and bless her, is a 
 bad example to society, and appears to me more hke a work 
 of the devil than that of a just and holy God. But, not to 
 dwell longer, what has religion to do with onanism, the drun- 
 kenness and incest of Noah — of Judah's incest or the Lord's 
 
 entering a petty battle with the strife of men, and ^'throwing 
 
 4* 
 
82 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 down great stones from heaven^^ upon the poor Ammonites — of 
 Jacob's cheating his brother Esau, and the many, many other 
 mistakes that should not be found in a book which is to claim 
 our confidence and respect, and that is to be an example of 
 moral perfection and godly piety. 
 
 All who have any regard for the character of the heavenly 
 benefactor, or hope for their own salvation, must grant his un- 
 deviating and eternal purpose of kindness, honor, and justice, 
 and consequently that he cannot be the author of anything in- 
 consistent with these immutable attributes. We are puzzled 
 then to know w^hat God, that is who butchers innocent and un- 
 offending women and suckling babes — who hardens the hearts 
 of men — then winks at their wickedness — and, after all, boldly, 
 in defiance of justice, love and mercy, declares himself to be a 
 partial, jealous, arbitrary, and unjust God, who, having the 
 power over man that the potter has over his clay, will shape 
 him in his merciless wrath, regardless of the meritorious and 
 sacred rights of his oum children. It is a marvellously strange 
 notion that our numberless little Divines entertain in regard to 
 the claims of God and his right to enforce them. 
 
 God did not create himself, as, to do so, would be to act 
 when he was not and where he was not, and to bring himself 
 into existence before he had an existence. He consequently is 
 held to be self-existent from all eternity, and that his attributes 
 inhere in him as an inseparable and component part of his 
 nature. He, therefore, is under the necessity (as say Chalmers, 
 Clark, Edwards, Dick, and other able Divines) of acting in 
 accordance with these attributes, or, in other words, his nature, 
 and that he has no power to act otherwise. This fact requires 
 no authority, but reason to make it clear to the mind of every 
 man who will exercise his own attributes that God has given 
 him to know himself, and the relation he bears to his Creator. 
 These divine attributes of God are wisdom, power, mercy, and 
 goodness. If God, therefore, could make himself impotent or 
 powerless, he would not be the mighty God. Were he to act 
 
INTRODUCTION. 83 
 
 foolishly, he could not be a wise God, and in like manner, were 
 he to act arbitrarily or unjustly, he could not be an impartial 
 and just God. These facts, as little as they are considered and 
 understood, are axiomatic and essential to a clear knowledge 
 of God and of the dispensations of Providence. A wise and 
 just God has no more power to act foolishly and unjustly than 
 a man has to be a wise and honest man, and a fool and a 
 rogue at the same time. It will at once be seen, then, that 
 those foolish and unjust acts attributed to God in the Bible, 
 simply because of his power, are wholly incompatible with the 
 constitution and nature of things, and as impossible as to be 
 and not to be at the same time. For though his attribute of 
 power is supreme, yet he has the attributes of mercy and 
 justice, which would be neutralized by the exercise of that 
 power, and consequently leave him without the attributes 
 necessary for a God. God, being immutable and always the 
 same, cannot, like man, vascillate, so that throughout all time 
 and in every act he is equally powerful, just and good. How 
 is it possible, then, that any man who believes in the great God 
 of the Universe, can think that he would, even had he power 
 to lay aside his nature, condescend to embroil himself in the 
 little petty passions and strifes of men, who are at best but 
 vain bubbles on the stream of time, that rise and sink, and are 
 gone for ever? 
 
 If man were actuated by wisdom and virtue, we should have 
 no such dirty records of God, nor would governments be over- 
 thrown, and the human family torn to pieces by feuds and 
 fiendish strifes. To have those impartial, exalted, and just 
 views of God which I aim to teach, we cannot get them from 
 the distracted and contradictory doctrines of men, but we must 
 look to the light of nature and the mighty works he has spread 
 around us. Our own systems are living, walking, and thinking 
 miracles of his marvellous wisdom, and continual goodness, not 
 to look into the starry heavens, where countless worlds revolve 
 in trackless and interminable space through endless time. The 
 
84 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 little, petty, local, and meddling Gods of the Jews, as by error 
 recorded, were like the debauched, debased, and faithless 
 deities of Greece and Rome, against whom the divine Socrates 
 rebelled, and for which he was put to death — my fate for the 
 same abhorrence of foul slander against the great God of 
 heaven, I hope, may not be the same. 
 
 Everything has its nature that makes it what it is, and to 
 alter or take any portion from it, leaves it not the same — for 
 as the whole is greater than its parts, and is made what it is 
 by its parts or qualities, any portion or property taken from 
 that whole, leaves it not what it was. This is a universal 
 principle running throughout all creation, both in the animate 
 and the inanimate kingdoms, and in the moral and physical 
 dependencies of God's inviolate purpose. Gold, for instance, 
 is what it is by its inherent or component parts, as solidity, 
 weight, and color — and to take from it any one of those quali- 
 ties, it is no longer gold, and, in like manner, every tree of the 
 forest has its specific properties which make it what it is, and 
 distinguish it from all others. God, then, being what he is, 
 from all eternity and through all eternity in power and pur- 
 pose, he cannot rob himself of his own holy attributes and 
 inherent nature, nor has he the power to remain this identical 
 God and yet rob man of his inherent, immutable, and eternal 
 rights. 
 
 Truth, honor and justice are universal principles paramount 
 to even power itself, and as undying and unalterable as God 
 himself, and belong to just men in common with God, and 
 therefore it is, that God is under the necessity of recognizing 
 and holding inviolate this inherent and holy gift of heaven to 
 man. Destroy truth, honor, and justice, and God himself, with 
 the universe of morals, mind and matter, would sink into one 
 undistinguishable vortex of ruin and desolation. But as these 
 principles will be philosophically discussed elsewhere, I will go 
 on with the outlines of my book, to wit : " The nature and 
 government of man from his cradle to his grave." 
 
 / 
 
INTRODUCTION, 85 
 
 It is from the angry and disgraceful quibblings upon those 
 unimportant points and mistakes of the Bible, to the utter 
 neglect of practical piety that many have doubted the truth of 
 religion, and others, whether if true, it can be of any value to 
 society. Theological enigmas and cold formulae involving 
 creeds, cannons, with irreverent and arrogant dogmatisms have 
 become the order of the day to the utter neglect of meekness, 
 humility, brotherly love and forgiveness. The repenting in 
 sack-cloth and ashes and the simple and unpretending piety of the 
 early Christians is not to be found. These things with the pre- 
 tended uispirational and canonical infallibility of every word in 
 the Bible, has been the bane of religion. That the Bible is an 
 inspired book, is not doubted, but that every expression therein 
 with its multiferious figures, emblems, symboles, hyperboles, 
 mistranslations and interpolations by uninspired men are to be 
 taken as any portion of our faith, is extreme folly. Again, the 
 haughty and assuming bigotry of Christian arbiters who profess 
 to have monopolzed religion by the partial choice and open 
 declaration of Almighty God, who, we had hoped, was our 
 common Father, and would treat us all with an impartial love 
 according to our respective merits, has horrified and discouraged 
 many simple-hearted and honest people. Of all the delusions 
 we think this the most arbitrary, unrighteous and degrading. 
 It is an impious and awful libellous personality against the 
 great Jehovah, who has so often declared that he is no 
 respecter of persons, and that he gave his only begotten son to 
 die for the redemption and salvation of the whole world, leaving 
 but one possible question for decision, whether the Christian's 
 God is one who falsifies and trifles with his children, or whether 
 he is a God of truth and justice. 
 
 We will here give a creed from the unraistaken word ol 
 God, which, if adapted generally, will bring about a perfect 
 brotherhood on earth. It requires no dead languages, no tech- 
 nical formulae or metaphysical abstractions to be understood, 
 and has but one objection, that of robbing the Clergy of their 
 
86 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 mystic learning and party distinctions and of their pastoral 
 salaries. Here it is, short and simple, unimprovable, unsur- 
 passable and fitted to the language, capacity and condition of 
 all men throughout the world : 
 
 " Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou 
 shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy 
 neighbor. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Thou 
 shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain. Not 
 every one that saith unto me, ' Lord, Lord,^ but he that doth 
 the will of my Father which is in heaven. By their perils ye 
 shall know them. I will have mercy, and not sacrifice. Be 
 not a slothful hearer only, but a doer of the word. Woe 
 unto you, ye Scribes and Pharisees, for ye pay tithes, mint 
 and anise cummin, and neglect the weightier matters of the 
 law : justice, mercy and temperance. Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself. Whatsoever ye would that men should 
 do unto you, that do ye also unto them, for this is the Law 
 and the Prophets. Love your enemies. Do good to them 
 that hate you. Pray for them which despitefully use you and 
 persecute you. Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those that 
 tresspass against us. I say not unto thee till seven times, but 
 until seventy times seven. If ye love them only that love you. 
 what reward have ye ? Do not even Publicans do the same ? 
 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake. 
 If any man will be my disciple, let him deny himself and take 
 up his cross and follow me. If thy right hand offend thee, cut 
 it off and cast it from thee. No man having put his hand to 
 the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. 
 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. He 
 that humbleth himself shall be exalted. He that is greatest 
 amongst you, let him be your servant. Take heed that you 
 do not your alms before men, to be seen of them. When thou 
 prayest, enter into thy closet and shut the door — watch and 
 pray. Yerily, verily, I say unto you: Whatsoever ye shall 
 ask of the Father in my name, he will give it you ; ask and it 
 
INTRODUCTION. 8l 
 
 shall be given you. Pure religion and undefiled before God and 
 the Father is this : To visit the fatherless and the widows in 
 their affliction, and keep yourself unspatted from the world. If 
 ye love not your brother whom you have seen, how can you love 
 God whom you have not seen. Piety without charity is nothing." 
 Here are a few simple and sublime precepts ample for the 
 salvation of the world, and which admit of no angry disputa- 
 tions or uncharitable revilings amongst the followers of Christ. 
 They explain themselves without the aid of clergy or creed- 
 makers, and recommend themselves by their own intrinsic 
 worth — yes — their own inherent divinity. They are the words 
 and commands of God himself, and cannot be tampered with 
 by the mystic mummeries of designing men. We here ask the 
 reader, whether he has ever seriously meditated upon the fact 
 that there is no practical difference between a sovereign law- 
 giver, and a sovereign interpreter and prescriber of that law ? 
 The interpretation of the law gives to man more control over 
 the eternal destiny of his fellow-man, than God himself can 
 exercise by that little of his law which may remain untampered 
 with. In the above creed, which I have offered, is the pure 
 undefiled Gospel according to God, and were there no other 
 creed in Christendom, we should all be the spotless and loving 
 children of God. But to the disgrace of humanity and the 
 perdition of souls, we have the Gospel according to the Pope 
 —the Gospel according to Calvin — the Gospel according to 
 "Wesley — the Gospel according to the world-destroyer and 
 fool-maker Miller — the Gospel according to Campbell — the 
 Gospel according to mother Ann Lee, and the Gospel ac- 
 cording to Joe Smith. These, with a thousand more petty 
 gospels or creeds have distracted and demoralized the world, 
 and raised up in the name of religion fiery fiends and demons of 
 destruction, to whose foaming fury and blighting breath were, 
 under the Inquisition, as fearful as the blue flames that are 
 breathed from the black jaws of perdition. These gospels 
 according to man have been the giant Upas of earth. 
 
88 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 We know that arrogant and assuming bigots whose cold 
 and hollow hearts are cased in iron, and cannot feel for 
 * other's woes/ are intolerant to free grace, and are jealous of 
 every sentiment that will free the soul from inquisitorial or 
 clerical dominion; and well may those forced Christians whose 
 hearts are hard, but whose election is sure for heaven, look 
 down with scowling contempt upon the poor benighted children 
 of God, whose pious struggles and humble faith are vainly 
 founded in the hope of heaven's eternal justice. Language 
 cannot be too strong against this most rebellious, irreverent, 
 and fearful misrule against the will of God and the freedom 
 of man. Such professors may well agree with the " Calvinist 
 peasant" in Bulwer's Eugene Aram, who considered "that 
 the choicest bliss of heaven would be to look down into that 
 other place, and see the folks grill." Tertullian, Gibbon, and 
 Baxter's " Saint's Rest" relate similar cases of a fiendish feeling 
 of the hearts of our fellow-creatures. We but ask of the honest 
 professor to look around him and see whether ninety-nine in 
 every hundred of church-members are not governed in their 
 faith by the articles originally drawn up by man, whose for- 
 mulae are prescribed by the pastor of their church ? 
 
 The reason why I have dwelt more largely upon the abuses 
 of church than of state, is that we are by nature religious 
 creatures, and that our lives for good and for evil are 
 governed by this main-spring of human action. The clergy 
 who profess to be the representatives of God and the guar- 
 dians of religion, hold firm grasp upon this secret spring or 
 chord of the heart, and wield it to their own views, and hence 
 it is through their teachings and the influence of the church, 
 that the moral, political, and social frame of society is formed. 
 We hold that the standard of morality, of religion, and of 
 social happiness in a community will depend upon the correct- 
 ness of knowledge which the leaders of that community may 
 have of God and his attributes, and of man and his constitu- 
 tion of mind and body, and of the relation which man sustains 
 
INTROnUCTION. 89 
 
 to his God and to his fellow-man. If we worship an exalted 
 God of honor, love, truth, and justice, a like tone of feeling 
 will possess the soul. But if, on the contrary, we aim to fol- 
 low the example of a grovelling, jealous, malicious, vindictive, 
 and partial God, the standard of truth, honor, and justice 
 will be low, indeed I So that it will be seen that the harmony 
 and happiness of man will depend upon the views which he 
 may have of a ruling God and of the dispensations of Provi- 
 dence. All, then, who acknowledge God, must agree that 
 the only rational means of harmonizing in the worship of that 
 God will be to make ourselves as clearly as possible acquainted 
 with his fixed, immutable, and eternal laws, in which there 
 can be no dispute from the misconstruction of language, that 
 leads to hard thoughts and unhallowed bickerings in the 
 church of God. 
 
 And from this granted category, all will farther agree that 
 the most of our lives are spent in the study of dead languages 
 and mystic dogmatisms that will never bring us to harmonize 
 as a family, but leave us to grovel as heretofore in our blind 
 and bloody struggles. In proof of this, notwithstanding the 
 millions of money that have been spent, and the many minds 
 that have been exhausted in the cause of religion for eighteen- 
 hundred and fifty-nine years, man has been left in doubt and 
 distraction, and the divisions of the church made wider and 
 wilder. It is well known that the Greeks and Romans wor- 
 shipped at the shrine of the most corrupt and degrading deities 
 that have ever disgraced our earth — full of intrigues, open 
 deba'ucheries, and bullying broils, and yet we have to spend 
 the better portion of our lives in the study of their languages, 
 for which we have no more use than we have ^r their religioa. 
 Every youth, in order to obtain his honors at College, is com- 
 pelled to study these languages together with the smattering 
 of a few other sluggish and jumbled studies that are doggedly 
 drilled into his head as into the learned pig. And, thus, with 
 the wings of his intellect clipped, does he go into a theological 
 
90 INTRODUCTION". 
 
 department again to go through a mechanical course of pre- 
 scribed isms and dogmatisms, to fit him for the church of which 
 he is to become a pastor. And, thus, he comes out with a 
 heart case-hardened to all other creeds, and a mind revolving 
 in a nutshell which better fits him for the intolerant bigotry 
 of an inquisition than for the ruler of an enlightened com- 
 munity. We say, a heart case-hardened, but surely not from 
 crime committed, or evil intended, nor is he to be blamed, but 
 pitied ; for he, like the galley-slave, performs his prescribed 
 duties, and, like a rail-road car, tracks closely after his leader, 
 and deserves equal credit for his dutiful performance. His is 
 an education of words, and not of principles and things — he 
 has pedantry, but not learning — he has words without mean- 
 ing, and distinctions without difference, and here, perfectly to 
 the point, we make an extract from one of the most distin- 
 guished Protestant Divines of America, Dr. Parker : "Look 
 at the Catholics of the United States in comparison with the 
 Protestants. In the whole of America, there is not a single 
 man born and b'ed a Catholic, distinguished for any thing, 
 but his devotion to the Catholic church. I mean to say, there 
 is not a man in America, born and bred a Catholic who has 
 any distinction in litei'ature, science, politics, benevolence, or 
 philanthropy. I do not know one. I never heard of a great 
 philosopher, naturalist, historian, orator, or poet among them ; 
 the Jesuits have been in existence three hundred years : they 
 have had their pick of the choicest intellect of all Europe — 
 they never take a common man wh n they know it, they sub- 
 ject every pupil to a severe ordeal, intellectual and physical, 
 as well as moral, in order to ascertain whether he has the 
 requisite stuff in him to make a strong Jesuit out of. They 
 have a scheme of education masterly in its way. But there 
 has not been a single great man produced in the company of 
 the Jesuits from 1845 to 1854. They absorb talent enough, 
 but they strangle it. Clipped oaks never grow large. Prune 
 the roots of a tree with a spade, prune the branches close to 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 91 
 
 the bole, what becomes of the tree ? The bole itself remains 
 thin, and scant, and slender. Can a man be a conventional 
 dwarf, and a giant at the same time ? Case your little boys' 
 limbs in metal, would they grow? Plant a chestnut in a tea- 
 cup, do you get a tree ? Not a shrub, even. Put a priest, 
 or a priest's creed, as the only soil for a man to grow in, he 
 grows not. The great God provided the natural mode of 
 operation — do you suppose he will turn aside and mend or 
 mar the universe at your or my request ? I think, God will 
 do no such thing." 
 
 This learned critic might have said the same, not of himself, 
 butj of all others blinded by a one-idea and one-sided prejudice 
 in religion ; nor can the comparison be withheld from the entire 
 system of education now in use throughout the world. The 
 physician is no better off, for though he obtains a pittance 
 more of science before he takes his license to butcher for him- 
 self, his soul has not been sufiBciently elevated, and his mind 
 enlisted in the sublime works of God to pursue it with that 
 ardor and energy that would make him a man of science and 
 a safe physician. His sheep-skin gives him but little more 
 knowledge than the undressed hide did its original owner. 
 He comes out most pedantically, however, filled with dead 
 languages, and confounding technicalities which, though they 
 will not heal, cover his ignorance and give great consolation 
 to his credulous and dying patients, when told they are pass- 
 ing off under abnormal influences. He, though in reality, but 
 a novice in science, is satisfied with the honors of his college, 
 and falling into the luxurious and reckless habits of the age, 
 sinks to indolence and insignificance. The lawyer, issuing from 
 the same institutions with less science, but mere sordid syco- 
 phancy, becomes the whole-hog demagogue and ruler of the 
 people; and thus must society suffer as long as the human 
 mind is manacled and incarcerated by an arbitrary and tyran- 
 nical rule of conventionality entailed upon us from the dark 
 
92 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 We have long been of the opinion that if the dead languages 
 and others of the dull routine of studies that now absorb the 
 better part of our early life and stamp our future character, 
 were cast off and science instituted in their place, that the 
 prosperity and happiness of our race would be greatly en- 
 hanced. It will require but little reflexion to convince every 
 man that dead languages never have, and in the nature of 
 things, never can give us a single idea of science, of principle 
 or of anything practical in life. There has not been a dis- 
 covery in science or improvement in art with which Latin and 
 Greek had anything to do ; our own living languages being 
 more than ample to make known every thought that may arise 
 in the mind. And magnetism, gravitation, geology, astronomy, 
 botany, and the thousand branches of science have as little to 
 do with such dumb and senseless things. The steamboat, rail- 
 car and other mighty improvements are not pillowed upon 
 dead languages. They are from the minds of men of thought, 
 and not of words. They are founded in the language and law 
 of God, not to be found in any other language, and not to be 
 governed by any arbitrary rule. These laws are immutable 
 and eternal, and not to be tortured and tampered with as has 
 been his paper book by lingual upstarts. The language in his 
 book of nature is suited to all ages and nations, and shining 
 so in the light of heaven, that " he who runs may read." God 
 has so constituted the human mind, that it form its earliest 
 perceptions, seeks him through his works ; and if not stultified 
 and dwarfed by scholastic foruuilae, would soar high into his 
 celestial spheres with wonder and delight, scanning with the 
 eye of science those potent agencies that operate from day to 
 day upon our sensitive being for woe or for weal, and of 
 which the grovelling linguist would remain forever ignorant. 
 
 The child from its earliest lispings will ask who made the 
 trees, the flowers, the streams, and pleasing objects spread 
 around them, and would, if early placed in a school of science, 
 under teachers of elevated and human minds, soon acquire 
 
INTRODUCTION. 93 
 
 more knowledge of the phenomena of nature than is obtained 
 by the present graduates of universities. It has been objected 
 that we can store up in our little craniums those useless lan- 
 guages, and much more rubbish, and yet have room for all 
 that can be known. Poor dunces ! how little do they know 
 of God and his wonderous works ! A few brief hours are our 
 allotted existence, and oh, how little, little, little are our vain 
 minds, while endless space and ceaseless time are but the 
 measure of God Almighty's works ! Startling, yes, startling, 
 strange is it to our reflections that the world should still be 
 floundering in mud and mire, while the pure fountains are 
 gushing from their source in nature, and the stars are smiling 
 down upon us and inviting our attention upwards. It must 
 be that we have not yet extricated ourselves from the mists 
 and mould of the dark ages that have been hallowed by time, 
 and stereotyped upon the minds of dullards as the ultimatum 
 of human investigation. Dead languages being best suited to 
 dry, horse minds, and such minds constituting what are called 
 learned men, and they have an interest in sustaining the 
 sovereignty of such trifles, it is not surprising that they should 
 have been selected as teachers in our institutions and the 
 trainers of youthful mind through successive ages. 
 
 This subject is beginning to be noticed by the best writers of 
 the age, amongst whom is Sir William Hamilton, professor of 
 metaphysical philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, and 
 who has been styled by the literati of Europe, "the walking 
 Encyclopedia." In his total and decided condemnation of 
 mathematics, particularly, as not only worthless, but injurious 
 to the mind," quotes the authority of the greatest men of any 
 age, and particularly the heads of the universities of Germany 
 and Prussia, who are professors of these very branches. The 
 language used in the exclusion of these studies by the various 
 writers, is that ''they cramp our intellectual life ;" they freze 
 the soul" — " the powers of thought are tied down to formal 
 and dull precision and the detail of facts ; they are one-sided 
 
94 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 and contracted ; they only dry up and chill the mind and are 
 worse than useless ; they give no exercise to the higher 
 powers ; they stupify the mind and check the flight of genius." 
 Many such expressions are used upon this subject. See Sir 
 William Hamilton upon " University Reform." We will 
 quote but a single passage from Sir William's long and able 
 argument against the study of mathematics : " From this 
 general contrast, it will easily be seen how in an excessive 
 study of mathematical sciences, not only does it not prepare, 
 but absolutely incapacitates the mind for those intellectual 
 energies which philosophy and life require. We are thus dis- 
 qualified for observation, either internally or externally, for 
 abstraction and generalization, and for common reasoning — 
 nay, disposed to the alternative of blind credulity or irrational 
 scepticism. 
 
 Mathematics afford us no assistance, either in conquering 
 the difficulties or in avoiding the dangers which we encounter 
 in the great field of probabilities, wherein we live and move. 
 We will here introduce what the miracle of universal genius 
 says — Paschal : *' There is," says he, " a great difference be- 
 tween the spirit of mathematics and the spirit of observation." 
 And again: "It is rare that mathematicians are observant, 
 or that observant men are mathematicians." 
 
 The efforts of these great men for reform in the universities 
 of Europe have mostly been to throw off the mathematical 
 branches as not only useless, but injurious in the development 
 of mind. It may, in our opinion, be said with equal propriety 
 that dead languages, logic and rhetoric may all be thrown 
 out from the high and intellectual schools that we propose, as 
 tyrannical and degenerating to the natural excellence Ind 
 aspiring powers of the soul. They allow of no exercise of 
 thought, nor expansion of mind. They are so because they 
 are so, staid and stale localities admitting of no alteration, 
 no enlargement, flat truisms, low and selfish, ofl*ering us no 
 aid iu the exigencies of life and the ills to which we are ex- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 95 
 
 posed, are neither moral nor social, nor do they give ns any 
 idea of a God or of man and his own constitution. They do 
 not exercise our high and rational powers, nor can they lead 
 the soul beyond the pale of their own servile and arbitrary 
 notions. They teach us nothing of religion or the laws of 
 God and the rights of man. To science they are blind, nor 
 have they an idea of a single phenomenon of the vast universe. 
 They, like the dead languages, cannot invent, till the soil, heal 
 a wound or provide for a single want of life. God has made the 
 eye perfect and it needs no Latin, logic or rhetoric to adapt it 
 to the light, nor does the native tongue require their aid. All 
 our ideas come through our senses, and there is no man but 
 that can make known to his fellows every valuable and practical 
 thought which he may have. To tell a man in English that 
 he has seen an animal with two legs, he will understand it just 
 as well as to say in Latin, that be has seen a biped, and so 
 with all other things. Thus, can we plainly and intelligibly 
 speak without the rules of either Latin or rhetoric, and in 
 regard to logic, it claims to originate nothing, but to shape 
 things to fashion and to enable a speaker to confuse and con- 
 found his adversary, but not to convince him. Of such artistic 
 quibble and sophistry, we already have too much in the world, 
 and as truth, the great attribute of God, condemns all alliance 
 with such trickery and delusion, it certainly has no claim to 
 the better portion of our lives. In short, these musty conven- 
 tionalities have long been a grievous incubus upon the aspiring 
 soul. They are parasitical and weighty excrescenses, which 
 should be pruned. They are a nuisance and they should be 
 abated. The unthinking reader may naturally ask why it is if 
 these studies be as worthless as here reported, that they should 
 have been so long retained? Our answer is : It is in the 
 apathy and delusion of millions of our fellow-men, as in 
 China and the Indies, where their fixed formulae have not been 
 changed through the long lapse of ages they have claimed on earth. 
 The mass of mankind are indolent and not disposed to think 
 
96 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 for themselves, and consequently yield to the opinions and teach- 
 ings of others. Besides, men whose minds are naturally dull 
 and mechanical and tied down by education, will, through self- 
 interest and often from honest conviction, enjoin the same upon 
 others, and thus have those stupid and worthless things been 
 entailed upon us and become hallowed by the lapse of time. 
 
 We will here bring to view the vast field for observation 
 that lies open before us and ojffer it as a substitute for those 
 excluded branches of academic studies. The illustrated book 
 of nature speaking in the unmistaken language of God, is ever 
 open before us, and the interminable chain that binds the phy- 
 sical intellectual, and moral world is to be examined link by 
 link, while but few rounds of the ladder of truth that reaches 
 from earth to heaven, have as yet been ascended. The whole 
 phenomena of nature are presented to our view and her classifi- 
 cation is simple, her nomenclature perfect. As the light of 
 heaven is adapted with kindness to every eye, so is the language 
 of nature to every tongue and capacity on earth. The outer 
 eye requires no arbitrary learning nor does the inner eye of the 
 mind ; it is but to open either and see for ourselves. The great 
 enigma of the universe is yet to be solved, and we have, if un- 
 tramelled, the capacity ample for the task. From the grand 
 and colossal exhibitions of nature, we infer boundless power and 
 infinite wisdom, and from the exquisite designs and adaptation 
 of means to ends, we infer a designer. Through immensity, we 
 launch into eternity, and in endless variety we find an eternal 
 unity. Transcendent beauty, order and harmony fill all the 
 departments of Go'd's vast domains, while vitality and thief t 
 spring from every pore of nature. Search from old ocean's 
 oozy bed to the concave heavens that span the whirling globe, 
 and from the hidden caverns of earth to the star lit skies, and 
 all is filled with life and activity. The glowing heavens, are 
 filled with light, and the laws that rule the celestial orbs, while 
 the waters beneath, team with organic being. Plenitude and 
 power are seen everywhere, and the unmistaken presence of the 
 
INTRODUCTION-. 9t 
 
 great Jehovah is made manifest to the most common observer. 
 God's own hand-writing is seen upon the face of nature, leaving 
 no room for subtle follies or verbal quibblings. No hie, hac^ 
 hoes, or farther struggle between the rule of truth and the errors 
 of education. Those glittering diadems that stud the mighty 
 dome of heaven and the green earth, with its rolling rivers^ — its 
 waving forests and blooming lawns are all sweet expositors of 
 their maker's greatness and goodness. "The heavens declare 
 the glory of God, and the firmament showeth forth his handi- 
 work, day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night 
 showeth knowledge." The heart is no longer chilled by the 
 stern and wrinkled brow of the technical pedagogue, but bounds 
 with exulting rapture, while the emancipated soul bathing in 
 the pure and sparkling fountains of nature, rises with renewed 
 strength, Hke the noble eagle from his dirty cage, and soars 
 high in heaven's unfathomable blue. No odious selfishness or 
 fraudulent creeds can be found in God's natural revelation. No 
 theological chnneras or sordid mummeries of a knavish priest- 
 hood are there to be found. No confused relations of vague 
 and complicated abstractions, conventionalities or factitious 
 entities — no cheerless mystery or desponding gloom, but all is 
 held out in bold and bright relief to the glowing light of day. 
 The boon of heaven is there offered to the ransomed soul and 
 the profound and lofty spirit of nature will guide it on and on. 
 We have thus briefly striven to show the reader what we 
 have yet to learn, and to restore the book of nature to the 
 church of God, which book in the dark ages being pronounced 
 heterodox with the artistic cannons of theological philosophy, 
 was thrown out, and an absu^d and suicidal system of mystic 
 philosophy ordained in its place. Of all the delusions this was 
 the most contemptible. It dethroned God, degraded the human 
 mind and dishonored religion and after the vast expenditure of 
 mind and money during a lapse of eighteen hundred and fifty- 
 nine years, the religious world is left in doubt and distraction. 
 Under this delusion thousands of arrogant and pedantic bigots 
 
 5 
 
98 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 are turned out from the old clerical manufactories, who, with 
 their bitter denunciations and uncharitable reviling, have en- 
 gendered a wrangling bedlam, instead of" a harmonious and 
 lovmg brotherhood on earth. 
 
 This to a Bigot, whose mind is clogged with localities and 
 specialities, and whose moss-grown soul vegetates in gloomy 
 recesses, where the light of heaven is meagerly shed, looks like 
 slander, but no honest and intelligent man can think so. Take 
 this parasitical soul from its musty and rock-bound prison, and 
 transplant it upon the lofty mountain's peak, where it can look 
 out upon the bright and glowing scenes of nature that spread 
 on and on far beyond its mortal vision, and it cannot longer 
 doubt the supremacy of nature, and, with transporting ecstacy, 
 will cry out: 
 
 Eternal Being, whose might divine 
 
 Ten thousand worlds obey, 
 While fiery comets trackless blaze. 
 
 And vary not their way! 
 Through endless space and ceaseless time 
 
 Those ponderous orbs are rolled, 
 By the mighty arm upheld. 
 
 And by the power controlled! 
 Still onward yet, and onward still, 
 
 Till lightning's speed shall tire, 
 Far distant worlds, dim twinkling stars, 
 
 Evince the end no nigher! 
 Vast are thy works, Jehovah great, 
 
 Thou one eternal cause. 
 Who spoke creation into birth. 
 
 And stamped it with thj' laws. 
 Let thoughts sublime of thee, o God, 
 
 My immortal soul inflame. 
 To raise my voice in song of praise, 
 
 Unto thy holy name. 
 
 The reader will excuse my rhymings, for though it is not 
 my intention to indulge in poetry, the subject inspires those 
 lofty thoughts that will occasionally bring forth my feeble 
 efforts. 
 
 Reason, if left free from dictation and the rod of oppres- 
 sion, will, as naturally as the spark ascends, lead us upwards 
 
INTRODUCTION. 99 
 
 along the unbroken chain of causality to the first, great, mov- 
 ing cause that holds the beginning link firm and fast. 
 
 In applying reason to rid the sacred word of God of its 
 obscenities, absurdities, and destructive incumbrances that 
 have been lugged into that holy book, I know not and care 
 not by what means, no intelligent Christian can take offence. 
 Talk to one opposed to the correction of those abuses, he will 
 admit that they are stumbling blocks in the way of Christian 
 faith, yet that they were nothing more than simply the modes 
 of men's speaking in those early days; whereas, with God, 
 there are no earlier or later days, and his language must al- 
 ways be decent and intelhgible. To acknowledge the fact, 
 that it was the figurative style of those early writers, is to 
 acknowledge at once, that it was not God, who thus obscured 
 his word, in order to make divisions in the church, and con- 
 sequently that it was the language of men who were not in 
 every word, they recorded, inspired. 
 
 I will then say, in conclusion that no good or honest man 
 can object to my endeavoring to correct those abuses, which 
 have given license to the most ensanguined despots amongst 
 men, and got up a rebellious feeling against God himself. The 
 example, the language, and the doctrines of our loving, meek 
 and lowly savior, admit of no false constructions or cruel per- 
 secutions — so that, if we can bring the Old Testament to the 
 practical piety and simplicity of the New, we may yet be able 
 to do something for religion. In former days of man-worship, 
 the people had their astrologers, augurs, and soothsayers, 
 while in modern times they have the same thing. Every little 
 neigborhood throughout the world have their great men of 
 deep and mystic learning, who are worshipped as wonderful 
 expounders of the chimeras and enigmas of the Bible. And 
 hence it is that those wonderful Magi are opposed to discord- 
 ing those mysteries and reducing it to the plain, simple word 
 of God. 
 
 Such is my love for the works of God, and such my con- 
 
100 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 tempt for the mantua-maker's and taylor's competition with 
 him, that I shall often introduce the scenes of nature in con- 
 trast, much to the astonishment, no doubt, of many a nutshell 
 pedagogue, who cannot comprehend how a writer can get out 
 of the beaten track and mechanical routine of bookmaking. 
 A large portion of the talents, as well as the money of the 
 world, is absorbed in following the ridiculous fashions and 
 fluctuating machinations of man, which, if spent in the im- 
 provement of mind, and in the study of the immutable and 
 eternal laws of God, to which alone we can look for lasting 
 knowledge and for health and happiness, instead of an ignorant, 
 roguish, and distracted community, we should become en- 
 lightened in mind, enabled in soul, and harmonized in Christ 
 as one loving brotherhood. 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 
 
 Sensation and Perception are, by most of authors, placed 
 under one head, and treated of as in close connection, and yet 
 as separate faculties or powers of mind. To quote the ob- 
 viously false and inexplicable views contained in the many dis- 
 tracted doctrines upon this subject, would be to make a hodge- 
 podge volume, too unwieldly for use. It is only in respect then 
 to custom that I treat the mind as though it were divisible into 
 many parts, and head my articles with the false insignias of 
 mind. Mind, like God, is a unit, and wholly indivisible, and for 
 the want of a philosophic knowledge and strict adherence to this 
 fact, has polytheism been the basis of many a learned book 
 and the religion of as wise nations as any on earth. The 
 Greecians and Romans, whose languages, even at this late day, 
 are crammed into our heads, to the exclusion of more useful 
 knowledge, worshipped at the shrine of many Gods, simply 
 because they were in their books and taught by their teachers. 
 Just so in regard to mind, the authors who manufacture books 
 of mental philosophy for our schools, having the rare skill of 
 those juggling gentlemen who draw wine and water from the 
 same vessel, and such too were the jugglers of classic days who 
 manufactured Gods at will. Our modern authors can divide, 
 subdivide, ramify, classify, refine and inforce distinctions without 
 a difference, and thus make up a large and learned book, neither 
 understood by the writer nor his readers. Thus have those 
 imaginative authors made innumerable and complicated divisions 
 of a thing which God himself has made simple and indivisible, 
 and what is unfortunate for the honor and dignity of science, 
 our stupid and routine teachers have drudged and drilled them 
 
102 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 into the brains of tlieir pupils till thej have made mere jack- 
 daws of them. It was precisely the same credulity and delusive 
 feeling which divides the mind into so many separate and inde- 
 pendent powers, that led to the polytheistic theology. A 
 separate God was created by man for everything in existence, 
 and then they were parceled out for the government of the 
 various departments of the universe. Such too were the inde- 
 pendent and separate interests of these Gods that they were 
 often at war with each other. They were full of sensual and 
 base intrigues and debaucheries, and yet did the learned books 
 and the Clergy, who taught them, enjoin an humble worship of 
 those detestable Gods, under the pain of death, nor did any 
 one, in these days, doubt of such deep learning and clerical 
 influence, but the divine Socrates who, for his scepticism swal- 
 lowed the poison and paid the penalty. So much for deep and 
 mystic learning and ecclesiastical teaching. Those learned 
 manufacturers of Gods and rulers over the consciences of men, 
 appointed a deity to preside over every function of nature, just 
 as our metaphysicians appoint a separate power or faculty to 
 govern every function, feeling, and emotion of soul, and yet 
 do our teachers force their pupils to swallow whole batches of 
 such warring faculties, when at the same time they condemn an 
 equally rational doctrine, as a heathenish mythology. Such, 
 indeed, has been the ridiculous extent to which this division and 
 independence of faculties has been carried that Dr. Alexander, 
 professor of theology at Princeton, has taught in his book on 
 moral science, that the soul is not responsible for the acts of the 
 will — a comfortable doctrine for evil doers. 
 
 The systems of mental philosophy now taught in our schools 
 are more vague complicated and incomprehensible than those 
 maintained in the days of Plato and Aristotle, more than two 
 thousand years ago. This want of improvement in so great a 
 length of time, is owing to the want of original and independent 
 thought, each book-maker being a mere copyist, and each teacher 
 being of the same stupid and stereotyped order. Sir William 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 103 
 
 Hershel says, that " the whole tendency of imperial art is to 
 bury itself in technicalities and place its pride in complicated 
 specialities and in mysteries known only to adepts." 
 
 Again, the Rev. Isaac Wats, in his work on the improve- 
 ment of the mind, says : " A man who dwells all his days 
 amongst books, may have amassed together a vast heap of 
 notions ; but he may be a mere scholar, which is a contemptible 
 sort of a character in the world." This sentence speaks volumes 
 in favor of coming out from the dark and factitious closet of 
 the mechanical schools to the glowing light of heaven and the 
 unerring revelation and guidance of nature. One of the ablest 
 of Divines expresses his views thus : . " A teacher of divinity 
 may be a living concordance and a walking index to theological 
 follies, and yet know nothing of religion." Yes, and I will add, 
 practice less. These facts I quote, as applying equally to the 
 teachings of mental philosophy ; for learning in' the phenomena 
 of mind, particularly where man, in the language of Scripture, 
 "pretends to conceive beyond what God can do," makes him a 
 foul. In short, no amount of labor or learning in abstract and 
 mysterious things, can ever result in any settled or satisfactory 
 standard of human action, whereas the laws of nature and the 
 precepts of religion, untampered with by man, are so simple 
 and so plain that he who runs may read. As I before said, 
 the learned leaders of classic days, made Gods and appointed 
 some to govern the seasons, and others to watch over all the 
 vicissitudes in nature ; one for rain, another for storm, and so 
 on, throughout the interminable changes in the warring elements, 
 as well as for all the fortunes and misfortunes of man. Now, 
 just as the one indivisible God has been divided out, has the 
 one indivisible mind been divided into sensation, perception, con- 
 sciousness, conception, memory, imagination, judgment, reason- 
 ing, attention, taste and many other faculties, so called by our 
 mechanical and modish teachers ; and just as rationally, might 
 we add, the faculty of singing, fiddUng, dancing and all the 
 other innumerable passions and emotions of soul, excited by the 
 
104 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 motives that pres'ent themselves, from moment to moment, 
 throughout the chase of life. It was doubtless hard at i&rst for 
 the pclytheist to get along with one God, and just as diJBScult 
 would it be for the mystic "and technical pedagogue to make a 
 book out of flat truisms, or to sustain himself as a deep and 
 divine teacher in things to be understood by all. It appears 
 that there must be mystery and humbugging kept up in all 
 things, otherwise merit would claim her own, which would not 
 suit the interest of the rulers of mankind. To give to God, 
 who has made things simple and plain, all the honors, would be 
 to reduce many of our adored leaders low, and hence the sen- 
 sitive jealousy and bitter enmity against all who may have 
 moral fortitude enough to bring sacred truth to bear against 
 them. The Pope once had sovereign power over the human 
 mind throughout the civilized world, so much so that he could 
 dethrone crowned heads and degrade them at will, nor is the 
 influence yet held over the mind by the many little Popes, less 
 crushing in its power. These melancholy facts so degrading to 
 humanity, I mention not only as legitimate in the history of 
 mind, but to bring forcibly before it its enslaved condition, and 
 thereby elevate, enlarge and no'jle the soul to feel its destined 
 sphere, which can only be done by turning its attention from 
 the petty arts of man to the natural and glorious works of 
 God. I have so long meditated upon the sad history of man 
 and the government of mind, that the picture is constantly be- 
 fore me with all its melancholy and forbidding forms ; and my 
 conscious duty to exhibit it to the reader may, and I am satis- 
 fied, often does somewhat lead me astray from the argument 
 which I will now resume, after saying that the reason for se- 
 curing so much to church influences, is that the Clergy have 
 been the teachers of mental science and of religion, true or 
 false, throughout the world, and as our faith, in whatever 
 religion we have been taught, whether of Boodhism that has 
 led more than one third of the human family astray, spiritual 
 dualism taught by Zoroaster, Mahometanism, Catholicism, Pro- 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 105 
 
 testantism, or any other of the ten thousand vindicative and 
 bloody schisms and pettyisms, controls the actions of men for 
 good or evil, it is important that man should be taught a correct 
 view of his own mind, which alone can keep him in the image 
 of his God, and direct and sustain hun in the high destiny of his 
 soul. 
 
 I have said that the mind has been divided into many com- 
 plicated and perplexing powers and faculties calculated to con- 
 fuse and give the pupil a false view of his own mind, which 
 God has made simple and indivisible. The word power is a 
 powerful word which seems to carry great force with it, and it 
 figures powerfully in our modern books of mental philosophy. 
 Authors, in the very beginning, branch off largely upon the 
 almost innumerable powers of mind, when, in reality, there is 
 not a single power belonging to mind ; every idea being 
 stamped upon it by the force and specific nature of the objects 
 that operate upon it — so that mind is a mere recipient or basis 
 of action. Let us experiment a little by way of analogy. Pow- 
 der, for instance, as powerful as may be its results, has no 
 power within itself, but must depend upon other agencies. It 
 did not make itself, nor can it explode itself, but when the 
 spark is applied, it does explode. Wood, in hke manner, has 
 no power to burn, unless fire be applied. An alkali has no 
 power to act upon itself, but when an acid is applied, an action 
 takes place, and the result is a new creation of a thing that is 
 neither one nor the other, but a saline matter, just as an idea 
 is a new creation which is neither the mind that is operated 
 upon, nor the object that operates upon the mind. Calomel 
 operates upon the bowels, but is not the bowels, nor are the 
 bowels calomel, nor does either constitute the result or effect 
 which is simply the product of the agency of an external object 
 upon our sensitive being. The rusty nail is not the lock-jaw, 
 nor the death that proceeds from it, but simply the remote 
 cause. So with mind,- which, with all the powers given it, has 
 no power to think a thought, .or do an act without the appro- 
 
106 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 priate cause that begets it — otherwise we could think of things 
 that had no existence, and speak languages we have never 
 learned. It requires but a moment's thought to see that it is 
 as impossible to perceive or know anything, the materials of 
 which have not been impressed upon us, as for a blind man to 
 see, or a deaf one to hear. Let one be blinded, and he cannot, 
 by any power of his mind, see light, but open his eyes in mid- 
 day, and no power he can command will exclude the force of 
 light upon his mind, and the result is neither the mind, nor the 
 light, but an effect called an idea of light. The ear, or rather 
 the mind through the ear, is acted upon in like manner. The 
 deaf mind, which has never been impressed or stirred by sound, 
 can have no knowledge of sound, yet open his ears, and fire a 
 gun, or agitate the air, and the mind has no power to avoid 
 their impression, just as they may come. The mind might as 
 well attempt to convert hoarse thunder into soft whispers as 
 to change anything from what it really is, independent of the 
 mind. If a coal of fire be applied to the touch, no effort of the 
 soul can avoid the pain. Smell, taste, and all our other feelings 
 or sensations are in the same category. These are simple 
 experiments that show beyond all quibble the true character 
 of mind. There is nothing within the range of God's creation 
 that has any power to operate upon itself, all being established 
 upon dualistic and dependent principles, as cause and effect — 
 father and son — impulse and motion — nothing starting itself, 
 and nothing stopping itself. God is the creator and primum 
 mobile of the entire series of the moving Universe. 
 
 We can readily conceive how one ball on a billiard table 
 may put another in motion — that a third, and so on — till every 
 ball be moved by the first impulse, and just as easy is it to 
 imagine an endless chain so firmly linked that the moving of 
 the first link one inch would move the entire chain of countless 
 millions of links, each link depending upon its preceding link, 
 and the whole fatally bound to the first, which is firmly held 
 by God's own hand. These are obvious facts, founded in the 
 
• SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 107 
 
 constitution and nature of things, and no idle imagining or 
 sophistry of man can ever change them. If God did not give 
 to the human mind its fixed laws, and set bounds thereto, then 
 God is not our creator, and as we have an undeniable existence, 
 we either created ourselves before ourselves had an existence, 
 or we must look to some other source for that existence. But, 
 as a farther indulgence in the pursuit of these great principles, 
 though legitimate in the history of mind, would lead us from 
 the strict argument, I will again assert the fact that sensation 
 or feeling is the substratum of the whole phenomenal series of 
 mind. Very different acids may act upon the same base — 
 forming different characters, and bearing separate names. The 
 same wax as the symbol of mind may receive endless impres- 
 sions called ideas, yet all depending upon the same basis for 
 their existence. Just in like manner will the same paper receive 
 any number of characters or sentiments, while the same ma- 
 terials in the kaleidoscope will by each turn exhibit new forms 
 ad infinitum. Yet the wax cannot press itself, the paper can- 
 not write itself, nor can the kaleidoscope turn itself any more 
 than the mind can operate upon itself, or produce its own sen- 
 sations. The blind man, as before said, knows nothing of 
 light or colors, till such sensation be impressed upon the mind 
 by light — the feeling or sensation of sound is unknown, till 
 impressed through the ear, nor could we tell by any exertion 
 of mind, or even by aid of other senses, that vinegar was sour 
 or sugar sweet, till tasted. The nose cannot see, nor the eye 
 smell, but all the senses telling us as plainly as God himself 
 could speak, that they are appointed to convey their appro- 
 priate impressions to the mind, which has no choice, but to 
 receive them, according to God's original appointment. 
 
 Though the senses are separate messengers and witnesses to 
 the soul, of the external world, yet they aid each other in 
 making up a judgment of facts. For instance, though we see 
 objects by the eye, it gives us no correct idea of the distance 
 or relative position of those objects. This fact might be shown 
 
108 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 in various ways, but as short facts prove the position better 
 than any course of reasoning could, I will not dwell, but give 
 a case in hand. The first case noticed in proof of my proposi- 
 tion was by the eminent surgeon, Cheselden, who operated 
 upon an adult for congenital cataract. Upon seeing objects 
 for the first time in his life, he would as quickly stretch his 
 arms to reach distant objects, even the heavenly bodies, as 
 those within reach. Every object appeared equally near and 
 in actual contact with the eye, and looked as pictures do to us 
 painted upon an even, flat surface. This was natural, as the 
 light, that came from every visible object, was equally in con- 
 tact with his eye, and he could no more tell the relative dis- 
 tance of visual objects, without the sense of touch and power 
 of locomotion to move from object to object, and compare and 
 test the facts, than we with all our experience can tell the 
 relative distance of the heavenly bodies, as the stars, for 
 instance, of equal brightness looking to us all to be at the 
 same distance, when in reality some of them are milhons of 
 miles beyond others. But we have no power to touch or move 
 about amongst them, and ascertain those relative distances, and 
 the light, as before stated, coming from every star, and in 
 every case being in contact with the mind, before the mind 
 can see them, it is natural that they should all look to be at 
 equal distances from us. I have closely observed the progress 
 of infants, who, pleased with the light of a candle, will smile 
 and make as many efforts to lay hold of it without their 
 reach as one within it, and even when adepts in little things 
 in a narrow circle, children will climb to elevated places to 
 touch the moon. I have been often deceived in viewing distant 
 mountains that hid our own horizon, in finding them detached, 
 and some of them many miles beyond others, when at a great 
 way off they bore the appearance of one smooth and continuous 
 object. 
 
 Our optical illusions are by far greater than those of any 
 other sense, while touch is the more equal and correct. The 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 109 
 
 young man whom Cheselden brought to sight, had a cat and 
 a dog that he delighted to handle, but when brought within 
 his view, even several times, he could not by sight distinguish 
 one from the other by name, till tired with such perplexity he 
 one day put his hand upon them, then, pushing the cat aside, 
 said: "Go, Puss, I will know you next .time." Thus it was, 
 by the combination of sight and touch, that he gained a 
 knowledge of facts. We might hear a cow low and a man 
 halloo ten thousand times, and we would never distinguish 
 which the voice came from, without the aid of another sense. 
 If we see the cow and hear its voice, and then see the man 
 and hear his voice, it may come from any distance, and whether 
 we see the object or not, we can tell the animal from the 
 sound. In like manner may the sense of smell be associated 
 with impressions through other senses. I never smell or taste 
 an orange, that Mexico with the roads, scenery, and adventures 
 I there met with, don't come up fully and freshly before my 
 mind. Being feverish, I used oranges and other tropical and 
 acidulous fruits, in many of which delightful groves I loitered 
 and refreshed myself. A.nd here the reader cannot fail to 
 understand how those ideas became so closely associated or 
 linked together that the movement of one link stirs them all. 
 
 " Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, 
 Our thoughts are linked y many a hidden chain. 
 Awake but one, and lo what myriads rise — 
 Each stamps its image as the other flies! " 
 
 " And hence the charms historic scenes impart — 
 Hence Tiber awes and Avon melts the heart. 
 Aerial forms in Tempos classic vale, 
 Glance through the gloom and whisper in the gale — 
 In wild Vaucluse with love and Laura dwell, 
 And watch and weep in Eloisa's oeU! " 
 
 I quote similar illustrations from other authors as will be 
 seen below, to prove how our ideas are linked together by 
 association : 
 
 " How soft the music of those village bells 
 Falling at intervals upon the ear, 
 
110 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 With easy force it opens all the cells 
 Where memory slept. Where I have heard 
 A kindred melody, the scene recurs, 
 And with it all its pleasures and its pains! " 
 
 This connection of thought, received through different 
 senses, is more properly treated of under the head of " Asso- 
 ciation." But I have given some illustrations here for the 
 purpose of showing how our past thoughts may be recalled 
 by present feelings or sensations, and to disprove the doctrine 
 that has so long obstructed the progress both of religion and 
 science. It has been almost universally published in books 
 and taught in schools that we have power to call up at 
 pleasure, or originate thoughts that did not come through the 
 senses, and more than this, that we have ideas or thoughts 
 which have existed from all eternity, long before the creation 
 of man or the existence of mind itself. And now, as ludicrous 
 and burlesquing as the statement may appear, it is undeniably 
 true, and all the reader has to do is to turn to authority and 
 read for himself. Cudworth, Descartes, Berkeley, the Bishop 
 of Cumberland, and Dr. Clarke are a few amongst the many 
 advocates of the " Idealistic System " of psychology. These 
 authors look with contempt upon the objective world, and our 
 gross senses or sensationalism, which I am aiming to teach, 
 as degrading to humanity, because belonging to the brutes in 
 common with man. They aim to establish in the place of 
 sensationalism a system of soaring philosophy that looks only 
 to etherial sources for our thoughts. They maintain that 
 there are pure and divine conceptions independent of our 
 senses and the objective world. This system is nothing more 
 than the renewal of the Platonic school, which taught, as do 
 those distinguished gentlemen, that our pure thoughts are the 
 actual and immediate emanations from the mind of Deity him- 
 self, where they have existed from all eternity. The fanatical 
 sallies and transcendentalisms of Swedenborg, where a coor- 
 dinate archetype of our every thought is to be found in the 
 mind of God, which gives to mortal intellection, inspiration, 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. Ill 
 
 and angelic wisdom, are of this school. Thus this lower and 
 sensual life of ours is raised to the pure and spiritualised 
 regions of divine embodiment where the soul can gaze upon 
 the higher spheres, and be inspired with immortal truth. 
 Wrapt in Elysian reveries, those souring Divines felt them- 
 selves within the sphere of the spiritual world, and thus be- 
 came lost in the reveries of their own souls. This fanatical 
 enthusiasm, or rather mystic dementation, has been carried to 
 a greater extent in Germany, the land of legendary books and 
 of addled brains, than in any other country. This undeniable 
 history of facts may appear truly laughable, but it is la- 
 mentable — it is melancholy and darkly portentous. Por, if 
 our intellectual labors of many thousand years, in search of 
 the just rule of religion, of morality, and the harmonious and 
 happy government of man, have only served to make man the 
 greatest enemy of man, and left us more distracted and in 
 doubt, what are we- to expect in future. The same man who 
 looks at his own constitution and the established order of 
 nature, so plainly sees the will of God, that he feels it a con- 
 descension to argue seriously against such monstrous nonsense, 
 nor will argument ever serve the purpose. The well known 
 professor. Dr. Drake, of Cincinnati, published a series of num- 
 bers against the medical mysticisms and humbuggeries of the 
 day, but finding that a " Faith Doctor," who settled at his 
 very door, did more business than himself, and that swarms 
 of the mystic and magic brotherhood of high and low degree 
 were thriving around him, he gave up all argument against 
 them, as a sensible man would, in throwing straws against the 
 wind. These facts clearly show that there is nothing too 
 ridiculous and monstrous for the fanatical and superstitious 
 taint of man. As contemptibly, false, and demoralizing as 
 was the Heathen Mythology, no man of the day dared doubt 
 but Socrates. And we have in the history of man the melan- 
 choly result. No one but Omar, the Learned, among the 
 Moslem people ever doubted the inspirational infallibility of 
 
112 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 Mahomet, and he had to fly his country. Whoever had a 
 mind of sufficient rationality and independence, as to doubt of 
 the vice-regency and divine supremacy of the Pope, but Martin 
 Luther, who was anathematized with curses .in the name of 
 God, and degraded to a level with the brute ? A volume of 
 such credulity and misrule might be brought up in panoramic 
 review from departed ages and slumbering nations who have 
 lived and died slaves to the grossest and most debasing super- 
 stition. The pupil who starts out upon his journey of life, 
 should take warning at the melancholy history of his race, and 
 looking to his own constitution and the laws of nature that 
 surround him and sustain him from his cradle to his grave, 
 step firmly on under the guidance of the great author of his 
 existence. He should avoid, as he would, the serpent's charm, 
 all human authority and the vain and idle imaginings, nor 
 sacrilegiously put on the Millerite "ascension robes" to 
 transcend our allotted sphere as those soaring philosophers 
 have done. But oh, that tyrannical grasp of superstition and 
 human authority are such that I fear we shall ever be slaves, 
 chained down like the galley-slave to labor our days out in 
 abject misery. We view it as irrational to worship sticks and 
 stones, lizzards and alligators, and yet it is not a whit more 
 so than to worship our erring fellow-mortals, who set them- 
 selves up in diametrically opposite doctrines of religion — each 
 professing to be infallible arbiters of the eternal destiny of 
 men — to which impossibilities we obsequiously submit. Just 
 as soon would I expect to get to heaven by climbing the 
 tower of Babel, as by following such contentious and distracted 
 parties. God has opened his unmistaken book of natural 
 revelation before us, and he has endowed us with ample reason 
 to ascend from the known to the unknown, or from effect to 
 cause — on and on — to know him and to enjoy his mighty 
 works. 
 
 It is our ignorance of our own minds and our confidence in 
 those of others that has ever led man from the paths of truth 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 113 
 
 and cheated him of his liberty, prosperity and happiness in life ; 
 yes, and of his settled prospects for eternity. The teachings of 
 our schools to give to our frenzied and delusive emotions of soul 
 instead of being guided by the simple, immutable and eternal 
 laws of nature, are at the root of all the fanatical and distracted 
 opinions of man. Those visionary Divines and rulers of the 
 world condemn the organization God has given us, and deserting 
 our senses as legitimate sources of knowledge, appeal to what 
 they deem a higher and purer source, that of a mental phantas- 
 magoria. They first set down vulgarity as unworthy of the 
 dignity of man, then pronouncing sensation to be a vulgar attri- 
 bute of common organism, they at once dispatch it as un- 
 worthy of any association with what they call by an unwar- 
 rantable and gratuitous assumption, the higher powers of the 
 soul. Thus we see how the credulous novice may be duped by 
 high authority and the skillful use of vague and ambiguous 
 terms. By this species of sophistry has the plain and simple 
 doctrine been cast out of the schools by all mystic teachers, 
 when in reality, sensation is the soul itself, and nothing but the 
 soul and the only characteristic distinction between the material 
 and immaterial worlds. These false teachers, when in contro- 
 versy with a materialist, will exultingly say : "Matter cannot 
 feel ; the mind or soul feels, therefore, it cannot be matter," 
 and yet because God has given feehng to brutes, they discard 
 it as a gross and vulgar thing and a clog to the high dignity 
 and lofty soaring of the soul. To attach sensation to the soul 
 of one of those purely etherial gentlemen, they would feel de- 
 graded to the level of the brute. And this is the secret of how 
 it is that mental science has not advanced one step ; no, not 
 one inch, by the labor of many thousand years. Dissatisfied 
 with God's own appointments, men have made pseudo-gods of 
 themselves, and following the vagaries of their own imagina- 
 tions, have been led into the innumerable and inextricable 
 labyrinths of mysticism, when one round of the ladder of 
 natural science which reaches from earth to the platform of 
 
114 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 heaven, has not yet been ascended. No amount of learning or 
 labor can ever bring truth out of falsehood, and the mightiest 
 minds may still lash the air as they have done, for centuries 
 past without leaving a mark of anything visible or valualjle be" 
 hind them. Were we to look at things as they exist and grant 
 the many defects and infirmities of mortality, we should be 
 better fitted to enter upon the investigation of our own constitu- 
 tions and of the great laws of the universe, than any mystic and 
 mental philosopher who has ever written. True, we have had 
 a few sound, clear-headed writers, as Bacon, Locke, Mill and 
 Comte, but all the institutions of learning in the world, both 
 Catholic and Protestant, are controlled by the Clergy, who 
 write their own text-books, and, true or false, drill them into 
 the heads of their submissive and drudging dullards, just as the 
 words are put into the mouths of parrots or stuffed into the 
 heads of learned pigs. And thus it is, that books of true learn- 
 ing are denounced as heretical and degraded in the eyes of all 
 Church members, till soon they are thus driven out of print. 
 An author must be a true philanthropist and be inspired with 
 a godlike spirit and fortitude to write a book now-a-days without 
 catering to the vulgar prejudice of the community, for he cannot 
 expect either pay or gratitude for his services. 
 
 We know that the vulgar realities of life clip the wings of 
 fancy and obscure the bright sunshine of imagination and the 
 poetry of existence, and dissatisfy us with God's appointments. 
 And yet, when understood, it is the only source from which we 
 draw our lessons of wisdom. The tipsy joys and poetic reveries 
 which enwrap us in the higher spheres of etherial mysticism, 
 beget an aversion to the practical teachings of true philosophy. 
 If we surrender ourselves to the guidance of reason, we cannot 
 but know that God has seen proper to give us senses like the 
 brute, stomachs hke the brute, sensations like the brute ; yes, 
 and pleasures and pains, hopes and fears, desires and aversions, 
 loves and hatreds, with all the passions and emotions of soul, 
 which facts are more fully shown under the head of "Instinct." 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 115 
 
 I have said it is folly to reason against the beguiling delu- 
 sions and fanaticisms of man and his craven sycophancy to human 
 authority ; for, no sooner are we cut loose by the power of 
 some great reformer, than we fall under the dictatorial domin- 
 ion of other designing leaders. This is the true history of man, 
 and from it we should 'draw lessons of wisdom. But a short 
 time since the code of witchcraft with all its horrid rites and 
 mummeries, was gravely sustained by law, and then it was that 
 cm' Divines of etherial and mystic systems of philosophy, could 
 solemnly swear before the high tribunals of their country that 
 they saw old women riding through the air on broom-sticks. 
 Yes, and then it was, to the eternal disgrace of man and his 
 high imaginative soul so much boasted of, that cruel ordeal of 
 both fire and water was enforced, where the poor, unoffending 
 wretch was doomed to walk barefoot and blindfold over nine 
 red ploughshares, then to be plunged into deep water, where, if 
 they drowned, they were innocent ; but if they swam, they were 
 witches and to be burnt. Laugh not, my reader, at these as- 
 tounding truths, nor think that your own soul is free from the 
 taint of superstition and of the enslaving and degrading schemes 
 of mysticism, for I will here assert that there is not one man in 
 ten thousand who exercises that high and enobling prerogative, 
 reason, that God has given him, and who is not under the ac- 
 cursed influence of others. I say accursed, for God's condemn- 
 ation must assuredly rest upon such as cast aside that gifted 
 attribute by which himself is great, and blindly submit to the 
 dictation of his erring fellow-mortals. I will close these reflec- 
 tions by asking the candid reader whether he does not believe 
 that there is more idolatry in the world at this time, than there 
 ever has been at any other period, and whether God may no>t, 
 in the evil to which we are hastening, turn us all from this Eden 
 which we do not appreciate, into Hell. After eighteen hundred 
 and fifty eight years from the vicarious death of his son, he sees 
 a large portion of the human family in gross idolatry of man- 
 worship, not one in ten thousand, even of Church-professors, 
 
116 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 exercising that divine gift of reason or regarding his natural 
 revelation and the laws under which they live, move and have 
 their being. Nor can the example of Christ or his holy and 
 simple precepts restrain man from the wiley influence of human 
 authority. 
 
 Though opposed to wasting time by quotations from any 
 quarter, I will give a few lines from Morrell's "History of 
 Modern Philosophy," to show that I have not exaggerated the 
 distracted condition of mental science. (See page 206.) His 
 book, of near eight hundred pages, is full of such representations 
 of man's melancholy and bewildered folly. "These phenomena, 
 then, which we have just enumerated, may be viewed as the various 
 waves of scepticism and mysticism, which having been first raised 
 by the storms of controversy, in which the idealism of Des. 
 cartes and the sensationalism of Gassendi, were so long engaged, 
 propagated themselves in different degrees of intensity for many 
 years over several parts of the continent of Europe. In the 
 meantime the phases of idealistic and sensational philosophy 
 themselves had altogether changed. The philosophy of Des- 
 cartes had passed through the hands of Malebranche and 
 Spinoza, had been remodelled by Leibnitz and had come forth 
 in a new dogmatic form under the auspices of Wolf. That of 
 Gassendi, on the other hand, had given place to the more pro- 
 found, and at the same time more popular sensationalism of 
 Locke and his expounder Condillac, so that the effects of the 
 old Cartesian controversy had hardly expended themselves, 
 before the fresh struggles of these remodelled systems were 
 throwing in the seeds of a new scepticism and a new mysti- 
 cism, which were to bear their fruits during the greater 
 part of the eighteenth century." Thus we see how distracted 
 the world has been rendered by these varied and conflicting 
 systems of philosophy, and if the reader will look into Cud- 
 worth's treatise on " Eternal and Immutable Morality," he will 
 there see that author's violent opposition to every species of 
 sensationalism, and this name I mention simply as one of the 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. lit 
 
 leaders in the solid phalanx formed against 'poor sensation^ 
 which, m the language of those authors, is "low, gross, sensual, 
 grovelling and brutal," with many other such degrading epithets. 
 
 Let us now see what this sensation is, that has induced the 
 Clergy to throw Locke and all his sensational followers out of 
 the schools of the world. That man possesses sensation will 
 not be denied, nor will it be maintained that he gave it to him- 
 self, which refers it at once to the great author of our being, 
 and as God has created nothing in vain, we should not look 
 upon sensation with contempt or pronounce it unwise. 
 
 Sensation, moreover, is, as I have said, the soul, the whole 
 soul and nothing but the soul. But for sensation I should be 
 a confirmed materialist, as I can satisfactorily account upon 
 dualistic and dynamic principles, for every phenomenon of or- 
 ganic life — save that of sensation and thought, and without 
 sensation there can be no thought. Let us not condemn 
 sensation, then, when we are nothing without it. We cannot 
 think without it, nor can we establish a reputation but upon 
 it. We speak of a sense of honor, a sense of moral duty, 
 a sense of propriety or impropriety, a sense of gratitude, etc. 
 Feeling is not only the basis of all sympathy, honor, and good- 
 ness of man, but is the most glorious attribute of God himself, 
 and without it he could not exist as a God. All his love, 
 mercy, forgiveness and kind feeling for man, is from sensation 
 or feeling, and how blind and brutal then, must be the man who 
 could speak with irreverence of this sacred attribute of feeling. 
 I am well assured that those thoughtless authors' low estimate 
 of sensation is from their gross ignorance of what sensation is. 
 The influence that name will often have, even upon the minds 
 of sensible men, is remarkable, and in no case more so than this. 
 Sensation being produced or excited by external objects, and 
 that through the instrumentality of our senses, it is supposed 
 that sensation is as gross a material as the senses themselves, 
 and hence I think the exclusion of sensation from any associa- 
 tion with what the transcendental writers call the higher powers 
 
118 MAN FROM mS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 of the soul. Impartial reflection will, however, show that sensa- 
 tion is not in the sense, but that it is the sentient or percipient 
 being itself, in other words the soul. Though we feel with the 
 hand, the sensation is not in the hand, but in the mind ; for, if 
 the nerve of communication between the hand and the mind be 
 cut off, there can be no sensation, and so with all the other 
 senses. It is not the external eye that sees, but the inner eye 
 of the soul. We cannot, for instance, see the satellites of 
 Jupiter without a telescope, yet it is not the telescope that sees 
 them. In receiving our ideas from external objects, we do not 
 take in their pictures, images or qualities, but our soul under- 
 goes different sensations, and we give names to express or 
 represent those sensations or emotions of soul called sensations. 
 These sensations constitute our ideas which cannot be big or 
 little, black and white, round, angular, etc. The fragrance of 
 a rose is neither in the rose nor in the olfactories of the nose, 
 but in the mind, and though there is a matter exhaled from the 
 rose, which, when brought in contact with the sense of smell, 
 produces the result, it might exhale forever without fragrance, 
 were there no sensitive bemg to act upon, nor can it be pos- 
 sible that the matter exhaled from the rose bears any more 
 resemblance to the sensation or idea it produces, than the knife 
 does, to the pain which it inflicts. And again, the odoriferous 
 particles producing the sensation upon the nerves of smell, are 
 no more carried to the brain than the rusty nail is carried to 
 the muscles of the jaw, which from sensation and spasm lock it. 
 Thus all the objects of sensations or ideas might exist forever, 
 without sensations or ideas, if there were no minds to feel them ; 
 and the soul itself, might, in like manner, remain forever without 
 sensations or ideas but for the objects that excite or beget sen- 
 sations and ideas. For instance, if there had never been a rose 
 in the world, we could never have either seen or smelt a rose. 
 Hundreds of illustrations might be given, but my favorite simile 
 of parent and child easily understood by all, may here come in, 
 in further elucidation of this idea, where the mother, having the 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 119 
 
 impressibility, or susceptibility like the mind, might remain forever 
 without a product or offspring without a father, nor could the 
 father produce anything without the mother. In like manner, 
 the mind cannot conceive or operate upon itself, nor produce a 
 single sensation or idea, while the external world is equally 
 barren of sensations and ideas ; but when brought in contact 
 with mind, begets thought. Powder, as before stated, would 
 never exj^lode without the spark, nor the spark without the 
 powder. Acids and alcalis, in like manner, if kept apart, 
 would produce no new creation which, in their union, they have 
 power to do. There is no sensation, then, in the external 
 world, nor is there any originally in the mind, but when brought 
 into contact through the senses and nervous influences, there is 
 a new creation or feeling to which we give the name of sensa- 
 tion. That the feeling is in the mind, is proven by the recollec- 
 tion of objects after the sense through which they were received, 
 is no more. As in cases where persons become deaf or blind, 
 and still remember those objects of sense. A farther confirma- 
 tion of the fact is where persons have had a painful disease of 
 the foot or hand which pain is not immediately removed by 
 amputation, but may remain in the mind, the foot and hand 
 still being complained of as though they had not been removed. 
 
 I have shown elsewhere that there is nothing in creation 
 which can operate upon itself. The body is dependent upon 
 food, digestion and assimilation, while the mind is equally de- 
 pendent upon its appointed excitants from the objective world 
 or the internal functional stimuli, showing the universal law of 
 mutual dependencies. 
 
 Having shown in other parts of this work that mind can no 
 more operate upon itself, or beget an idea within itself, than it 
 can create a world or make itself, I will here only explain how 
 it is in a philosophic point of view, that when a man kills him- 
 self, he does not operate upon himself, as has been asserted. 
 Man is a generic name, making, like the universe, a unit in 
 name, but many in parts, constituting a complicated system of 
 
120 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 causes and effects. A man may shoot himself through the 
 heart, but the heart does not shoot itself, nor the ball operate 
 upon itself, but was sent by the force of explosion ; the powder 
 did not make or explode itself, nor did the spark create or 
 operate upon itself, but refers to the cap, the cap to the cock, 
 the cock to the spring, the spring to the trigger, the trigger to 
 the finger, that to the tendon, the tendon to the muscle, the 
 muscle to the nerve, the nerve to the will, the will to the motive 
 that begot the will, and that to more remote causes which 
 could we trace, would lead us on like the endless chain, link by 
 link, ad infinitum. 
 
 Man is a universe within himself, acd like the universe, 
 neither created nor governs himself, but is governed by dualistic 
 powers. The celestial bodies are kept within their spheres by 
 two opposing powers, that of centripetal and centrifugal agen- 
 cies, while all the functions of the human system are carried on 
 by similar laws. The blood does not circulate itself, but is 
 thrown out with great force by the heart, which does not 
 operate upon itself, but is alternately filled and stimulated by 
 the blood. 
 
 Though not an atom in the universe can have created itself 
 or put itself in motion, yet every atom acts upon every other 
 atom in the ceaseless and eternal round of motion. The hand, 
 though an efficient member of the body, cannot operate upon 
 itself, but depends upon the muscles and the mind, nor can the 
 legs be moved or directed to any purpose but by the will, which 
 will does not create or operate upon itself, but is in turn the 
 result of antecedent causes, and so on through the dependent 
 series of secondary causes to the beginning or hand of God 
 himself, the Creator and prime mover of all. If we could start 
 from the most simple effect and follow link by link along the 
 chain of causality, we should as certainly arrive at the throne 
 of God, as that there is a God. For, if God be at the begin- 
 ning of all things by tracing back to the end of all things, we 
 certainly should find the beginning. 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 121 
 
 Though we think ourselves wise in the sturly of dead lan- 
 guages and the isms of conventional life, the time is fast ap- 
 proaching, when we shall look back upon this age as one of 
 Cimmerian darkness and gross ignorance. 
 
 But to drop all reflections upon the consequences of a false 
 view of the human mind, we will return to sensation and see 
 whether the mind can exist without it. Feeling is the first in- 
 dication of life, when the child quickens or moves at four and a 
 half months of gestation, and when we cease to feel, we are 
 dead. And we only know that we exist by feeling that we 
 exist. Feeling not only gives us all the knowledge we have of 
 the actuality of things, but of the relation of things ; for, in the 
 highest and purest spheres of intellection, it is the author of 
 all we know and all we do. We feel a sense of honor, of duty 
 and of gratitude ; but this we need not further repeat, for every 
 man left to common sense is persuaded in his own mind that he 
 can neither think nor act without a feeling or motive for 
 thought and action. The learned members of the Academy of 
 Natural Science at Paris, who were forming a Dictionary of 
 Natural History, defined a crab to be a small red fish that 
 walked backwards, and upon referring the case to Cuvier for 
 his approbation, he replied : " Gentlemen, there are three objec- 
 tions to your definition. First, the crab is not a fish ; secondly, 
 it is not red, and thirdly, it does not walk backwards." I have 
 a similar objection to the learned divisions and independent 
 powers of mind ; first, because the mind is a unit and indi- 
 visible, and secondly, these faculties or powers of mind, so 
 called, bemg nothing more than its properties or conditions, 
 cannot be independent of it, or separable from it. For, 
 take from it its constituent properties or qualities, and there 
 is nothing left. Everything in creation is what it is by its 
 properties, or in simple terms, by that which makes it so. 
 Take from gold solidity, color and extension, and it is no longer 
 gold, and take from God himself power and wisdom, and he is 
 
 no longer God. And yet the learned professor of theology and 
 
 6 
 
122 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 moral science in the seminary at Princeton, has taught in his 
 book on moral philosophy, that good or bad qualities may be 
 added to or taken from the soul without affecting it. In my 
 simple conception the good quahties of a soul make it a good 
 soul, and with as much certainty do its bad qualities make it 
 a bad one. Those who believe in the doctrine of Election may 
 teach with professor Alexander that the wicked acts of a man 
 cannot vitiate the essence of the soul ; for, if a soul be elected 
 from all eternity to be saved, and that perseverance is inevitable, 
 the soul cannot be any act of its own be lost. Here are the 
 words of the professor himself: "The notion, that corrupt prin- 
 ciples must vitiate the essence of the soul, is without foundation." 
 And many more such expressions might be quoted from the 
 same author. (See Moral Science, page 152.) Those, however, 
 w^ho believe that God was in earnest when he declared that 
 every man should be held responsible for the deeds done in the 
 body, may, with propriety, teach the opposite doctrine, that 
 wicked deeds will vitiate the soul ; yes, and even destroy it. 
 Those arbitrary extensions and complicated divisions of ^-ii 
 unextended and indivisible soul are not only dangerous in their 
 consequences by their leading us shamefully astray from the 
 simplicity of nature into the mazes of metaphysics that never have 
 nor never will be understood. I have coupled sensation and per- 
 ception m accordance with custom, but they are in reality one and 
 the same thing. We cannot perceive without feeling, nor can we 
 feel without perceiving. Let one open his eyes and perceive a man 
 standing before him, and he at once feels that he is there, thinks 
 he is there, supposes he is there, imagines he is there, judges he 
 is there, and knows he is there. These and many other terms 
 might be used to mean the same thing, showing how deceptive 
 language is and how often we are misled by mere sounds. 
 Here was a simple feeling or consciousness of an object, and 
 though we have applied a number of those independent powers 
 and faculties so foolishly called to express it, yet it must be 
 seen that they all resolve themselves into the simple principle 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 123 
 
 of the soul, that of a feeling or consciousness of things. We 
 are apt to think that every term has a separate meaning, and 
 this is what produces so much unmeaning controversy in meutal 
 science. For instance, the same man may have a dozen names 
 and he may take on a new name for every act of his life, and 
 yet he is the same indivisible man. What is conscience bu* a 
 feeling of right and wrong. Reason is based upon a feeling 
 of the agreement or disagreement of testimony, or objects that 
 come feelingly to the mind, and we cannot feel these things 
 without knowing them, nor know them without feeling them. 
 
 Judgment is another term of the same import, meaning 
 nothing more than a belief, which belief is our feeling upon the 
 subject. We may imagine many things, but all our imaginings 
 are but the re-feeling of our first sensations. Which fact is 
 rendered certain by our not being able to reflect upon or 
 imagine anything that did not come to the mind by sensation. 
 For instance, a man reared in a dark cave, who never saw a 
 knife or was cut with anything so as to feel pain, would have 
 no more fear of a knife than of a rose. But let a knife be 
 thrust into him but once, and ever after would he have the 
 dread of a knife, and the sight of one would feelingly remind 
 him of the pain. An infant, when it begins to reach after 
 pleasing objects will take hold of a candle quicker than any- 
 thing brought within its reach, but being once burnt, it. will 
 ever after avoid it and hence the adage : " A burnt child 
 dreads the fire." Which fact, in its application to our mode, 
 and only of receiving knowledge, simple as it is, is actually 
 Vorth more than all the theoretic and silly books I have ever 
 read upon mental philosophy, which look to spiritual intuition 
 for our knowledge. 
 
 The ruminating of a cow is an exact parallel with ouiv me- 
 mories, imaginations and reflections, and the gastronomic philo- 
 sopher might with as much propriety teach that the cow's cud, 
 when brought back to the mouth by rumination, was not from 
 the external world, but innate, and the working of spiritual 
 
i?4 
 
 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 agencies, as for our mental philosophers to contend that our 
 ideas, when brought back by memory, reflection, association, 
 or imagination, had not their original source from the external 
 world, through our senses, but that they are spiritual and 
 eternal emanations from God himself. 
 
 . Some philosophers knowing it to be undeniable that a 
 large portion of our ideas are through our senses and made 
 sure only by experience and observation with a semblance of 
 honesty, agree to split the difiference by admitting that most 
 of our knowledge is from the material world, but yet that there 
 are ideas, as honor, obligation, gratitude, time, space and 
 other abstract knowledge too refined for the gross senses, and 
 consequently claim a higher origin, that of supernatural agency. 
 A writer must be self-stultified who cannot see that these are 
 things of mere relation, and as much dependent upon sense as 
 the shadow is upon its substance. They are correlative, and 
 consequently nothing but results. Honor is not a principle or 
 a real and independent entity, but an attache, a thing that 
 qualifies something of real existence. But for the absence of 
 light, there would be no darkness, but for good, there would 
 be no such word as evil, and but for things genuine, there 
 would be no counterfeits, and but for men with their sensations 
 of pleasure and pain, which render them susceptible, there 
 could be no good or evil act towards them. For, in the first 
 place, they would have no real existence, and in the second 
 place, there could neither be enmities nor friendships, and con- 
 sequently no acts of honor, virtue or gratitude. These high 
 sounding things, as virtue, honor, sympathy and gratitude* 
 taught in our schools to be spiritual promptings and inde- 
 pendent of oar gross organisms, as certainly originate in our 
 nature and condition in life, as any other quality, passion, or 
 emotion belonging to man. Had not God interwoven sensi- 
 bility into our nature, and given us certain appetites and 
 wants, the greatest dullard must see that we could not ad- 
 minister to those wants, and consequently could not exercise 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 125 
 
 those high and noble feelings, so that after all, it will be seen 
 that virtue, honor and gratitude, with all other kinds and hu' 
 man feelings, either towards God or man arise from the sensi- 
 tive organization God has given us and the relative position he 
 has placed us in, both in regard to our fellow-man and to him- 
 self. Similarity of organization for enjoyment or misery gives 
 us a congeniality of feeling, and from this simple arrangement 
 of our Creator, proceed all our sympathies and kind acts 
 towards our suffering fellow-mortals. And thus, it must be 
 admitted that as eternal and independent of man as may be 
 those high sounding words of Chalmers and the spiritual 
 schools, that no knowledge or exercise of such principles, 
 could exist independent of man and his physical relations in 
 life. 
 
 God himself, if alone in the Universe, could not exercise 
 honor, justice, and kindness except towards space and dura- 
 tion, which are not subjects of honor, justice, and mercy. 
 Duration and space are the only things truly eternal, for 
 except in time and space God could not exist, but as they 
 have no sensibilities, they are not the subjects of kindness, 
 honor, or gratitude, as are the sensitive beings created by 
 God himself. Ah, but still, they cry out that honor with its 
 noble and kindred feelings, is spiritually eternal, and I still 
 answer that if so, without percipient and sentient beings, they 
 could never be known or applied. Even when honor is exer- 
 cised amongst the subjects of honor, it is a creature of educa- 
 tion that lives or dies according to the conditions and wants 
 of man, and is in no two countries or ages alike. It is an 
 honor for a Catholic to kiss the Pope's big toe, while to a 
 Protestant it would be a disgrace. In regard to obligation, 
 it has no independent or self-existence, but must attach to 
 persons and grow out of circumstances, and consequently is as 
 much dependent upon experience and the actual conditions of 
 life, as any other event belonging to life. As to gratitude, it 
 is truly a heavenly principle, yet by no means dependent upon 
 
126 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 supernatural agencies to make its obligations known, for every 
 creature possessing sensation is through that sensibility in- 
 structed to know how to act towards others, and upon this 
 natural constitution of man is founded the golden rule "to do 
 unto others as we would they should do unto us." 
 
 Thus we see that this vulgar sensation ostracised, because 
 unworthy the association with the higher faculties so flatter- 
 ingly and falsely called, is the living and active foundation of 
 all good, and in truth — the mind itself — for without sensation 
 there is no mind. Nothing more clearly shows divine wisdom 
 and parental kindness than the intertwining of sensation into 
 every fibre of our mental constitution. But those sacrilegious 
 book-makers, ^' plus sages que ks sages" have condemned God's 
 economy as unwise, and beneath the dignity and high prero- 
 gatives and powers of mind which they have most shamelessly 
 and arrogantly assumed to themselves. Without sensation 
 we could have no love for God, feeling that he is our creator 
 and protector, begets an obligation on our part to love and 
 serve him. 
 
 Rewards and punishments are based exclusively upon sen- 
 sation, for without sensation we could neither feel the joys of 
 heaven, nor the pains of hell. If then, sensation be given for 
 the enjoyment of the disembodied soul in heaven, as taught in 
 the Book of God, I cannot see how those pseudo-gods exclude 
 it from their books. In all our obligations and appointments 
 we appeal to sensation as the arbiter of action. We will go 
 or stay, or do or not do, as we may feel about it. Anger and 
 revenge as well as love and gratitude have the same ever 
 present and prompting guide: sensation or feeling. We say, a 
 man has insulted us, or wounded our feelings or sensations, 
 and we consequently feel that we should gratify, or soothen 
 our feelings by revenge. Cowardice and fear also originate 
 from feeling, and all governments are controlled by feeling 
 whether in peace or war. In fine, sensibility or feeling is the 
 distinguishing characteristic both of God and man, and the 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 121 
 
 only argument and hope for immortality, and grossly ignorant 
 and boldly rebellious of heavenly authority must be the man 
 who can call it low, base, brutal, sensual, and degrading. 
 
 The penetrating observer will find that the whole opposi- 
 tion to the doctrine of sensationalism arises from the fact that 
 brutes have it in common with man. But as I have before 
 observed, we should not tear out our stomachs and refuse our 
 digestion, because they are possessed in like manner by the 
 brute. When Grod has seen proper to bestow these powers 
 and blessings, it should not be with man to condemn or 
 pronounce vulgarity upon them. Job, of old, said: "Who 
 knoweth that the soul of man goes upwards, and that of the 
 brute downward." Tupper, as I think, before quoted, says: 
 " What hath the faithful dog less than reason, or the brute 
 man more than instinct ? " I could quote a volume from 
 Divines and other feeling writers, in favor of the brute's having 
 an immortal soul, to reduce to utter shame and contempt 
 those writers with conscience seared and foul, who profess to 
 be above all sensibility or feeling for the sufferings and woes 
 of other mortals. We are not satisfied with the patient and 
 suffering toils of the poor brutes in contributing to our wants 
 and pleasures, but we begrudge them the little God has given 
 them. 
 
 There is a lurking envy and even malice often found in the 
 hearts of modern professors of religion, who most profanely 
 arrogate to themselves every gift of Grod, and thus placing 
 themselves above the contingencies of mortality, and the 
 doubts of futurity look down with scowling contempt upon 
 the gross feelings of God's outcast and neglected creatures, 
 both of brute and man. It may or may not be that God has 
 from all eternity determined to force some of his children to 
 heaven, worthy or unworthy, and others to hell, guilty or not 
 guilty, but this is as sure as that there is a God in heaven, 
 that if any tyrant on earth were to establish a code of laws, 
 or a court to hang without a crime, and to reward and honor 
 
128 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 murder, that the comiDon sense and good feeling of mankind — 
 gross and brutal as that feeling might be — would rebel against 
 such inequality and base injustice. 
 
 I feel that it is a crime to disdain the natural and fixed 
 laws of God, and to transcend the bounds he has set to 
 human knowledge. For, if his revealed words be true, he 
 looks upon all his works with pleasure, and as being of equal 
 importance, and that he is to be found amidst his works on 
 earth as well as in his celestial abodes, for God numbers the 
 hairs upon our head, and suffers not a sparrow to fall to the 
 ground without his notice. These visionary writers whom I 
 have been combatting, remind me in their lofty and refined 
 conceptions of the inebriate, who, in his tipsy joys, and bright 
 and glorious conceptions, is lifted far above the vulgar and 
 sober realities of life, and I think them as safe as exemplars 
 and teachers of morality and religion as those superstitious 
 monomaniacs. The heathen mythology and the legendary 
 love of the darker ages were certainly entitled to as much 
 respect and confidence as the metaphysical erudition of the 
 present day, where men make Gods of themselves and divide 
 their soaring minds into independent faculties and powers as 
 numerous as the whole progeny of the Hindoo Gods. That 
 our craniums have bumps like other bones, no anatomist will 
 deny, but that they were all made for the purposes they are 
 put to by phrenologists, no man of sense can believe, for every 
 upstart in phrenology, like those in psychology, discovers his 
 dozen new bumps, till the protuberances of the head are as 
 numerous as those upon the surface of our globe. And from 
 this vanity have the teachers of the science of mind run into 
 the ridiculous extremes above related. 
 
 That a well organized brain is better than a badly organ- 
 ized one, cannot be doubted, and if phrenologists were to 
 teach practically as do the Fowlers & Wells, and only to the 
 extent for which nature has laid the foundation, much good 
 might be done, in that simple and practical mode of iustriic- 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 129 
 
 tion, which all can feel and understand. Speculative phreno- 
 logy, on the contrary, like speculative religion, morality, and 
 science in general, cannot be too much condemned. 
 
 The doctrine I shall next maintain in regard to the power 
 of material stimuli upon the mind in forming the character of 
 the man, will doubtless be shocking to the delicate sensibilities 
 of those fancy writers, who exclude all objective influences from 
 the higher spheres of intellectual knowledge. That material 
 excitants, both from without and within, may generate some of 
 the noblest traits of human character will soon be seen. The 
 stimulus of the seminal fluid, for instance, will make a man bold, 
 daring, honest and honorable, and the depriving of the man of 
 it will make him cowardly, thieving and insignificantly false. This 
 is a well known fact in medical history, resting upon the obser- 
 vation of thousands of cases. The character of the eunuch is 
 well known and teaches more in the science of mind than all 
 the imaginary books that have been written from the days of 
 Plato to the present time; for as Comte justly ^says, "there has 
 not, during all that time, been a single proposition agreed upon 
 by the distracted and bewildered writers upon mind," while this 
 proposition is as undeniable as it is prolific of important restflts. 
 It is a key which, if properly turned, will unlock every secret 
 of the human mind. In addition to the regular history of 
 eunuchs, I will mention the case of Abelard and Eloisa, well 
 known to the reading world. Abelard, one of the most re- 
 nowned philosophers, divines and orators of Europe and the 
 pride of France, was by his emasculation, almost demented and 
 reduced to timidity and insignificance, so much so that instead 
 of answering an adversary in a certain controversy, which he 
 was ever wont to do in his brilliant days, he cravened down 
 and sneaked under the pulpit. His desertion of his lovely 
 Eloisa is a farther proof of a loss of love and gratitude as well 
 as of intellect. Honorable love is as noble a trait as belongs 
 to the human mind, and that it is begot by our animal organism, 
 is as certain as any fact in physical science. For a man to love 
 
130 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 a man and be wedded to a man is contrary to God's appointed 
 order of things and for the propagation of the species he has 
 offered ample inducement. All history shows that the seminal 
 stimuli has a powerful influence upon the character and destiny 
 of man, so much so that there has rarely ever been a daring 
 general, bold orator or great and persevering intellect that was 
 not dependent upon it. From the days of David and Solomon, 
 who are fair examples, to those of Mark Anthony and Julius 
 Caesar, Cortez, Pizarro, Almagro, Bonaparte and Jackson, there 
 has hardly been a conqueror of any note, who has not been so 
 notoriously given to venerial passions as to be noticed in history, 
 nor would any biographer herald such a trait in the character 
 of his friend, were it not too well known to be withheld. AVash- 
 ington has been given as an exception, being contrary to the 
 established order of nature, and in the face of facts reported by 
 his companions in arms, we do not entertain his case as any 
 exception to the doctrine here maintained. Washington had 
 no time to loiter in the amourous wiles of seductive courts, for 
 his early life was spent in privations, hardships, hazards, and 
 depressing cares, and where no temptations were offered and no 
 time afforded for gallantry. Besides, there are many men of 
 ardent passions, but of powerful fortitude aud resolution ample 
 for an equipoised or paramount balance in the scale of morality. 
 St. Paul, from his own records, was one of this class, being 
 much annoyed by a thorn in his side, which nothing but the 
 rewards of his eternal destiny could counteract. 
 
 We will find the same stimulus acting upon the great orators 
 and poets of the world in all ages, but more particularly upon 
 those of our own country, most of whom have been arraigned from 
 time to time before the public in our newspapers, as Solomons 
 and Caesars in that way. It was said of Caesar that he was the 
 husband of every woman in Rome, and Napoleon, in his con- 
 versations with his biographers. Las Casas aud O'Meara, who 
 relate the fact, said that "he sometimes thought of Paris as 
 Caesar did of Rome, that he was the husband of all the women 
 
 1 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 131 
 
 in it." He, like George the Fourth of England, often went 
 out in disguise and had his frolics in houses of rowdy resort. 
 I know that Abbott, in his history, or rather his Romance of 
 Kapoleon, aims with a sordid sycophancy, to cover every fault, 
 even the common frailties, incident to mortahty. His hero, 
 however, though not altogether mortal, became a prisoner, died 
 and was not translated, but buried upon the island of St. 
 Helena, which has marred in a mortifying degree his beautiful 
 fiction. 
 
 It is degrading, to be sure, that man should be classed 
 amongst animals, but God has placed him there, and we cannot 
 sunder him without flying in the face of heaven, so that we 
 must treat of him philosophically, as God has made him ; and 
 in so doing, show that he in many respects bears a close analogy 
 to the next in grade below him. There are many analogous 
 principles to be found in common belonging to both brute and 
 man ; and this procreative stimulus above named, operates as 
 powerfully upon the brute in the development both of form 
 and action. The stallion, the bull, the boar, and the chicken- 
 cock, for instance, are strong, bold, and fearless, compared with 
 the eunuchs of their race ; and when stirred by the seminal 
 stimuli, they will run days and nights without food or rest, 
 when, if emasculated, they would lie torpidly and tamely at 
 their ease. There has been great improvement of stock upon 
 this very principle, for every observing farmer now-a-days knows 
 that by breeding " in and in," the seminal stimuli, hke the con- 
 stant application of any other specific stimulus to the same 
 sensitivity, looses its effect and the stock degenerates, hence 
 therefore, their custom of crossing breeds. 
 
 I have said that this internal and organic power is a key 
 to the phenomena of mind, and will expose more fully the folly 
 of all past philosophy which refers most of our mental influences 
 to supernatural powers, than any abstract reasoning which I 
 could adduce. Metaphysicians seem to have but two divisions 
 in the phenomena of mind, the external or objective world, an(i 
 
132 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 the mind whicli they call the subjective world. Now all our 
 ideas that do not come to the mind through the outward senses 
 and from the objective world, are referred to higher and more 
 spiritual sources of interminable mysticism or what, in their 
 own language, they term '! a real, veritable and visible, spiritual 
 world." Thus this religious fanaticism teaches that a large 
 portion of the elements and powers of our reflective thoughts 
 are from celestial spirits or whispering angels. Others, that 
 our pure thoughts are furnished by an eternal phantasmagoria, 
 or, as Plato had it in different language, they are species — 
 forms or phantasms — the archetypes that have existed in the 
 divine mind from all eternity, which distant time 1 take to be 
 some considerable time before man, who claims those ideas, had 
 any existence. I grant the lofty sublimity and overflowing 
 beauty of these speculations, but sacred truth is so defaced and 
 veiled by their mystic sublimations and spiritual re finings that 
 there is nothing left in their attenuated forms visible and 
 tangible for the mind to lay hold of or digest. It is like eating 
 fog, which though etherial and far above the gross things of 
 the earth, is so illy adapted to the organization God has given 
 us that it can never sustain us or serve the practical purposes 
 of life. Those doctrines, though pleasing to fancy, are so 
 grossly and palpably false as to insult the common sense of 
 man and provoke the reason which God has given him. 
 
 Fearing the reader may think I am burlesquing in my 
 representation of the almost universal teachings of moral philo- 
 sophy, I will make a short quotation from Dr. Keid's " Intel- 
 lectual Powers " of man in confirmation of all I have said. In 
 speaking of the doctrines of Aristotle and Plato which have 
 been remodelled and rechristened, but not changed, and are 
 DOW the popular hypothesis of the schools, he says: "These 
 images or forms impressed upon the senses are called sensible 
 species, and are the objects only of the sensitive part of the 
 mind," (I do wonder where that part of the mind is which has 
 no sense I) "but by various internal powers they are retained, 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 133 
 
 refined, and spiritualized so as to become objects of memory 
 and imagination, and at last of pure intellection. When they 
 are objects of memory and imagination, they get the name of 
 phantasms. When, by farther refinement, and being stripped 
 of their particularities, they become objects of science, and are 
 called intelligible species, so that every immediate object — 
 whether of sense or of memory — of imagination or of reasoning 
 — must be some phantasm or species in the mind itself." Des- 
 cartes changed the name of these strange things to that of 
 ideas, and Hume, with more good sense and tangibility, to im- 
 pressions. Thus we have seen how far a frenzied fanaticism 
 may lead even great minds astray, and how dangerous it is to 
 be governed by great names (great fools) and books of Utopian 
 learning. All the errors in mental science, from the days of 
 Plato to the present, and even back to that of Confucius and 
 all other mystic leaders of the world, have grown out of our 
 not understanding the laws of our own organism, and the vital 
 and invisible functions upon which the mind is not only 
 dependent for its mundane existence, but for its constant 
 renewal and a large portion of its thoughts. The eagle, as 
 lofty as may be his flights, has to return to earth for food and 
 rest, but those aerial mystics float all the time between heaven 
 and earth, and build their castles upon foundations as in- 
 tangible and shifting as air itself If, instead of looking up 
 for every element of intellection, they would look down and 
 within themselves, they would find, as I have said, that our 
 ideas are first obtained through our senses, and that from 
 objectivity, or the world around us, and when thus engrafted, 
 literally grow into bark, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit, 
 while the roots spread far and deep by proper culture. The 
 tree cannot grow and produce fruit without the materials 
 which God has appointed to rear it from the very germ to its 
 full maturity, and so it is with mind, that has a germ handed 
 down from Adam — the first created man — yet it cannot en- 
 large or become intelligent but by culture and the materials 
 
134 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 that must sustain it. This is the true nature of mind which 
 is just as much dependent upon the elements of this world for 
 its every idea as the tree is for its growth and fruit. As I 
 have before illustrated, the mighty oak would remain forever 
 no oak, or more properly without existence, but for the soil 
 and the germinating elements around it. And as I have also 
 shown in illustration of my position, the grains of wheat that 
 have been taken from mummies found in the dark vaults of 
 the pyramids of Egypt, three thousand years old, and have 
 produced whole fields of wheat, would never have germinated 
 but for the plastic and vivifying powers of objectivity. So 
 also with the chicken, for instance, which but for the father 
 would never have existed in the egg, and then, but for incuba- 
 tion, would never have come to the world. Yet it must be 
 understood, that those fortuitous agencies create nothing, for 
 God in his power and wisdom placed the germ in all things 
 which under his ordained laws were to bring forth of their 
 kind. By way of further illustration we might say that the 
 fire, elicited by friction from the cold wood and the spark 
 produced by the collision of flint and steel, is no proof of the 
 creation of fire, but simply the development of it by God's 
 appointed laws. He has also seen proper to make the mind 
 of man, the germ of which was planted by himself, dependent 
 upon his physical laws, as the body or the vegetable kingdom, 
 nor is it in the power of gilded books and arrogant pedagogues 
 to contravene them. This must be granted, otherwise that the 
 doctrine of transmigration is true, and consequently that it is 
 the religious duty of Brigham Young's women — as he has 
 piously enjoined it upon them — to bring forth as many chil- 
 dren as possible, to accommodate those surplus souls that God 
 has made perfect and set afloat without a habitation, and are 
 only waiting for the bodies which those women have it in their 
 power, by but little labor, to create. This injunction of the 
 great and divine Brigham Young — the full-orbed sun of Mor- 
 mon faith, and the controller of human minds — though greatly 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 135 
 
 ridiculed by our public prints, is in full accordance witb the 
 doctrines taught in all our religious schools, and to be found 
 in almost every work upon mental philosophy, to wit: that the 
 human mind is made perfect with all its ideas and abstract 
 intelligence, and has no dependence upon the physical world, 
 and thus it is that others have taught as well as Brigham 
 Young, that souls are launched into the world, and go about 
 hunting bodies just as a man would a house to inhabit for 
 the time. 
 
 If we would confine ourselves to the abhorred task of rea- 
 son and the vulgar realities of life we could not but see that 
 the mind is born with the body, that it is as childish and 
 helpless as the body, knowing nothing of good or evil, or how 
 to support its own existence, that it is nurtured and reared to 
 maturity with the body, that it is subject to the frailties and 
 diseases of the body, and that it sinks to infirmity and super- 
 annuation with the body, and passes off from this stage of 
 action with the body. Our senses, the only inlets of knowl- 
 edge and the valid witnesses of the soul, have not made 
 cognizable any influences other than the material world, and 
 we feel that our spirits are buoyant by fullness of health, and 
 that they are raised or sunk by prosperity and adversity. 
 Spirits will make a wise man a fool, and laudanum will put 
 the mind to sleep, while disease will set it raving or reduce it 
 to melancholy and almost dementation. 
 
 My views here given of the analogy of mind and body are 
 not for the purpose of inculcating the doctrine of the materia- 
 lity of the soul, but to bring us to our senses, that we may see 
 the fixed and eternal relation of things, just as God did in his 
 first creation ordain them. I as firmly believe in the imma- 
 teriality of the soul as I do in my own existence, yet the ma- 
 terialistic doctrine does not alarm or make me unhappy, for, 
 be it material or immaterial, we know that it feels pleasure 
 and pain in this life, it can do no more nor less in the next. 
 It would be a safe and selfish doctrine with many, that all 
 
136 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 sensation of the soul is to be 'extinguished with the death of 
 the body. 
 But, 
 
 " Lost in earth, or air, or main, 
 Kindred atoms meet again! Glorious resurrection! " 
 
 T^e should not feel unhappy, either about mind or body, 
 for that almighty power which brought myriads of glittering 
 worlds from black chaos, and formed this vast and gorgeous 
 universe, can as easily make matter as spirit eternal. Then 
 let us not loose sight of God's sacred truth in vain search 
 after the philosopher's stone, but put up with things as things 
 are made, and doubting nothing evil, leave results to God 
 himself. But the unstaid perversity and^ incorrigible vanity 
 of man keeps him in perpetual strife against his allotment, 
 and transcending the bounds of nature, seeks knowledge and 
 happiness in the regions of beguiling fantasy. The number 
 and nature of the refining and sublimating faculties that con- 
 vert the raw materials of the mind into spiritual phantasms, 
 is still a grave and unanswered question, but perhaps will be 
 better understood when we shall be wise enough to tell what 
 becomes of all the old moons when the new ones appear. 
 Upon abstract philosophy, as Dr. Reid says, " many systems 
 have been invented, and heated controversies kept up for ages 
 past without anything satisfactory being ascertained." Dr. 
 Reid, however, goes on to say that notwithstanding the wild 
 theories and interminable disputations, that several additions 
 have been made to the Aristotelean and Platonic doctrines 
 of perception, but, as far as I can see, modern philosophy has 
 only added ghost to ghost, and left the subject as formless, 
 viewless, and intangible as ever. I am utterly unable to 
 conceive of what they mean by images in the mind, for in- 
 stance, what kind of image can heat, cold, sound, smell, or 
 taste present ? These are mere sounds, and absolutely with- 
 out meaning. It may seem incredible to the unobserving 
 reader that men of great intellects should write books founded 
 upon such follies, and yet when he considers that 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 13t 
 
 "Great wit to madness sure is oft allied, 
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide " 
 
 he will not be surprised that such is the case. Besides, if he 
 will recollect that with his own mind, he has seen fashions 
 that at first were formless and even forbidding which by time 
 and the taste of others became beautiful, and that the voice 
 and manner in a friend may be charming one day, and yet 
 from disagreement and hatred disgusting by the next, and yet 
 the person remain identically the same, and thus it is that all 
 speculations, both in religion and philosophy, are subject to 
 the whims of prejudice and the contingencies of fashion in 
 whatever isms or dogmatisms we may have been taught, and 
 the example of local churches, society, and neighborhoods in 
 which we are reared or live, hence the necessity of watching 
 the vascillations of our own minds, for history has shown that 
 we are all monomaniacs, and that there is no form of religion 
 too foul and deformed, or Gods too numerous or too corrupt for 
 our sincere belief and humble worship. 
 
 We have but to refer to classic days to see that wiser 
 heads than ours worship the most corrupt Gods that ever dis- 
 graced the name of religion. But of all the Christians in our 
 country none so fully put in practice the doctrines of modern 
 philosophy as our neighbor "Shakers," many of whom visit 
 heaven in person, and converse face to face with God and the 
 inmates of heaven, and particularly with General Geo. Wash- 
 ington, who has told them many things not to be found in the 
 history of his life, and it is supposed that they will soon bring 
 out a true history of that great man. Those of our Shaker 
 brethren who do not go to the spirit-land in person after 
 metaphysical phantasms, have trances, visions, and direct 
 communications through invisible spirits, proving more fully 
 than any teaching could do that the doctrines in our school- 
 philosophy are true. Now these facts are not given by way 
 of ridicule to our spiritual philosophers, but to open their eyes 
 to their own extreme folly, for I cannot believe that any sen- 
 
138 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 sible man out of the Church can have faith in such wild fana- 
 ticism. These people, strictly guarding non-intercourse, know 
 by the rising of a rebellious member when the devil is near to 
 tempt them, as they say he did Adam to enjoy Eve, they at 
 once, with pious heroism, male and female, surround the old 
 serpent, and the women flirting their petticoats in his face, 
 "shew^' him on, while the men with their brandishing rods 
 rush him headlong down the Kentucky cliifs, and into the 
 river he has been seen to plunge. Now as ridiculous as all 
 this may seem, it controls the minds of many of our fellow- 
 beings, who are just as sane as ourselves, and certainly by far 
 more rational than many of our modem book-mukers, whose 
 minds are as celestially excursive as those of the Shakers. 
 
 The whole secret of the chaotic mass of folly to be found 
 in the textbooks of our schools, is that the writers and teachers 
 of mental philosophy are of the same family of fallible beings 
 with the Shakers and all other fanatics, and that their minds 
 are like theirs perpetually prone to transcend the bounds of 
 reason by yielding to the delusive and elysian emotions of soul. 
 If we will cast aside the wild vagaries of imagination, and 
 sternly follow God's established order of things, our souls will 
 be elevated in the true channel of knowledge, and be rendered 
 invulnerable to the machinations of erring man. Sensationalism 
 is the platform upon which the ieaver must rest to move the 
 world and set it aright. It is the foot-stand of the intellectual 
 ladder that reaches from earth to heaven — yes, and the main- 
 spring of the whole machinery of mind. The secret, as I have 
 said, of all the erroneous teachings in the mental government 
 of man, is in the internal workings of the mind. Feeling a 
 number of recurring thoughts running through the mind, and 
 being conscious that they are not the objects of sense, or more 
 properly that they did not at the moment felt, as in the dark- 
 ness and silence of night, come through our senses, some have 
 referred them to spiritual communications from God, and others 
 to etherial agencies. It may seem hard to believe, yet no 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 139 
 
 reading and intelligent man will dare deny that the greatest 
 intellects of modern times have taught that there do exist 
 eternal and immutable ideas which were prior to the objects 
 of sense, and that they come to us contingently and inde- 
 pendently of any established or fixed laws of causality. And 
 this is the doctrine, I repeat, that has led mental science so 
 shamefully astray, and cast an odium on the very name of 
 metaphysics. Every phenomenon of mind may easily be ac- 
 counted for from the internal workings of our animal organisms. 
 For instance, when our bowels disturb us we .dream of stooling, 
 if hungry, of eating, and if thirsty, of water and drinking, and 
 so with all our dreams, it matters not how celestial, for the ten 
 thousand nervous disturbances within us when asleep will stir 
 up by associations all and every thought we ever had. Where, 
 then, the necessity of spiritual and prompting agents to direct 
 us to stooling, urinating, or the innumerable other stirrings up 
 of past thoughts and actions. It is simply the circulation of 
 our nervous fluids instead of ministering angels supposed to 
 creep through the dark windings of the nerves to the sensorium 
 communi to whisper folly to us. Our hearts contract with great 
 violence, and the fluids flow to and from it like the streams of 
 earth to their great fountain, the Ocean, while digestion, ab- 
 sorption, assimilation, with the pulmonary respiration, and ten 
 thousand other vitalizing and moving agencies are flashing 
 like lightning corruscations throughout the living miracle inde- 
 pendent of our senses and ungoverned by our wills. From 
 this secret and unconscious source is prompted ninetenths of 
 our mental exercises, and when morbid agencies assail those 
 normal functions, mental derangement in all its varied forms 
 may ensue. Many of our dreams that come true, and all the 
 omens and prescience that man has, are from this source, and 
 it is worthy of serious consideration how often we predict a 
 spell of sickness, death, and other events. The incipient stage 
 of a fatal disease may be preying upon the vitals, and disturb- 
 ing the nerves and mental associations long before it is suffi- 
 
140 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ciently developed for external notice. These internal laws of 
 the animal economy, which influence the mind in all its varied 
 phases, have never been studied or understood, and why? — 
 simply, as I have often repeated in this work, because the 
 religious teachers of this world are in possession of all the 
 schools, where generation after generation receive its false in- 
 struction to look without and far beyond this vulgar tenement 
 of clay and its gross animal senses for all its knowledge and 
 impulses of soul. To tell such teachers that a full stomach 
 makes a generous soul, and that a dyspeptic stomach carries 
 many a Divine with all his high-sounding but unavailing knowl- 
 edge down to dementation and even death, will not stay their 
 soaring fancies, but looking with contempt upon all gastric and 
 physical agencies, they will still teach the doctrine of a special 
 providence, and of spiritual influences over the health, and hap- 
 piness of man. The loss of friends, and the melancholy ex- 
 amples daily before their eyes will not convince them that 
 God's providence is not in his special visits and partial favors, 
 but in his fixed and irrevocable laws, under which he has 
 placed us, and that our ignorance of these laws is no plea of 
 exemption from the consequences, as sickness, misery, and 
 death. But still they run counter, by sedentary habits and by 
 vain and delusive hopes, to every law of health, and still they 
 cry: Lord save! The drunkard may, with equal consistency, 
 and with no greater criminal presumption, violate the laws of 
 his own constitution and cry: God save! 
 
 All the magnetic, mesmeric and psychological exhibitions 
 arise from the internal laws of our constitution, and from the 
 same source comes somnambulism and somniloqnism, with the 
 endlessly varied and fantastic emotions of soul. The mind may 
 be likened to a mechanic's shop, where every material must first 
 be made by God himself, and then come in through the senses or 
 the doors of the shop, but when there, the workmen within, like 
 the soul, can turn his materials to many shapes and put them 
 to many purposes, and give them endless names, as chairs, tables 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 141 
 
 and bureaus, but neither the mechanic nor the mind has any 
 power to create its own materials. Our senses are the only valid 
 witnesses and legitimate arbiters of truth, for when they are 
 locked up by sleep, our minds run wildly astray by internal dis- 
 turbences, but awake the senses and they at once tell us that 
 the feelings which possessed us a moment before, were not in 
 the order in which they were originally received. The kindred 
 relations and established order of nature, as first perceived, 
 must be strictly guarded by the senses, or all our ideas soon 
 loose their integrity and take the name of visions, phantacies 
 and vagaries of endless forms. In mesmeric and psychologic 
 experiments there is a partial mastery yet held by the senses, 
 the imperfect sleep or stupor not being quite suflBcient to check 
 the nervous currents, but simply to confuse them, as in cases 
 of somnambulism and somniloquism, where the subject both 
 walks and talks in his sleep, yet cannot fully compare facts and 
 detect errors, as when his senses are sound and fully awake. A 
 man psychologized can both see and hear, yet the comparing 
 power is actually lulled to sleep, so that when the subject is 
 told it is raining, it is hot, it is cold, it is dark or light, and he 
 will agree to it, and to throw a stick before him and exclaim it 
 is a snake, and he will run from it. The word snake excites the 
 former idea of snake, and, of course, alarms. This state of mind 
 is similar to one with mania-a-potu, where the subjects sees 
 snakes and other delusive objects. 
 
 The mind may also be compared to a violinist, who lives seper- 
 ate and independent of his violin, but who cannot make music 
 without it, and even if the violin be perfect and the strings be 
 cut or broken, he cannot make harmony — and so with the mind, 
 that may live independent of the body and brain which it in- 
 habits, yet without the brain its instrument, and the nerves that 
 vibrate and give tone and harmonious action, it could not de- 
 velope and exhibit its powers to the world, and when the nerves 
 be severed, or the brain concussed or depressed, the violinist is 
 not dead, but his instrument is destroyed. 
 
142 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 To confirm the doctrine I have aimed to establish, to wit, 
 that all our ideas are brought to the soul through our senses, I 
 will make but one or two short quotations from Upham's 
 " Mental Philosophy." 
 
 " In the history of our original intellectual acquisitions the 
 following is given in the Memoirs of the French Academy of 
 Sciences for the year 1703, of a deaf and dumb young man in 
 the city of Chartres. At the age of three-and-twenty, it so 
 happened, to the great surprise of the whole town, that he was 
 suddenly restored to the sense of hearing, and in a short time 
 he acquired the use of language. Deprived for so long a time 
 of a sense, which in importance ranks with the sight and the 
 touch, unable to hold communion with his fellow-beings by 
 means of oral or written language, and not particularly com- 
 pelled, as he had every care taken of him, by his friends and 
 relations, to bring his faculties into exercise, the powers of his 
 mind remained without having opportunity to unfold themselves. 
 Being examined by some men of discernment, it was found that 
 he had no idea of a God, of a soul, of the moral merit or de- 
 merit of human actions, and what might seem to be yet more 
 remarkable, he knew not what it was to die ; the agonies of 
 dissolution, the grief of friends, and the ceremonies of inter- 
 ment being to him inexplicable mysteries. Here we see how 
 much knowledge a person was deprived of, merely by his want- 
 ing the single sense of hearing ; a proof that the senses were 
 designed by our Creator to be the first source of knowledge, 
 and that without them, the faculties of the soul would never be- 
 come operative." 
 
 Thus we see what Upham, though a servile copyist, has said 
 at the close of his quotation, in regard to the importance of our 
 senses. He is, from this single fact, worth more in the develop, 
 ment of God's established relations in the laws of mentality, 
 than all the trashy books that have ever been published ; forced 
 to admit the fact which I am striving to establish, that all our 
 knowledge must first come through our senses. In Upham's 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 143 
 
 own language, as seen above, " the soul without the senses 
 would never become operative." This is going very far, for a 
 dull and modish mystic. A number of such cases, which power- 
 fully appeal from idle hypotheses to common sense facts, might 
 be collected both from physiological and metaphysical writers, 
 in full illustration and confirmation of all I have said ; but pre- 
 suming that the cases I have given with my varied arguments 
 upon the subject of sensation and perception being both the 
 substratum and ultimatum of all our external knowledge, will 
 prove satisfactory to the reader, I will not trouble him farther 
 with tedious quotations, except a single one to show, how our 
 sensations and thoughts are stirred up and again brought before 
 the mind by association. 
 
 The well known Chateaubriand, writes thus : "When travel- 
 ing through the wilds of America, I was not a little surprised 
 to hear that I had a countryman established as a resident at 
 some distance in the woods. I visited him with eagerness, and 
 found him' employed in painting some stakes at the door of his 
 hut. He cast a look towards me which was cold enough, and 
 continued his work ; but the moment I addressed him in French, 
 he started at the recollection oi" his country, and the big tear 
 stood in his eye. These well known accents suddenly roused in 
 the heart of the old man all the sensations of his infancy !" 
 Were I not wearied with the subject, I would bring up many 
 additional illustrations both from history and from every-day 
 observation, in farther proof of the power of association, and 
 the sixth sense as I call it, or internal functional agency in re- 
 producing thought, if farther proof could be deemed necessary. 
 
 Thus we have seen that there is neither innate nor superna- 
 tural ideas belong to the natural mind, but that all knowledge 
 first comes through sensation and perception, and that every 
 after thought is produced either by association from kindred re- 
 lations, or sameness of sounds, sights, touch, smell or taste, 
 through the five senses or by means of our sixth sense, in other 
 words, our internal functional excitations ; and further, that 
 
144 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 these simple, unmistaken and unalterable laws, ordained by God 
 himself, does away the necessity of whole chapters of extra 
 powers and faculties, and the study of huge volumes of mystic 
 and alchemic nonsense. Our gross ignorance of our own con- 
 stitutions has given rise to swarms of licensed butchers and to 
 innumerable contraband and self-styled imposters, of high and 
 low degree, from faith-doctors, and patent pillers, down to urin- 
 ary tasters and alaine smellers ; while the abstract and com- 
 plicated teachings of mental science has kept mankind ignorant 
 of their own minds, and sustained a despotic and oppressive 
 hierarchy which has filched countless millions of money from the 
 pockets of the toiling masses, who prefer to pay for a prescrib- 
 ed religion from man, rather than to obtain it from God him- 
 self, by a life of simple honesty and sincere piety. These are 
 melancholy facts — yes, they are facts of the most lamentable 
 grievous and portentous import ; for the exposure of which, I 
 may look for the common lot of all who may attempt to sus- 
 tain the honor of God, and protect the interest of man, by de- 
 throning the pseudo-gods of earth, and correcting the abuses of 
 society ; yet will I do my duty, by giving to man his true cha- 
 racter, looking with the eye of faith beyond the confines of earth 
 to a court of eternal and immutable truth and justice for my 
 reward. 
 
 I cannot close this article without saying that I have as 
 much respect for divines, politicians and physicians, as their 
 craven and hypocritical flatterers, yet I cannot, as an observ- 
 ing man, but see it, and as an honest man, to make it known, 
 that there is a sad and criminal amount of ignorance and dis- 
 honesty amongst them. There is not a politician in our land 
 who will tell the people of their dissipated habits, and of the 
 great sin they commit by selling God's greatest blessing to man 
 at the polls, for even less than thirty pieces of silver, the price of 
 our Saviour's liberty and life, in which cases the vender of votes 
 is equally as criminal in the eyes of God, as he who betrayed 
 His life. Yet where is there a leader of the people honest enough 
 
SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 145 
 
 to tell thera of it. And more alarming still — where is the po- 
 litician who will not bribe souls to their own damnation and to 
 the ruin of their country. And a question I am sorry to ask 
 is, where can we find the Divine in modern high life, who exhib- 
 its a concentrated, sincere, and humble devotion to the cause 
 of religion ? And where, where, I with religious duty ask, 
 can you find a professor in fashionable life, who does not set 
 the worst possible example of costly dressing and of being for- 
 most in every species of extravagance, parade and criminal folly ? 
 And who can say that we do not in our insignia of honor, and 
 in our church paraphernalia view with the paradeful days of Pa- 
 pal power. Such vain glory may bloom but can never bear but 
 the bitterest fruit which we all have tasted. I look back with 
 horror upon the melancholy march of man through the dark and 
 bloody ages of the past, nor can I look forward with any better 
 hopes for the future. The bloody sword is unsheathed and 
 ."Time is as rife on earth as ever. Nation wars with nation 
 and man with man — the midnight dagger and the burglar's 
 hands are bold in their daring deeds, while frauds and seductions 
 have become the order of the day — brother cheats brother, and 
 neighbor overreaches neighbor in his contracts, and shamelessly 
 boasts of his smartness. Then blame me not, but for my fruit- 
 less efforts to correct these abuses in society. And now I close 
 this article, with the hope that the Clergy particularly, who I 
 have strove to improve and aid at every turn, will feel the same 
 brotherly love for me that I do for them. This is my unfained 
 feeling and humble prayer before the searcher of hearts and the 
 final judge of all on earth. 
 
VOLITION. 
 
 I WILL here premise that my reason for being more ilhistra- 
 tive and lengthy upon the subject of will, than that of any other 
 mode of mental action is that the world for woe or for weal has 
 ever been governed by opinion or will, which is nothing more 
 than the effect — forced result or sequence of opinion. And 
 again, of all our feehngs there is none so deceptive and that re- 
 quires so much close thought as our feeling of liberty in the 
 promptings and exercises of will. It is like fever, the actual 
 existence and feehng of which every man is conscious, yet no 
 one traces back the antecedent causes, or can, but by inference, 
 detect the proximate or remote cause of such feeling. The 
 cold may have been caught or measma breathed months before 
 the sensible effects, and that in some remote region of which 
 we are not conscious. A man in vigorous health may be con- 
 scious of his strength of muscle and boyancy of spirits, and yet 
 unconscious of his interna] and vital functions as digestion, assi- 
 milation, nutrition, and other remote but causal renewing powers 
 The sun as it strikes our senses, is a little lamp that goes round 
 this world to light it up, and it was once as universally believed, 
 as free will now is, that the sun and starry heavens revolved 
 around this earth which has the sensible appearance of being a 
 flat and fixed surface. Heaven-born reason, however, has dis- 
 pelled many of those time-hallowed but vulgar superstitious il- 
 lusions, of a Racred consciousness. This feeling or conscious- 
 ness of being free to will what we will, or do what we do, is of 
 all other feelings the most deceptive and mischievous. That 
 we can will what we will, and do what we do, is certain, or we 
 could not will what we will and do what we do, but it is 
 
VOLITION. 147 
 
 equally certain, that we are no more conscious of nor have no 
 more control over, the antecedent and remote agencies that 
 causes the desire to do or not to do, than we have over the 
 normal and abnormal conditions of our vital functions. 
 
 Much has been said and written for past ages in regard to 
 the human will. The question has been whether the will* acts 
 under the influence of mortals, or in other words, the prompt- 
 ings of subject presented to the mind for its choice, or whether 
 it has self-controlling power to act independent of all mortals. 
 Various definitions have been given to this subject, and yet no 
 agreement has been consented to by parties. Locke defines 
 the will to be nothing more than "the ability to prefer or 
 choose." In this I think all must agree, that it is simply the 
 choice of one thing rather than another, for we cannot choose 
 a thing contrary to our will, nor will a thing contrary to our 
 choice. My position is, that God has so constructed us, and 
 connected soul and body, that they have no independent exist- 
 ence here, and that they are as much under. the laws of causal- 
 ity as his physical universe. But sever this glorious harmony 
 of mutual dependencies from the throne of the great Architect, 
 and this world in common with all worlds, now holding their 
 courses in lawful obedience to the divine will, would become 
 a wreck. In like manner would our animal organism and in- 
 tellectual and moral dependencies upon the will of God become 
 an entity or a non-entity as chaoce by chance might determine. 
 To quote authority for and against this subject would make a 
 large and profitless book, of abstract refinings and technical 
 nonsense, and I will therefore introduce a few sentences only, 
 from the pen of Sir William Hamilton, the greatest and best of 
 modern and Christian philosophers. 
 
 " Will, they hold to be a free cause, a cause which is not 
 an effect ; in other words, they attribute to it a power of ab- 
 solute origination. But here their own principle of causality 
 is too strong for them. They say that it is unconditionally 
 
148 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 promulgated, as an express and positive law of intelligence, 
 that every origination is an apparent only, not a real, com- 
 mencement. How to exempt certain phenomena from this 
 universal law, on the ground of our moral consciousness, can 
 not validly be done. For in the first place, this would be an 
 admission that the mind is a complement of contradictory re- 
 velations. If mendacity be admitted of some of our mental 
 dictates, we can not vindicate veracity to any. If one be de- 
 lusive, so may all. ' Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.^ Abso- 
 lute skepticism is here the legitimate conclusion. But, in the 
 second place, waving this conclusion, what right have we, on 
 this doctrine, to subordinate the positive affirmation of causal- 
 ity to our consciousness of moral liberty — what right have we, 
 for the interest of the latter to derogate from the former ? 
 We have none. If both be equally positive, we are not en- 
 titled to sacrifice the alternative, which our wishes prompt us 
 to abandon." (Page 586.) " How the will can possibly be 
 free, must remain to us, under the present limitation of our 
 faculties, wholly incomprehensible. We are unable to con- 
 ceive an absolute commencement ; we cannot therefore con- 
 ceive a free volition. A determination by motives can not, to 
 our understanding, escape from necessitation. Nay, were we 
 even to admit as true, what we can not think as possible, still 
 the doctrine of a motiveless volition would be only casualism ; 
 and the free acts of an indifferent, are, morally and rationally, 
 as worthless as the pre-ordered passions by a determined will. 
 How, therefore, I repeat, moral liberty is possible in man or 
 God, we are utterly unable speculatively to understand.'^ 
 
 Thus we see in accordance with my position, that in the 
 above language " it is impossible to conceive of a free volition," 
 and again, " how the will can possibly be free, is to our facul- 
 ties wholly incomprehensible, and the reason he gives is truly 
 philosophical, "that we can not conceive of absolute commence- 
 ment," that is, the beginning of the series of causes that un- 
 avoidably brings about the result. This argument, in a word, 
 
VOLITION. 149 
 
 incontestably confirms that of Jonathan Edwards, the great- 
 est of Divines and the most powerful of reasoners : "that no- 
 thing can not produce something, and as we cannot, therefore, 
 see how those volitions came into existence save by the prompt- 
 ings of motives, of which we are subjects, from hour to hour, 
 we must trace back along the chain of causality, how one link, 
 or will, has got up and moved another will, in infinitum, and 
 as the last will is not a self-created being from nothing, but 
 had a prior cause, cannot but be a result of something, there- 
 fore not free." 
 
 Upham, in his " Mental Philosophy," page 265, when 
 speaking of mental emotions, writes as follows : " We are at 
 first pleased or displeased, or have some other emotion in view 
 of the thing, whatever it is, which has come under the cogni- 
 zance of the intellect. And emotions, in the ordinary process 
 of mental action, are followed by desires. As we cannot be 
 pleased or displeased without some antecedent perception 
 Or knowledge of the thing which we are pleased or dis- 
 pleased with, so we cannot desire to possess or avoid anything, 
 without having laid the foundation of such desire in the exist- 
 ence of some antecedent emotion. And this is not only the 
 matter of fact which, as the mind is actually constituted, is 
 presented to our choice, but we can not well conceive how it 
 could be otherwise. To desire a thing which utterly €ails to 
 excite within us the least emotion of pleasure, seems to be a 
 sort of solecism or absurdity in nature : in other words, it 
 seems to be impossible, from the nature of thing, under any 
 conceivable circumstances. At any rate, it is not possible, as 
 the mind is actually constituted, whatever might have been the 
 fact, if the mind had been constituted differently." 
 
 Thus did this author, in one of his lucid moments, argue 
 the case justly. But soon did he, like Hamilton, craven to the 
 cry of fatalism, and abandoning sacred reason, fall back 
 into the interminable vortex of superstitious mysticism — a 
 divine conscience. 
 
150 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 It is to avoid the Gorgan phantom, this scare-crow word 
 fatalism, that authors have traiterously abandoned the sacred 
 Laws of God, grounded in our constitutions and in the kindred 
 and causal relations of all things, and thus reduced mental 
 science to that contempt which iu its present dark and vacil- 
 lating condition it justly deserves. 
 
 To reach the throne of our Creator, through his unerring 
 laws of causality, is to break from the strong bands of clerical 
 authority, and hence it is taught by all theological institutions 
 to be dangerous in its tendencies. ^ And hence it is that our 
 teachers and preachers cry out skepticism, and hold that a 
 divine mysticism, which has distracted the world and caused 
 brother to drag brother fiendishly to the stake, is the only sure 
 and tithing faith for the duped and demented masses of man- 
 kind. 
 
 Astronomy was to destroy the Bible faith, and therefore 
 to be kept down, in darkness and doubt. 
 
 The science of geology was to contradict the mosaic ac- 
 count of creation, and a true and kind-hearted morality, as 
 founded upon the harmonious laws of our own constitutions, 
 was to be stifled by the many-headed monster, superstition, 
 and human idolatry that creates innumerable leaders, and calls 
 and livings for all. 
 
 Bui to proceed : — Every rational being acts with a view 
 to some end, and his desire for this end is just as certainly the 
 exciting cause, of will and action, as the moving of a body 
 is the result of something that moves it, and the contraction 
 of the heart the effect of the stimulus of the blood within it. 
 I can no more conceive of a will begetting itseif than of a 
 child begetting itself. Both require parents, and those other 
 parents on and on through the series of ages to the first man, 
 Adam, from God's own hand. 
 
 We may as well look for new spontaneous and self-created 
 animals, in violation of Jehovah's harmonious order and causal 
 dependencies of all things as to grant the accidents of selfr 
 
VOLITION". 151 
 
 creations of the human will. I hold that nothing can act be- 
 fore it is, — that is, when it is not and where it is not; and it is 
 equally absurd to admit that the will can create itself or move 
 itself without an antecedent existence, or something that 
 causes it and brings it forward. To say that the will is very- 
 different from other things, and that in its own fiat, and self- 
 creating power, it can bring forth without a parent, can act 
 without a motive, choose without a choice, and prefer without 
 a preference, is to talk nonsense, and say nothing in support 
 of such miracles. All things are different from each other, — ■ 
 no two in the wide world alike ; and yet they have their laws 
 stamped upon them from creation, that under certain condi- 
 tions each shall bring forth of its own kind. Every thing 
 in God's boundless universe is "sui generis," and in other 
 words it is what it is and nothing else. And the myriad 
 of ideas that are impressed upon us are linked results of those 
 objects. It is from the necessary existence of these laws that 
 the mind can regularly step from effect to cause, on and on, 
 to the existence of a God. And it is this, and this alone, that 
 enables us to infer the future from the past, and to know that 
 we are identically what we are, and not by whim of causality, 
 another from day to day. Fearing that I may be accused 
 of unfairness in my quotations from Sir William Hamilton, 
 who, when reasoning as a philosopher, not only grants but 
 with the hardihood of true inductiveness, vociferously aflBrms 
 all I have or may say, I here acknowledge that he to escape 
 the consequences of truth like Galileo, cravens to the un- 
 founded and mischievous dogma of Christian writers, that the 
 doctrine of Necessity compromises good and evil, and destroys 
 future rewards and punishments. So that after proving 
 demonstratively that the will is under the laws of Necessity, 
 and going so far as to say that it is impossible in the nature 
 of things that it should be free, he having no argument in the 
 negative, gets out of the dilemma by bringing up a lying wit- 
 ness to disprove all his own arguments, as he says himself 
 
152 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 "unanswerable, and the contrary of which the human mind is 
 absolutely incapable of conceiving." After all this, however, 
 he closes his remarks by marshalling an empirious and para- 
 mount consciousness, which declares that we are free agents. 
 And thus it is that we are to prove all things by faith, and 
 not by reason. But it will be shown elsewhere that this thing 
 of faith or conscience is a lying scund — a mere parasite — a 
 creature of circumstances, and that we have more false faiths 
 in the various religions and opinions of the world than true 
 ones. But to be done with faith for the present, we will return 
 to the argument, upon which alone a rational and lasting 
 faith can be founded. 
 
 All actions proceed from definite and uniform laws, of our 
 unavoidable nature, and just as rational would it be to aflBrm 
 that the results or effects of will are free as that the will itself 
 is free, as it must be the subject of something that operates 
 upon it changing from time to time, and causing it to be iden- 
 ticaUy what it is. The muscles are free to act, yet forced to 
 act in obedience to the will, and the will itself is free and yet 
 forced to act by the impulse — its antecedent and prompting 
 power. The billiard ball in like manner is free to act when 
 struck with sufficient force by another, and this may strike 
 and freely move a third, and so on. But when we look back, 
 we will find that the motive put the first will in motion, and 
 that the mace or cue put the first ball in motion. As well 
 might we attempt to think without an object of thought as to 
 act without a motive to act. There is a fixed and uniform 
 relation between motive and action empirious and indissoluble 
 as the connection of cause and effect. It is a law of mentality 
 that the desire is always prompted by the motive, and deed 
 will always follow the desire, and here I make my stand-point 
 in this long agitated and perplexing controversy : one party 
 has ever contended for what is vulgarly called the freedom of 
 the will, while the other party that it has no freedom of action 
 save from an antecedent and propelling power. Both are 
 
VOLITION. 153 
 
 right, and both are wrong. Each according to their own 
 meaning of the word freedom, and I think that my position 
 and explanation will satisfy both parties of the fact. When 
 asserted by a free-wilier that we can do as we will, see proper, 
 or dispose, choose, prefer, desire, have our inclination, or mind 
 to do, he is right ; and why ? Simply because we witness the 
 unvariable result ; the deed in accordance with a menial law, 
 as before stated, following the desire. 
 
 Let us now, by familiar example and by the observation of 
 common sense, test the thing and see how it will work out. 
 The free- wilier says exultingly to a necessarian: it is folly, sir, 
 to spend your breath in the advocation of a cause so repulsive 
 to my intuitive convictions. Why, sir, I am now sitting and 
 desire to rise and walk, don't you see I can do it, and look 
 here, I willed to extend my arm, and now to flex it, and it is 
 done. Truly it is, and all according to the will or desire so to 
 do, and here rests my strong position against the freedom of 
 the will, as understood in vulgar parlance. For example, one 
 man says, the sun rises and sets, and another denies it, they 
 are both right and both wrong, each according to their own 
 meaning of the word. The sun, as it strikes the senses, and 
 as commonly understood, rises and sets, yet strictly and astro- 
 nomically speaking, it does not. The sun being actually a 
 fixed centre, and its apparent motion round the earth nothing 
 more than the earth's diurnal motion on its own axis, thus the 
 parties did not fully define their position. Books upon books 
 might be written upon the mistake in the meaning of a single 
 word or sentence, as has been done upon the word, freedom of 
 will, one party affirming, and the other denying. 
 
 If we could voluntarily act contrary to our desire or will, 
 then, indeed, would we be free, but so long as we are forced to 
 act in accordance with the promptings of the will or desire, are 
 we under the law of necessity, or, in other words, our unavoid- 
 able nature, for there is not a being on earth, brute or human, 
 but what is endowed with a susceptibility of pleasure and pain. 
 
164 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 from which necessarily arises desire and aversion, and con- 
 sequently will to do or not to do according to circumstances. 
 Thus it must now appear to every reader that there is no 
 rational possibility of a denial, but that we can do as we will, 
 please, desire, or see proper, and, moreover, that such is the 
 fixed and immutable relation or tie between desire and action, 
 that no man can voluntarily act contrary to his will or wish so 
 to do. This indissoluble link, then, between the desire and the 
 deed, being established, it only remains to show how this will, 
 the cause of all human action, is got up, and whether it be a 
 self-created, self-controlling and independent entity in violation 
 of all the laws and causal dependencies throughout God's 
 universe, or a fated link in the immutable and eternal chain of 
 causality. Will is not a real, substantial and lasting entity, 
 any more than a shadow, which has no existence seperate and 
 apart from its substance, or fever, or any other condition of 
 system that depends upon its cause. Love, though powerful 
 even to death, cannot exist seperate from the object of love 
 that begets it, and may be transformed by the force of circum- 
 stances to hatred, and so with all our other passions and emo- 
 tions, which rise and sink for ever like the ripples upon a 
 troubled stream, one hour placid and the next perplexed. 
 These ripples cannot beget themselves but are produced by 
 external causes, and just so it is with all our desires, passions, 
 and emotions of soul, which succeed each other like waves of 
 the ocean, rising and subsiding by the renewed force of circum- 
 stances. We hunger and desire food; we thirst and desire 
 water; we are kindly treated and love the object, cruelly 
 treated, and hate it. If cold, we approach the fire, because 
 pleasurable, but if we get into it we seek to escape, because 
 it is painful, and just so it is with the myriad feelings and con- 
 sequent actions throughout life, each and every object pro- 
 ducing its specific effect upon our sensibihties, just as plainly 
 as vinegar tastes sour and sugar sweet, or that calumel purges 
 and tartar pukes, simply because God has so ordered it. This 
 
VOLITION. 155 
 
 is the doctrine of fatality or necessity over which man has no 
 control, and from which there is no escape, but by subverting 
 the mandates of heaven and the eternal fitness of things, 
 
 A man to know that he acts from the strongest motive at 
 the moment he does act, has but to feel his own regrets at past 
 acts of his life, and farther to see his friends even commit sui- 
 cide to avoid a long li% of hopeless degradation and misery, 
 from irrevocable deeds which he would not for the world now 
 commit. Every passion and emotion of soul, from the fondest 
 love to the feilest hate, and from the purest feelings of philan- 
 thropy to the sordid grasp of venality, has its motive object 
 that as certainly begets the will as that the parent begets the 
 child, and the cause its unavoidable effect. Thus it will be 
 seen that the motive begets the will, and the will begets the 
 deed, and farther, that as the motive is prior to and inde- 
 pendent of the will, the will can no more create the motive or 
 author of its being, than a child can beget its parent, or an 
 effect create its cause. This, then, being a settled point, we 
 will now illustrate how it is that there can be no will without 
 a choice, and no choice without an object of choice, and as this 
 object of choice prompts the will to choose, such will cannot in 
 the nature of things be free. For example, we come to a 
 precipice of a thousand feet, to the ocean or to a great river; 
 these objects create a desire or will to avoid them. We find 
 a treasure in the road, and at once there is a will to pick it up, 
 or we are cold or belated, and see a fire, there is a will that 
 moves us to it. We are in bed and wearied with one position, 
 there is the will to turn this way and that way, or stretch 
 ourselves out at length, as ennui may prompt the will to do. 
 We sit down to eat, and this dish, that dish or other may be- 
 come the motive to action, and thus many wills be created, and 
 the many muscles of cutting, eating, and swallowing put into 
 motion. In dictating, in writing, the hand obeys the will, and 
 executes its myriad desires to the letter, but the subject of all 
 this writing and the object to be obtained was the author or 
 
156 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 parent of every thought and action, for it must be seen that we 
 cannot think without an object of thought, nor write without 
 something to write about. It has been said that in as much 
 as all men do not act identically alike from identically the 
 same given motives, that the will must have some liberty aside 
 from its motive, but a shght observation of facts will show that 
 this objection to the doctrine of necessity is a shallow and 
 glaring shift, unprotected even by the shadow of science. We 
 might, with equal propriety, say that digestion has a liberty, 
 and is not governed by necessary laws, because the same food 
 does not equally agree with, or act alike upon all men. Medi- 
 cine that claims no powers of vohtion, sees proper like the will 
 to act very differently upon different persons. A given quan- 
 tity of spirits will intoxicate one man, and not be felt by an- 
 other, and more than this, it will make some furious and others 
 friendly, shewing plainly that it is just as free as the will to 
 act by its own whims. A bubble of wind in the bowels may 
 unconsciously so act upon our nervous sensibilities, as to give 
 us sleepless and thoughtful hours, and often leads the mind to 
 deep meditation and solemn devotion. And more than this, 
 such gaseous excitations, as vulgar as they may seem, may, 
 during the silent and sleepless watch of night, fill the mind 
 with a most beautiful and poetic strain of imaginations. 
 Females, thus affected, will laugh, cry, sing, and pray almost 
 in the same sentence. This form of neuralgic influence is called 
 globus historicus, because the mind gives the feehng of a globe 
 rising up in the throat, that threatens instant suffocation and 
 great alarm. Even beggars have discovered the philosophic 
 fact of the gastric and dietetic influences upon man, and that 
 a full stomach makes a generous soul, so that they never call 
 for alms upon an empty stomach. 
 
 These things I mention to illustrate how wonderfully the 
 mind is wrought upon from without as well as from within, and 
 a volume of such secret and unobserved agencies from our 
 physical organism and internal stimuli might be given to show 
 
VOLITION, 15 1 
 
 that those operations of the mind not depending upon external 
 objects, and consequently called by authors intuitive thoughts, 
 divine monitors, angel whispers, and such like mystic powers, 
 but I will give only one more prolific source of mental develop- 
 ment. The annals of medical science show that the most in- 
 trepid heroes, and generous souls have been produced by the 
 seminal stimuli, and that quickly may such souls be reduced 
 to cowardice, roguery, and insignificance, simply by emascula- 
 tion, and history shows that the most eloquent orator, profound 
 philosopher, and divine in the world was instantly reduced to 
 demeutation and purility in this way. We may run through 
 history from the days of Solomon and David, Caesar and 
 Mark Anthony to Napoleon, Jackson, Clay, and Webster as 
 well as all others of great note, for the confirmation of this 
 fact. We may also by analogy refer to the stallion, the bull, 
 the boar and rooster for the powerful influence of internal and 
 corporeal stimulants. The mind, I have said, is a unit without 
 any of those powers, faculties, and complicated divisions given 
 it by routine copyists. But is simply susceptible of endless 
 modes of action from the impress of objects from our outer 
 senses or from organic and internal emotions. Nor can the 
 mind act upon itself, any more than a will can cremate itself, or 
 the mirror create the pictures it reflects, the paper the charac- 
 ters written upon it, or the wax the endless forms that may be 
 stamped upon it. 
 
 I have said the mind can not act upon itself, nor has it any 
 more power of self-development than the seed put in the ground 
 to be acted upon by the soul, and the nourishing and vitalizing 
 elements around. The soil has no knowledge of anything, not 
 even the alphabet of its own language, till impressed upon it. 
 Neither mind nor body have a self-creating or self-sustaining 
 sovereignty, but are both subject in common with all created 
 things to the universal, fixed, and fatal laws of causality. 
 Fever does not exist in the system, but is the product of a 
 cause acting upon it, nor is the rusty nail which produces lock- 
 
158 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 jaw, any part of it. Ideas, in like manner, are not inherent in 
 the mind, but are the mere results of things known operating 
 upon the mind, and intelligence is consequently as much a con- 
 ception and impregnation of the mind, as the child is a con- 
 ception and impregnation of the body, or the growth of any- 
 thing something actually acquired through the agencies of the 
 vital functions. All are therefore effects, and as effects must 
 have their causes. They are not the authors of their own exist- 
 ence or the first moving link in the chain of causality. In plain 
 truth, every action, change and product throughout the universe, 
 short of divine sovereignty, is an effect. We speak of causes, 
 but these causes must themselves be effects, as the father though 
 the cause of his son, was himself the product of an antecedent 
 father, and consequently an effect. 
 
 The cause of original thought is not inherent in the mind, 
 but like love and hatred, in the objects beloved and hated. 
 Why for instance does a man not fall in love with man, and 
 marry him instead of a woman, simply because the will-making 
 cause or motive power is not in the mind, nor in the man, but 
 in the woman, that no authority short of God can alter. This 
 is a fatality of God's own appointment, and no quibbling writer 
 can write God out of his rights. But the question may be 
 asked, why did such a man fancy such a woman, and the simple 
 answer is that he had a will so to do, and could not do other- 
 wise, the motive will or cause being in that particular woman. 
 Yes, but she is not to me an object of love, but is disgusting ; 
 true, but a dog will leave a bed of roses for a rotten carcass, 
 simply because it is his nature so to do; the cause of choice 
 or motive power being in the object chosen. But could he not 
 have married another woman, if he had chosen to do so; cer- 
 tainly he could, and could not have done otherwise, and yet it 
 was impossible for him to do so under the circumstances, be- 
 cause he had no will at the time so to act. A man could as 
 easily make a good bargain as a bad one, if he had a will to 
 do so, and save himself many sore regrets, but I ask the honest 
 
VOLITION. 159 
 
 thinker to say whether the present circumstances of the 
 moment did not beget the will for a bad bargain. To farther 
 show the controlling influence of motive over the will, and 
 demonstrate that the will does not beget itself, I will give an 
 additional case. Suppose, two boxes, exactly hke in all ap- 
 pearance, be presented to the mind for choice, but one is known 
 to be filled with rich jewelry, and the other empty. Now the 
 mind will be in equipoise suspense, and no choice for the mo- 
 ment can by any freedom of the will be made, but let it be 
 seen or said, in this box are the precious diamonds, and how 
 quickly does that box beget the will to take it. These are 
 simple and undeniable facts, showing demonstratively that in 
 every case there must be some motive or impulse which excites 
 the will. Yanity, ambition, love, hatred, gain, and ten thou- 
 sand other causes of human will and action are found to have 
 their governing influences over the human mind. When I say 
 to a man, he cannot raise his arm, and he in triumph and de- 
 fiance does so, my voice and the ambition excited that will, 
 which otherwise would never have existed. 
 
 Suppose a jet-black object be presented to the eye, could a 
 man, if he had a mind so to do, will or believe it white? most 
 certainly he could, if he had a mind to do so, but here as in 
 all other cases it would be impossible for him to have such a 
 mind or will without the ability to change the object itself, 
 that begets the will. Suppose again, that a Catholic say to a 
 Protestant, if you have a will, you can believe that the holy 
 faith of the Pope to be the only true religion on earth, and if 
 you do not, you shall be put to death, would this, I ask, change 
 his honest convictions, or would it give him a will to hate his 
 cruel and unjust oppressor. These facts should, surely, give us 
 a more brotherly tolerance and kind forgiveness for each other's 
 opinions, which I teach to be as variant and unavoidable as 
 our physical and mental appetencies. 
 
 I have thus somewhat digressed, in order to occupy the 
 whole of the ground, and in some instances have thought it 
 
160 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 well to pass over it more than once, in order to fix the ground- 
 rights more fully upon the mind of the reader. 
 
 There is no subject that can engage the thought or fix the 
 conviction of mankind, so firmly and so universally as the 
 consciousness of being able to do as we will or please, and the 
 fault of necessarians heretofore has been to oppose this self- 
 evident fact, for certainly we can do as we please, and cannot, 
 to save our lives, voluntarily do otherwise, and yet this granted 
 fact does not derogate in the least from the laws of necessity, 
 but, on the contrary, shows the fixed and indissoluble relation 
 between motive, will, and action. The motive having control 
 over the will, and the will over the muscles. The deception 
 here is that we only feel the last two links in the moving chain, 
 which are certainly free to move, or they would not move, but 
 we never look back to the fixed and antecedent links that 
 necessarily moves the last series in that chain. If it be said, 
 that the will is not material, and, therefore, exempt from the 
 laws of dependence or necessity, I answer that an agent as 
 potent and productive as the will must have an existence, and 
 whatever has an existence, must have come into existence, and 
 as it cannot have created itself before itself was or had an 
 existence, it must of positive necessity have an immediate ante- 
 cedent or cause that excited it for the occasion, and shaped it 
 to suit the occasion, or it is uncreated and self-existent from all 
 eternity. If the will's self-existence from all eternity be as- 
 sumed, it must be a definite character, that is, it must be what 
 it was in the beginning, and nothing else; and if of this iden- 
 tical character, it can no more alter itself, or shape itself to the 
 emergencies of life than it can create itself. Then how, I ask, 
 will this gratuitous assumption of free will apply to the uses of 
 life. From day to day, hour to hour, from minute to minute, 
 are our actions called for, according to the necessities of our 
 nature, and this unchangeable statue of an eternal will cannot 
 apply or serve our wants. It is easy for the common reader 
 to see, that if God were created, that as certainly as the 
 
VOLITION. 161 
 
 mechanic is superior to his work, would God's creator be 
 superior to God himself, who, we affirm, has no superior. It 
 is equally axiomatic that God cannot have created himself, as 
 to do so would be to suppose a thing creating itself before it 
 had itself an existence, which is the same as to say that a thing 
 can be and not be at the same time, or that it can act when it 
 is not and where it is not. Many Divines have gone so far, 
 and most truthfully so, as to say that God has not given to the 
 mind to conceive how he could himself create something from 
 nothing, and, hence, that it is most rational to suppose that 
 matter or the materials of which he has formed all things, was 
 self-existent, co-eternal, and co-extensive with himself. Then, 
 having taken from God a self-creating power, shall we im- 
 piously assign to the human mind, a created being, a power 
 superior to Jehovah, a self-creating and self-controlHng power, 
 in defiance of the laws of providence, and against all motives 
 for good or evil. 
 
 This is the naked and ridiculous position of a free-will, for, 
 if not governed by existing causes and wants that hourly assail 
 our sensibilities from without and within, it must in defiance 
 of all these potencies create its own causes. Thus must an 
 effect create its cause contrary to every principle and law that 
 sustains the harmonious universe, and leads us step by step 
 through the unerring paths of causality up to the throne of 
 God, the first and only cause of all created existences. Reader, 
 if yon will but think for yourself, these things I relate to you 
 will be too plain for the waste of words. They are God's own 
 ordinances, written upon the tablet of every mind, and where 
 not defaced or obliterated by early prejudice or obscured by 
 scholasticism and learned nonsense, stands out in bold relief. 
 I ask my reader again whether he does not know the fact that 
 the only knowledge we have of our creator is from his natural 
 and immutable laws, in other words, the unerring book of 
 nature, his first revelation, not written in Hebrew, Greek, or 
 Latin, but in a language simple and suited to all nations, con- 
 
162 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ditions, and ages. This may seem a- startling fact to the 
 ignorant, who have been deluded by theological mysticism, yet 
 it is ennobling to God, and glorious in its results to man, and 
 though not investigated by the lower orders of the clergy, is 
 advocated by the more noble and elevated souls, who, bursting 
 from their clerical closet as the eagle from his dirty cage, seek 
 God in a purer and higher sphere, far above the fettering 
 dogmas and bewildering enigmas of the Church. In the knowl- 
 edge of truth, and with a sincerity of heart, I appeal to every 
 Christian and Bible reader to answer me with an equal eye to 
 truth and the honor of God, whether he has in any instance, 
 in scriptural record, given a single argument for the existence 
 of himself. In all cases, without exception, the position is 
 assumed that there is a God, and where there is a shadowing 
 forth by reason, the appeal is to those very laws of nature 
 written in his first book of revelation (nature), which was in- 
 tended to, and does incontestably, prove his second revelation. 
 His natural revelation gives us a knowledge of his works, and 
 through them of himself, while his supernatural instruct us in 
 our moral duty, and our devotion to him. But think of these 
 things, and then how the world has been governed by opinions, 
 and then again how those opinions have been formed by assail- 
 ing and unavoidable circumstances, and you will be better in- 
 formed, and thus qualified to aid in the great cause of inter- 
 lection and of human happiness. The serpent, by assiduous 
 and wily means, tempted or persuaded Eve to the conviction 
 of impunity, and in the indulgence of this opinion, mankind fell. 
 From that hour to this, all the acts of individuals for woe or 
 for weal, and the aim, the end, and the mighty result of com- 
 bined powers in bloody struggle, huve all been from this one 
 omnipotent, yet simple thing, called will or opinion. And what 
 is opinion ? It is what every man feels, and yet finds hard to 
 define. What gravitation is, or any other ultimate fact, no 
 man has known, not even Sir Isaac Newton, yet from its gentle 
 hand upon the falling apple he traced its laws on and on 
 
VOLITION. 163 
 
 through regions far and spheres sublime, and there saw its 
 mighty grasp on whirling worlds. And just so with opinion, 
 which is a simple impression or conviction forced upon the 
 human mind by assailing and insidious influences, over which 
 we have no control, and the modus operandi, of which we know 
 but little, yet we can trace its results from the gentle smiles of 
 the little babe to the scowling and bloody passions of those 
 monsters of the inquisition. For the moral training and happy 
 government of man, then, it is all important that we should 
 understand the laws of mind, by which those opinions are 
 formed and controlled. 
 
 That our minds are inclined by something that inclines 
 them, cannot be denied, and to suppose a volition counter to 
 the prevailing inclination, is contrary to all experience, so that 
 our volitions cannot be free and independent of motives, or those 
 causes inclinations. It is by the laws of necessity alone, that 
 we can know the certainty of any thing physical or mental. If 
 the mind be left to chance the study of it, and the infering a 
 man's future conduct from his past character, is all in vain. 
 And why lecture, preach, or teach, if these impressions are not 
 to influence the mind ? The law of necessity is nothing more 
 than the law of God, established to make all things siare. It 
 is nothing more nor less than that indissoluble relation between 
 cause and effect, and but for the full conviction of all mankind 
 in the fact, and his reliance upon it, all transactions of life 
 would cease. Why eat and drink, or cultivate the soil, hoping 
 to be sustained thereby, but from our confidence in the doctrine 
 of necessity; and why offer rewards and punishments, or set 
 examples to good and evil, if there be no necessary connection 
 between these things and the convictions of the mind. We can 
 as certainly anticipate the operations of the will, when tempta- 
 tions are set to excite it, as we can the products of our crop, 
 or the explosion of powder by the touch of the spark. It may 
 not always succeed from unseen and counteracting causes, nor 
 may not powder always explode, being wet or otherwise imper- 
 
164 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 feet. The chemist, though acting upon the necessary laws of 
 science, is as often disappointed in his results from the endless 
 and unseen counteracting influences, as the man well acquainted 
 with human nature is of the anticipations of his results. The 
 physician, in like manner, is constantly perplexed and disap- 
 pointed in the sequences of his prescriptions, for though calumel 
 be a purgative, and tartar will puke, calumel may vomit, and 
 tartar purge, from some necessary existing, yet unseen condi- 
 tion of system. Constitution, temperament, and disease that 
 blunts or sharpens the sensibilities, and a thousand other causes 
 from without and within, may intervene to disappoint our anti- 
 cipations, and yet the laws of mentality are just as certain as 
 those of matter, wherein we are also as often disappointed. If 
 a rock be cast into the air, the law of gravitation will certainly 
 bring it to the earth, yet it may lodge upon some intervening 
 object, and not fall so in the like manner; if you offer a miser 
 two dollars for one, the law of motive will certainly control his 
 will to take them, but should a suspicion intervene, that there 
 is a trick in it, he will not do so. 
 
 These are no exceptions to the uniform laws both of mind 
 and matter, but the very proof of it, each counter-acting law 
 producing its legitimate effect, A feather may start in a direct 
 line in the air and yet be driven in a thousand whirls and zig- 
 zag directions ; but in every motion it has a definite cause. 
 So it is with mind: it may be carried here, there and else- 
 where, just as motives may be presented of this, that, or the 
 other strength. A man may start to a designated spot and 
 yet be driven from that spot in various directions by the cry 
 of fire, of murder, and other deterring attractive sounds or 
 sights. Here were no self-creations of will which was produced 
 by ample causes over which he had no control; and this will 
 be found to be the case in every action throughout life. The 
 will or desire is invariably excited either by external or internal 
 causes, and the action will as infaUibly and unavoidably follow 
 the will or desire to act, as the will itself follows the mo- 
 
VOLITION. 165 
 
 tive. Why then talk of a free will without motives in such 
 case any more than the freedom of the billiard ball to move 
 without a cause, when struck with sufficient force to move it. 
 If the ball, when struck, had the feeling that we have, it would 
 at once declare its freedom to move, as we do when we feel the 
 stroke or liberty given us by the will or desire to move. This 
 might seem to a careless reader a surrender of the point. But 
 not so, for I have previously granted that the action or mo- 
 tion (for there is no action without motion) is not only at 
 liberty to follow or proceed from the will, but is forced to do 
 so, and is just as much under the law of necessity, as is the 
 ball under the law of the infringing power. Let common sense 
 and the universal unity of action in the will decide whether 
 the deed does not invariably follow the desire or will, and as 
 previously stated the will itself is the unavoidable result of an an- 
 tecedent and causal motive. I will to sit, I do so ; I will to 
 rise, and do so ; I will to lift my arm, and I do so ; and will 
 to lower it, and it is done. The action quickly following, and 
 being a forced result of the will, as the moving ball is the 
 forced result of the willed ball that operates upon it. To 
 be plain, I ask, whether any man ever did an act contrary 
 to his will or desire so to do, and whether he can conceive 
 it possible to voluntarily do a thing which he at the mo- 
 ment does not want to do. 
 
 It is a common and silly remark that we do many things 
 which we do not want to do, which must be seen to be a glar- 
 ing inconsistency and a gross solecism in language. I will give 
 a few striking examples to show the fallacy of this position. 
 When a man goes to the stake voluntarily for his religious 
 opinions, it may be said that he dies unwillingly and without 
 a motive. But this, when investigated, will be found to be 
 false ; he, having a motive stronger even than the miser, who 
 exchanges one dollar for two, for he exchanges temporary tor- 
 ments for eternal happiness. Again, we set ourselves up to be 
 shot at in a duel, or walk to the gallows voluntarily to be 
 
166 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 hanged, which, when understood, constitute no exceptions to 
 the necessity of will. 
 
 It may here be taunted then, that we must prefer death 
 to life. But not so, we are forced to the gallows by the un- 
 avoidable laws of necessity, from which the poor will, this 
 non-caused and self-created being, has no escape. We walk 
 to the gallows like a man, rather than be dragged there and 
 hung like a dog, and we prop ourselves up to be shot at in a 
 duel in order to escape a greater evil : the blighting clamor 
 of cowardice and disgrace. The man who commits suicide 
 weighs his motives, and prefers instant death to a long and 
 lingering life of hopeless misery. I introduce those graphic 
 cases to show that the mind is the subject of circumstances or 
 motives that surround us and force themselves upon us from 
 day to day, and that it has no power to create, annihilate, or 
 alter these motives that beget the will and force it to action. 
 To test the sovereign power of this non-caused cause, this de- 
 ceptive sound, this wonderful thingless thing, called will, let us 
 exercise it awhile, and see what it can of itself do. Can it 
 create a desire or will ? No ; because it is itself a desire or 
 will, and not a cause, but a result ; not a principle, but an 
 agent ; the mere creature or menial of a motive. Can it create 
 a thought ? No ; nor get rid of one. Can it soothe a pain ? 
 No ; nor cure a fever. Can it put us to sleep, when restless 
 and worn-out upon our beds ? No. Can it make a blind man 
 see, or a deaf one hear ? No. Can it create a single idea ? 
 No ; no more than it can create a world. Then, what can it 
 do more than move as a fated link in the adamantine chain of 
 mental causality — the first link of which is held by the hand 
 of almighty power. And could this pigmy will sever it from 
 its divine and harmonious dependencies, all would become a 
 shapeless and melancholy wreck. In testing this creative 
 power or inventive will a little farther, we will see that it 
 cannot call up a single idea that has not already been impres- 
 sed upon the mind, through our senses by the external world. 
 
 A 
 
VOLITION. IdT 
 
 'Nor can the mind by any power of will even call up those 
 ideas at pleasure that have once been before the mind. We 
 are apt thoughtlessly to say that we can think of any thing or 
 idea we may will to think of. I think of London or of Paris, 
 for instance : yes, but London and Paris were in my mind and 
 the objects of thoughts, or in other words, they were thought 
 of before I could name them as objects of thought. 
 
 One may say I can see any object you may name within 
 the sphere of my vision, which is true, and more than this 
 such person with open eyes could not to save their lives, avoid 
 seeing. I might say to a man : "Now, think of heaven f 
 and he can not only do so, but cannot help doing so. My 
 voice having put heaven into his head, a name or thought 
 that otherwise could not have been there, and consequently 
 could not have been thought of without being there. A per- 
 son may affirm that they can think of what they please, or 
 name any person they may see proper ; for instance that they 
 will name and think of Washington ; but here as in the other 
 case Washington was thought of before they could name him 
 as the object of thought. Now, all this is as simply and 
 plainly true as it is possible for any proposition to be. 
 
 But reflect upon these facts for a moment, and you will 
 see how impossible and how ludicrous the position, of being able 
 to think as we please, is. Now I ask, in the name of common 
 honesty, can we call up a thing by its proper name without 
 knowing the name of that thing, or think of an object that is 
 not an object, or in other words has no excistence, or which is 
 the same thing, is not already in the mind, and the immediate 
 object of thought. Thus, if the reader will go on slowly and 
 carefully, he will see that it is impossible to call for a thing 
 without knowing what to call for, as to speak a language that 
 is not in his mind and of which he has no knowledge. Nor can 
 he think of a thing without having that very thought already 
 in bis mind. I have here repeated the view, and turned the 
 picture about to show the careless observer, how obvious the 
 
168 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 fact is, that we cannot create or originate any thing, and that 
 all our actions proceed from will or desire, and that will or 
 desire is begot by motives that we did not create, and over 
 which we have no more control, than the eye has over light 
 or the ear over sound, when sensitive and assailed. The blind 
 man cannot by any exertion of will see : no, or think of light; 
 yet open his eyes with visual impressibility and he cannot 
 avoid light. He then becomes the subject of this self-evident 
 doctrine of necessity. He cannot open his eyes to midday, and 
 think it or will it to be midnight ; nor can he look aroand him 
 and not have the objects that there exist fatally forced upon him. 
 
 This is necessity, the immutable and eternal law of God's 
 own mechanism ; and why eschew or impiously oppose it ? 
 
 As the words will and desire are of the same import, and 
 the term desire being expressive and less ambiguous, I shall 
 frequently use it in the course of this essay. We have all our 
 lives been in the habit of giving to the word will complicated 
 and wonderful powers, but which, when analyzed, we find to be 
 nothing more tban a simple result, the product of motive ; and 
 yet it is like all other inveterate habits, hard to be broken 
 of their faults and mischievous associations. It is this false 
 association that has produced so much bewildering, ludicrous 
 and disgraceful contentions amongst Divines in their heated 
 discussions upon the subject of will. As for example : between 
 Rev. Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Whitby, with a score of Ar- 
 menian pigmies, who have pounced upon him with their vulgar 
 prejudices and vociferous unmeanings of free will. 
 
 Presuming that the testimony, furnished the reader, has 
 proven to his satisfaction that God has so constituted us in 
 mind and body, that will or desire shall be the immediate 
 precursor of all human action from the tongue that speaks to 
 the feet that walk, and the hands that execute, we will ascend 
 one step higher in the ladder of truth. FeeUng then, that all 
 our acts are the result of will, and seeing, that will cannot, from 
 any possible contingent or law under God's universe, have 
 
VOLITION. 169 
 
 created itself, we shall next search for its cause. Man like will 
 is an active agent, yet nothing but an agent — did not orighiate 
 or create himself — consequently had a cause of existence. All 
 rational beings are moved by the impetus or force of motives. 
 We cannot voluntarily act without a desire or choice so to 
 act, and desire as unavoidably implies an object of desire that 
 begets it, as the word, "son," implies a father who begot him. 
 Trace back the death and the reproduction of man through 
 mouldering ages to the first man, Adam, or glance forward 
 through ceaseless duration to the last man who may hang 
 upon the verge of time, and there will not be found a single 
 gap or broken link in this eternal chain of causality, that 
 firmly bands God's harmonious and mighty universe. Pause 
 but for a moment, and think of these things, and how impossi- 
 ble the doctrine of casualism must be ; for if God had created 
 things contingently and allowed beings to come into existence 
 without a designated and fixed cause, the world would be filled 
 with new non-descript and motley spontaneities, without an 
 archetype and without the pale of God's government, so that 
 we are preserved only by the uniform laws of Providence ; in 
 other words, divine fatality. These are the fixed and immuta- 
 ble laws of supreme wisdom, and is applicable to mind as to 
 matter. Every motive or object of desire begets its appro- 
 priate desire, or will ; and all our movements, improperly called 
 free volitions, are as much forced as the rifle ball is forced by 
 the powder behind it. The ball has no liberty but to obey the 
 impulse, and human action has no liberty but to obey the will, 
 and the will itself no liberty but to obey the cause, the motive 
 or impinging power behind it. I will to raise my arm, and it is 
 done; I will to walk, and the limbs are put in motion. Now, the 
 motive here, whether from a banter or from the ten thousand 
 other incitements, caused the will, and the will caused the mus- 
 cular motion. The powder explodes, and the ball is driven before 
 it. In like manner, the steam is let upon the engine, and the ves- 
 sel is put in motion. But in neither case is there a self-creating 
 
 8 
 
ItO MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and independent power. But for the spark that causes the explo- 
 sion, and gives it its quickening power, the powder would remain 
 forever uuexploded and powerless. In like manner would the 
 mighty engine, the will of the vessel that sends or makes it wnlk 
 with magic power through the waters, remain a lifeless tool as it 
 is, but for the steam that is let upon it. In this case, everybody 
 looks at the astounding might of the working engine as it wields 
 the ponderous mass, without thinking of the power behind it, and 
 just so it is with the workings of the will upon the human body. 
 Every one sees and feels the energies of the engine will, without 
 looking at or feeUng the silent motive-power behind it, that be- 
 gets it and forces it to act just as it does act. We differ greatly 
 in regard to the potency of this will or engine, and the regu- 
 larity of its action for good or evil, owing to our mechanism, 
 constitution, temperament, prejudice of education, and to the 
 interminable aptitudes to the impulses of passion and of the 
 impressions that are momently made upon our sensitive being 
 through life. Precisely so with a vessel of less complicacy, 
 yet from defect in construction, or from the machinery becom- 
 ing deranged, it may go astray like the madman, and even be 
 reversed in its motion, but it is still moved by the same engine 
 without violation of principle, not being able to alter its own 
 condition. The deranged man is under the same necessity, 
 yet he is governed by the same principle as the sane man, who 
 has not a jar or a crack, or a screw loose in his system. He 
 is governed in all his various and apparently inconsistent move- 
 ments by his firm and honest convictions, or that same will 
 forced upon him by external circumstances, or excited within 
 by the feverish or otherwise disordered condition of his sys- 
 tem. Nor is there any escape from the workings of this en- 
 gine will, as long as the steam is let upon. If the steam 
 wears down or becomes exhausted, the will of the vessel no 
 longer works, and the vessel sleeps. Identically so is it with 
 miiid^ — when the sensorial power or steam becomes exhausted 
 by over-working, the engine will cease and the body sleeps; 
 
VOLITION. Ill 
 
 but the stomach, like the furnace of the vessel, being con- 
 stantly supplied by food or fuel, the. steam is again and again 
 renewed. 
 
 We cannot have a sensation of any kind, whether of pleas- 
 ure or of pain, but that there is a desire or will got up, to do 
 or not to do ; in other words to embrace or avoid. Even 
 when asleep, and the doors of knowledge are closed to the 
 external world, the laws of the animal economy are such that 
 we are stirred by functional influences to pleasure or pain, 
 and often to act as though we were awake. When the bowels 
 are disturbed, we dream of stooling; the bladder : of urinating; 
 when hungry : of eating ; when thirsty : of water and drinking ; 
 and there are many other normal and abnormal phenomena : 
 all arising from a definite organism, and the uniform and fixed 
 relation between mind and body, and which is as indissoluble 
 as the tie between cause and effect. Both in the cases of sum- 
 nambulism and somniloquism, the unconscious will, stirred by 
 internal forces, puts our machinery in motion. The sensible 
 observer may daily see that when his dog is asleep and dream- 
 ing of the chase, he will bark while his legs are in motion, as 
 though convulsed by galvanic influence. If, then, when our 
 senses are locked up and we unconscious of all around, are 
 thus forcibly operated upon without a choice or a self-created 
 will to bring about these results, is it not proof positive that 
 we are governed by the irresistible laws of our nature, ia 
 which we have no hand, any more than in the creation of our- 
 selves, or the pulsations of our heart. The internal workings 
 of our vital functions, of which we are not conscious, are truly 
 wonderful ; and here lies the secret of the various mystic sys- 
 tems, that refers all human actions, not produced by external 
 agencies through our senses to an internal and self-moving 
 power of the mind ; called by different names, as inherent or 
 intuitive conceptions, sacred monitors, angel whispers, and 
 such like. Digestion, absorption, circulation, nutrition, and* 
 assimilation, with all the sustaining and renewing both of our 
 
172 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 mental and physical energies, is carried on as well when asleep 
 as when awake, and the conservative vigilance of these vital 
 powers is the marvellous work of divine wisdom, and indicates 
 a mind of body as well as of brain. Marvellous it is indeed 
 that we may take into the stomach an homogenous substance, 
 as milk, which is itself a secretion, and it will soon be con- 
 verted into muscles, bones, cartilages, tendons, nerves, and 
 many other solids, and a thousand secretions ; all differing 
 greatly both in their visible appearance and their chemical 
 properties. The wear and tear of mind and body by day is 
 restored by night ; and the insidious and stealthy encroach- 
 ments of morbid influences are watched at every pore. Or- 
 ganic breaches that disturb the vital functions, as a cog out 
 or a broken wheel, is quickly repaired ; a wound is watched 
 and healed, and a bursting blood vessel or a broken bone is 
 soon mended. Prick the hand or flesh even when asleep, and 
 there is an instantaneous recoil ; — let us stumble or loose our 
 balance, and quicker than thought does this law of our nature 
 right us up. Indeed, we have no time to think, nor has this 
 exotic will time to create itself and to come to our aid. A 
 thousand facts of equal wonder and sure design are seen in our 
 physiological researches into the animal economy, too numerous 
 to doubt the existence of an all-wise and ever-present designer, 
 who numbers the hau* upon our head, and suffers not a spar- 
 row to fall to the ground without his notice. If these mere 
 material and tangible operations of body are carried on with- 
 out our consciousness or knowledge of their modus operandi, 
 and without a self-created will that creates these results, how 
 is it to be supposed that in the more inscrutable and subtle 
 mind we scan those ultimate causes that belong to God alone ? 
 To cover this ignorance, a thingless name and powerless phan- 
 tom has been got up in the dark ages, called will. The physi- 
 cian, when ignorant of those inscrutable workings upon his 
 patient and pressed hard for explanations, treats the case with 
 deep gravity and most learned technicality ; such as morbid 
 
VOLITION. 1T3 
 
 irritation, normal and abnormal condition of system, loss of 
 sensorial power, accumulated excitability, revulsion, transla- 
 tion, concatenation, and, above all, '*vis medicatrix natura" is 
 dragged in as the universal panacea of medical ignorance. In 
 like manner does the superficial metaphysician, when unable 
 to go back through the labyrinth and lengthened series of 
 causation to the more remote and true causes of human action, 
 most sacrilegiously call into existence a non-created and self- 
 willed being, that can with impunity violate all the laws of God, 
 sever the connection of cause and effect, render void his potent 
 and harmonious dependencies, and what is of all most wonderful, 
 in this wonderful uncaused and efficient no-cause without the pale 
 of God's government, that it can make something out of noth- 
 ing, and create and annihilate itself at pleasure ; a power that 
 no philosopher or divine on earth ever supposed God himself 
 possessed of. Hence it is that he is held to be uncreated and 
 from all eternity. This paramount God of all Gods, will, 
 however, is said to have no antecedent or cause of being, but 
 to rise spontaneously from nothing, and from moment to mo- 
 ment through our existence shaped with exact design, but 
 without a designer to suit the million of emergencies, emo- 
 tions, thoughts and actions of man as he runs the gauntlet 
 of life, and is assailed by warring elements on every side. The 
 God of the universe cannot be and not be at the same time ; 
 nor can he act inconsistently with himself, and yet be a con- 
 sistent God. But this God, will, can rise from nothing, can 
 be or not be, as it may will, without a parent will ; can make 
 incompatibility compatible, inconsistency consistent ; can move 
 by contraries, can make virtue vice, and " vice versa ;" can 
 act without a motive, prefer without a prefercQce, and choose 
 without a choice. These things, ludicrous and impossible as 
 they may appear to the reader, are actually the legitimate 
 results of the doctrine taught by free-willers. 
 
 Dr. Whitby, the great Armenian champion of free wills, 
 seeing that desire is in some way always connected with our 
 
114 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 volitions, is recreant and traitorous enough to truth and 
 sacred reason, to boldly affirm that we do not choose a 
 thing because we desire it, but desire it, because we have 
 chosen it, making the will thus free to choose without a 
 motive, or desire so to do ; the exact converse of our mental 
 process and order of exercise in willing, for this would 
 be to will contrary to our will, or chose a thing contrary to 
 our choice, or desire, in order to obtain that desire. He far- 
 ther speaks of an indifference of choice, or an equipoise con- 
 dition of mind, leaving it free to act without a choice, which is 
 again impossible in any case, for in such case there could be no 
 choice, change, or act of mind — quietude and action, or rest 
 and motion, being antagonal and incompatible. That a man 
 can do what it pleases him to do, I grant, but to say that he 
 wills to do what it does not please him to do is absurd, for the 
 very putting of the proposition at once gives a denial to the 
 affirmative answer. 
 
 In returning again to our analogies and illustrations, it may 
 be recollected that I gave the will the place of the engine, which 
 in reality is a nullity, a perfect nonentity in regard to an intrinsic 
 or self-existent power. Like the powder that would remain 
 powerless without the spark that explodes it, the engine would 
 lie for ever dead but for the vitalizing steam, which gives it its 
 executive office. Explosion is a new creation, and is neither 
 powder nor the spark, but a powerful and efficient effect, or off- 
 spring of both, and which becomes in the fated chain itself a 
 cause. And so in regard to steam, it is a new creation, brought 
 into existence not of itself, but by water and fire. Of this 
 creative power, through the influence of objective and subjective 
 unity, so little understood or applied in our investigations of 
 science, we have many examples in chemistry as the union of 
 an acid and a base, forming a saline substance, or agent, new 
 and efficient in all its appliances, and yet wholly different from 
 either of its originals. All our thoughts, ideas and wills are in 
 like manner new creations, not from nothing or from individual 
 
VOLITION. 1T5 
 
 influence, bnt is the result of the objective action upon the subjec- 
 tive, or in other words, the influence of the external world act- 
 ing upon our sensibilities, or the soul within, through our senses. 
 It was from the revivescent and plastic hand of nature in the 
 death and reproduction of organic matter in its various forms, 
 and of the new and strange productions in the mineral kingdom, 
 that doubtless gave to Zoroaster the idea of the transmigration 
 of souls, the Pythagorean doctrine, and religion of Persia. True, 
 the reader may say ; but now for its application to the subject 
 of will, to which I answer that it is by giving a familiar knowl- 
 edge of the result of those occult, and wholly inscrutable laws 
 that bring into existence such results that we can conceive of 
 the workings of appropriate agencies in the hunian mind in the 
 production of their results, and it will be found that there are 
 more things in this analogy than the giving of a religion to 
 millions of our fellow beings. And to prevent the barking of 
 cur-critics, who may strike upon a false trail, and cry material- 
 ism, I here say, that though chemistry and machinery, used in 
 my analogies, are not identical with mind and will, such analog- 
 ous principles are common to all things. Were I to say, a good 
 man and a good dog, it would not necessarily mean that man 
 was a dog, and yet little critics, fonder of controversy than of 
 truth and honesty might find excuse for a tirade of Puritanical 
 invectives upon this single point, for I have read books against 
 Locke's Metaphysics, and the Rev. William Paley's Moral Phi- 
 losophy, not a whit better founded, which only proves the fact 
 that dogs may bark at dead lions. 
 
 But to return from illustrations to the argument. You say 
 that you can do as you please. I say so too. You reply, this 
 then is surrendering the question. Yet not so, for it incontest- 
 ably confirms my position. I notonly grant that you can do as 
 you please, but I affirm, that you can not, to save your life, avoid 
 doing what you please, which is a plain proof of necessity, the 
 very thing T want. You may be determined to a vicious act, 
 but turn it to a virtuous one, or alter your wills in ten thousand 
 
1T6 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ways, and yet every act must be in obedience to the motivity of 
 will. You will to raise your arm, and it is done. I say, now 
 put it down, but you reply triumphantly, I wont do it, and so 
 hold it up in defiance of my will, but in full accordance with 
 your own will. The holding your arm up was as much in obe- 
 dience to your will as the raising of it up, and when you put it 
 down it will be from the same necessity of action following will. 
 The fixed and fatal law of mentality or volantarity is, that the 
 muscular action obeys the inflexible mandates of will. A link 
 of connection in the machinery of man may be severed, as in 
 palsey ; a screw may be loosed, or a bone broken, and in 'that 
 case, though the engine will may work intensely, the legs remain 
 still and the body unmoved. Just so it is with the vessel, the 
 wheels will not walk, nor the body of the boat move, if the con- 
 nection between the wheels and engine be cut off. This fated 
 necessity of connection as of cause and effect, or will and action 
 being established, we will look farther into the origin of will, 
 the moving engine of the human system. I have elsewhere said 
 that every rational being acted with a view to some end, and 
 that that end or object to be obtained was the motive or cause 
 of will, and that this exciting object of will bears precisely the 
 same necessary relation to the will of man, that the steam does 
 to the engine or will of the boat. The steam, though a new 
 creation, and got up to suit the occasion, is not a self-created 
 being, but is a separate entity, the offspring of water and heat. 
 The generators of the will of man are also actual objects, and 
 work just as simply and plainly to be seen as the action of one 
 billiard ball upon another in the production of motion. For 
 example, a child is hungry and sees an apple, and now the will 
 to obtain that desired oV)jcct, apple, is certainly created by the 
 apple, and the efforts that follow are the necessary results of 
 the newly created desire or will to fulfill its destined end. Now, 
 in this case, the apple as certainly created the will and the will 
 as certainly stretched out the arm, as that any one thing in 
 science is the cause of another. It must farther be seen, that 
 
VOLITION. 
 
 117 
 
 without this apple such will would never have existed ; and 
 again, that there is no such thing as steady, or living and last- 
 ing will beyond its immediate motive or causal object. Ten 
 thousand wills are created daily, and as quickly do they pass off 
 for ever, succeeding each other like waves of the ocean. Will 
 is not an entity, but simply a conditional or correlative term, 
 like hunger, thirst, love, hatred, and other sensations that con- 
 stitute neither matter nor spirit, and like motion that inheres 
 only in the moving object. Music, for instance, has no real, 
 lasting or separate existence apart from the instrument that 
 produces it. It is a mere momentary sensation or one of the 
 many evanescent modes of mind. Will, like effect, has no sepa" 
 rate existence from its cause. Every word we speak, step we 
 take, and movement of the body in the execution of our hourly 
 vocations, requires a new will generated by the object of desire 
 to do what we do. I am cold, and approach the fire, here the 
 fire creates the will or desire, and the will carries the body. The 
 mind did not produce the fire nor the will to go to it, but God 
 created the fire, and the fire created the will to go to it ; and 
 from this fatality in God's own hand there is no escape. But 
 could we not as easily have staid away from the fire ? Yes in- 
 deed, and have suffered or frozen to death, if a stronger mo- 
 tive had caused a counter-will, but no such motive having inter- 
 fered with the bent of the mind, it was impossible for us, under 
 existing circumstances to do otherwise than what we did. The 
 difficulty in understanding this subject has ever been, that we 
 feel the desire or will to act, and see the result, but never look 
 back of the will to see how it is produced. We may see a pup- 
 pet dancing, and except we look behind the curtain to see the 
 hand of design that holds the law of motion, we might suppose 
 it to have vitality and intrinsic power. To free the subject as 
 far as possible from vague abstractions and bewildering techni- 
 calities, I have striven thus, to illustrate, by familiar examples 
 of every-day life, and original, but, I hope, acceptable mode of 
 instruction. And again we may exercise our thoughts in trac- 
 
 8* 
 
118 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ing the succession of events. We see a man dead from a shot 
 and accuse the ball, the only thing seen, of the deed. It pleads 
 necessity, as being sent by a power called explosion, the explos- 
 ion accuses the powder ; the powder being innocent in itself, re- 
 fers to the spark or cap that ignited it ; the cap to the cock or 
 hammer that struck it, and the hammer to the mainspring, that 
 to the trigger ; the trigger to the finger, the finger to the tendon, 
 the tendon to muscle, the muscle to the nerve, and the nerve to 
 the will, which will is gone for ever, but could it be called up, 
 it would refer you to some powerful impulse, passion, or emo- 
 tion, that begot the will. But could not a counteracting or 
 paramount will have prevented that fatal will, is the natural 
 question of every man ; which question brings the subject in 
 all its force, fully and fairly, right up before us. I answer 
 promptly to this question, that a stronger will would as certainly 
 have counteracted this fatal will, as that the whole is greater 
 than a part, but it is equally certain that as the prompting pas- 
 sions and emotions of soul, or in other words, as the motives 
 then before the mind did not excite such will, it was impossible 
 under existing circumstances for him to have such a will, which 
 surely left him as free to follow the stronger will as a feather is 
 to float with the currents of the prevailing winds. It would 
 have been just as easy for water to run upwards, sparks to 
 descend, and rocks to float, instead of being ruled by the fatal 
 law of gravitation, as they now are, if God had so willed it, 
 but as God in his plans of creation from the motives then before^ 
 him, had no such counter will, he ordered things as they now 
 are, which renders it impossible for them to be otherwise than 
 as they are. Again, if God had willed us to live for ever, we 
 could not die ; but ah ! how in the absence of that easy will do 
 we feel the powerful influence of our fated death ! It would be 
 just as easy for to-morrow to be clear as to be cloudy, but if 
 cloudy, it will not be without a necessary and sufficient cause in 
 the unseen and unending series of ever-moving events. If those 
 who have gone to the stake had had a mind they could have 
 
VOLITION. IT 9 
 
 thought otherwise than they did, and thus have saved their 
 lives, but without being able to change the circumstances that 
 fixed upon them the death-deserving opinion ; it was impossible 
 for them to have such a mind. I think, however, aside from 
 these examples that the reader must clearly see from the very 
 nature and fixed relations of things themselves, that no change 
 of will can occur without a change in the principle or laws that 
 governs will. For instance, if a man of quick temper has his 
 face spit in, he will be prompted to strike, before he has time to 
 think, while another cowardly, or of blunt feeling and slow temper 
 having time to weigh the consequences, may withold the blow, 
 but in each case the parties were governed by the necessity of 
 their nature. And again, suppose a man starts to attend a 
 card party or a drinking club, but while on the way a thought 
 of evil consequences comes over his mind and he turns back, 
 was he not in each case governed by a sufficient motive to 
 move him, so that a first will being counteracted by a second 
 will is no proof of a self-created or non-caused will. A virtuous 
 will then that counteracts a vicious will is no less a motive or 
 caused will, and as whatever is moved, is moved by something, 
 and whatever is caused is caused by something, the will must 
 have a motive for action, and be that motive good or bad, real 
 or imaginary, for ghosts move the mind with great power, it 
 leaves the will free to act without a motive. It turns out then 
 to be simple and plain that a good end to be obtained begets 
 good will, and a bad one a bad will, or there can be no merit 
 or demerit in the actions of men. 
 
 It is granted by all sound minds in science, that the same 
 causes will always produce the same effects under the same 
 circumstances, which renders it impossible, that any man could 
 have done other than he did, influenced by circumstances as he 
 then was. It is a common, but thoughtless and false remark, 
 in the mouth of every one: well, I am sorry I did so, for I might 
 have done otherwise. One moment's thought will convince us 
 of this most palpable and unhappy of all errors. The pursuit 
 
180 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 of every man throughout life, from his cradle to his grave, is 
 that of happiness, and this arises from the first law of our 
 constitution, which God has implanted in us for self-preserva- 
 tion. He has given us acute sensibiHties of pleasure and of 
 pain, which gives us a desire or will to escape from the one 
 and seek the other, and simple arid comprehensible as it may 
 be, constitutes the mainspring of human action, and is the key 
 to the phenominal series of hfe. How, then, under this granted 
 and governing law, can any rational being involuntarily seek 
 pain in preference to pleasure, and, if not so, he certainly acts 
 at the time he acts with the best lights that he at the time 
 had, and were it possible for him to go back with identically 
 the same impressions or opinions, it most assuredly must appear 
 that the same results would occur. From the same principles 
 of our nature, it must be evident, that we would not suffer 
 under bitter and deep self-reproach, and anguish of soul for 
 past acts, if the lights, now shining in upon our souls, had co- 
 existed with those regretted acts. 
 
 Why, then, so foolishly say that we could have done other- 
 wise than we did, or that the will has power to act contrary 
 to the convictions of the soul. And now the result of the ex- 
 amples beautifully illustrate the utilitarian principles, upon 
 which my book is founded ; to wit, that, by enlightening the 
 human family and giving them a clear knowledge of the laws 
 of God or nature, and our own constitutions, and how those 
 laws or elements operate upon our sentient and percipient 
 being, that we are to obtain that quiet satisfaction and hap- 
 piness of mind, for which the world incessantly strives. Having 
 in other parts of this essay fully pointed out to man his only 
 hopes for happiness, it will not be necessary here to dwell upon 
 this point. It may be said, why educate, instruct, or admonish, 
 if all is fate and fixed by laws that cannot be altered at will. 
 But I answer that these very laws of fatality are what makes 
 us free to escape destruction or less consequences as the case 
 may be; and farther, these laws being fatal, afford the only 
 
VOLITION. 181 
 
 rational plea for instruction. For instance, being instructed 
 that water will drown, and fire burn, we keep out of them, and 
 thereby avoid the consequences; the friendly law of fatality 
 making us free to escape the more fatal law of destruction. If, 
 on the contrary, God had left things to chance or contingency, 
 instruction and knowledge would all be in vain, as founded 
 upon the shifting sands, bread that nourishes us one day might 
 prove a deadly poison by the next, and a deed of virtue one 
 hour, a vicious one on the following, so that it will be seen in 
 a single sentence that the doctrine of free will and casualism 
 would destroy all knowledge, and leave us a physical and 
 moral wreck. 
 
 The fatality, I teach, is conditional; it is this, that if you 
 sin you shall be punished. If a man be viciously taught, his 
 passions and wills will be fatally vicious; and if raised igno- 
 rantly, the poor fellow will be fatally ignorant. If Eve had 
 have believed in the doctrine of fatality, she would not, when 
 told what would be her fate, have committed the acts she did. 
 But being persuaded by the free will, devil, that there was a 
 casuality in the command that left room for escape, she, in con- 
 sequence, hazarded the happiness of all mankind. 
 
 The physical universe depends wholly upon fatality for its 
 glorious harmony and eternal preservation, and but for the 
 reliable constitution of man in his susceptibility of pleasure and 
 pain, and his steady relation to his creator, good and evil would 
 be neutralized and lost in the destructive vortex, casualism. 
 Grant the existence of a God, and his steady rule and govern- 
 ment over all things, then, indeed, will instruction in his laws, 
 for which he has given us full capacity, prove valuable to our- 
 selves and acceptable to him. In short and in plain truth, the 
 full and sovereign control of God over man, in all his ephemeral 
 and impotent movements in life, is wholly incompatible with 
 free wills or casualisms of any kind, which shows that the dis- 
 graceful wranglings and petty and puerile struggles between 
 
182 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 God and man for mastery, as taught in the duncery depart- 
 ments of theology, must be grossly and offensively false. 
 
 I will show in the close of this essay, that God has estab- 
 ished all things upon dualistic and dynamic principles, and 
 that neither free will nor any thing else in the universe, save 
 God, stands independent and alone, but all are mutual depen- 
 dencies on the one great moving cause ; — and farther, that 
 the will is nothing more than the mind, and the mind nothing 
 more than the will, when willing ; and moreover, that judg- 
 ment, reason, memory, imagination, etc., are in like manner 
 nothing more than mind in its different modes of action ; and 
 also make it plain, that the mind is a unit, and that it has no 
 power, and cannot be divided into the various parts and 
 powers given it by scholastic and routine writers. The mind 
 is simply a capacity or recipient, like the vessel, or a mirror 
 that is operated upon; the mind, like the wax, has an impres- 
 sibility for all things that may be impressed upon it. Precisely 
 as is the body that does not act upon the medicine, but upon 
 which the medicine acts. The question whether a cup of 
 strong tea operates upon the mind to keep it awake all night, 
 or whether the tea does not operate upon the mind, at once 
 gives the affirmative answer. The vital powers, so called, do 
 not operate upon the snake in case of a bite, but the snake 
 operates upon them, when it destroys them, and reduces the 
 body to death. 
 
 Fatality instructs us that we have no will to speak an un- 
 known language, yet this very fatality gives us the will to 
 learn it ; and though we have no will to cure the fever, a 
 knowledge of the fact gives us a will to avoid the malarious 
 region that would cause the fever. Fatality, farther, instructs 
 us in morals, that we have no will to save ourselves from con- 
 demnation for sin, but a knowledge of this fact gives us a will 
 to avoid sin ; — knowing that no will we can create of our own can 
 save us from punishment, gives us a will to abstain from crime ; 
 and thus it must appear to the most common reader, that the 
 
VOLITIOV. 183 
 
 doctrine of fatality is the only immutable basis upon which to 
 found a rational education ; and farther, if events could be 
 brought about without a fixed and known law of God by the 
 self-created will of man, all knowledge of the future, both by 
 God and man, would be destroyed. Arrogant and impious 
 then must be the man who aims by a self-created power to 
 resist the laws of his own constitution, and subvert the man- 
 dates of heaven. The pre-science or fore-knowledge of God 
 would be impossible, if there were other gods or men who 
 could by their own wills diange the result or destiny of things. 
 The future with God is the same as the past with men, and 
 as what has past is certain, and 'unalterable, that which is 
 to come is just as certain and unalterable with God. Now, 
 it will be easily seen, that had God left it to the whims of 
 men's wills, to do or not do independent of fixed and fatal 
 laws of his own, by which he can judge that his future knowl- 
 edge must be uncertain, for how could he be certain of an 
 event that is uncertain, or to know a thing to be that may 
 no be. 
 
 Things past, as I have said, are fatally certain, and things 
 to come are equally certain, or God's knowledge must be un- 
 certain. Man may stand in a small cercle, as within a wheel, 
 and see upon its surface, as it revolves through time and space, 
 and all will be equally distant and divisible to him, the present, 
 past, and future ; the enth'e round of the wheel being the same. 
 In like manner, God's throne being in the centre of his vast 
 universe, his telescopic eye can see all at a glance. Observing, 
 then, as we must, that God's perfect fore-knowledge of events 
 and free wills, whims, or accidents are incompatible, and that 
 the doctrine of necessity is thereby estabhshed, some have de- 
 nied to God his power of pre-science. This power, however, 
 cannot thus be got rid of, particularly by Christians, for it is 
 recorded in his book of revelation that he did predict the 
 actions of men, and brought them to pass to the letter. As 
 of his telling Moses in advance what the conduct of Pharaoh 
 
184 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 would be, and that lie would not let him depart. In short, all 
 the prophecies were founded upon God's fore-knowledge, from 
 which it must appear obvious to every man, that, if the events 
 and persons spoken of, had had a will of their own independent 
 of God's will, or known knowledge, and could act from moment 
 to moment even against all temptations, causes, or motives, 
 God could not, by any possibility, have known their deeds, 
 where they might have seen proper to act differently. Stand 
 here for a time unsandalled, for you are upon holy ground, and 
 think seriously of what you read. We can, with our limited 
 knowledge, anticipate the conduct of men, and did we know 
 them perfectly, we could present a motive or lay a bait for 
 every act of life. For instance, we know that a miser will 
 prefer two dollars to one, and that a man, who has a strong 
 propensity for drink, will take it when the temptation is set 
 before him, provided there be no intervening temptations to 
 draw his mind in a different direction. All other events of 
 life are equally certain, when understood, and why, then, say 
 that we are not actuated by motives and by laws, just as ob- 
 vious and sure, as the movement of the material bodies. We 
 will farther that will is an effect, as has been often asserted, 
 and how it is created or produced. One man calls another a 
 liar,' it creates a will to strike, but fear of consequences or a 
 regard for moral duty may be the stronger motive, and create 
 a will not to strike. A large sum of money, without fear of 
 detection, may create a will to steal, but if a high sense of 
 honor and moral turpitude, from an early and well grounded 
 instruction in religion, comes in as his stronger motive, the theft 
 will not be committed. Liquor creates a will in a savage to 
 fight, and a kind word and certain benefit to that savage gets 
 up a counter will. The inhalation of the exhilariting gas may 
 engender various wills and reveal to view the peculiar idiosyn- 
 crasy of the individual: one will dance, and another dash at 
 the audience for a fight; a third will debate most furiously, 
 while a fourth will sit silently and weep: showing beautifully 
 
VOLITION. 185 
 
 and clearly that will or desire is nothing more than an impres- 
 sion made upon our sensitive being. This subject is to me so 
 simple and so clear, that additional illustrations seem really to 
 be a loss of time. 
 
 This doctrine of necessity must show to every reader the 
 necessity of an early and deeply grounded instruction in reli- 
 gious and moral principle, it being as fatally certain that a 
 man of early vicious habits and strong passions will yield to 
 evil temptations, as one whose passions have been early sub- 
 dued, and mind elevated to more noble aspirations, will have a 
 will strong enough to resist them. Some authors, seeing the 
 power of motives over the will, have granted that the strongest 
 motive or temptation offered to the mind will move it, as cer- 
 tainly as that the strongest body in motion will overcome the 
 weaker, or that the whole is greater than a part. This every 
 honest man of clear mind, like Hamilton, is forced to allow, but 
 some, like Sir William, fearing that bugbear cry of . fatalism, 
 shift off under the cover of conscience. Fashions in education 
 are like fashions in dress, as well as in all other things. A 
 new cut may at first be uncomely, and even forbidding and 
 ridiculous, but soon, from its association with greatness, becomes 
 beautiful and irresistible over the will, and the reader, who 
 cannot see from this single example the sovereign power of 
 circumstances over the production of thought and action in the 
 human family, must be blind, indeed, to the influences of his 
 own mind. 
 
 Conscience or opinion, which in reality are the same thing, 
 are like will, not an original faculty or power, as is falsely 
 taught in all the. books on these subjects, but they are effects 
 or results, and formed and changed about by the circumstances 
 that create them. For instance, how are the consciences of 
 judges and juries formed in giving their decision in cases in- 
 volving life, liberty, and property. They have no legal or just 
 opinion, and consequently no will to act till the case is heard. 
 If the testimony be plain and positive, the conscience is clear, 
 
186 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and the will quick and strong in its decision. Here is a simple 
 case that it will apply to every opinion and act of human life, 
 and shows beyond contradiction that we are governed by 
 opinion, and that "that opinion, the father of the will to act, is 
 itself depending upon circumstances, and farther more, that 
 those circumstances are themselves dependent upon their ante- 
 cedents or appropriate causes, and so on " ad infinitum," and 
 hence, as Hamilton says, it is impossible to find the beginning, 
 one will succeeding another, and the causes of will being as 
 interminable as the sweep of time itself. It is remarkable that 
 Hamilton and other intellectual writers, men of great minds, in 
 little things should not know that the beginning is in God, 
 whose creative wisdom has called all things into existence, and 
 who gave life, laws, and motion to the aggregated universe, 
 and that all was constituted to act in harmony, and with uq- 
 deviating fate. 
 
 It is at once seen that the will or conviction of mind to 
 decide any case is not of a self-created, fortuitous, or contingent 
 nature, but is dependent upon the testifying facts that make 
 the ctise what it is, or upon impulses arising from love or hat- 
 red to persons or objects, which loves or hatreds also had their 
 foundation in the nature of things. It appears to me to require 
 but little expansion of mind to see this relation of causal de- 
 pendencies, or the immutable and indissoluble connection -of 
 cause and effect, and that the investigation of which must as 
 necessarily lead us upwards and onwards to the first great 
 cause, as the rounds of a ladder will lead us upwards, or the 
 tracing back the causality of man from son to father will, 
 through the series of generations, leads back us to Adam, the 
 first man, from the hand of God himself Nothing stands alone, 
 or has a self and independent existence, but all things bear a 
 kindred and causal relation, in time, space, and nature, and is 
 doomed to incessant and eternal succession. There is no first 
 beginning, no last end, but in God. 
 
 The mirror has no power to create pictures, but can reflect 
 
VOLITION. 18t 
 
 the impression made upon it, nor has the daguerreotype-plate 
 power to alter or obliterate, except by time, as the fading of 
 memory from the tablets of the mind. The wax, in like manner, 
 is susceptible of ten thousands stamps or impressions, but has 
 no will to resist or change them. And so it is, likewise, with 
 a blank paper, like the child's mind at birth, without a scratch 
 or character of any kind upon it, but languages and whole 
 books of science may by and by be written upon it, nor has it 
 any more power than the mirror to speak a language that has 
 not been taught it, or change the nature of things that are 
 impressed upon it. The materials in the mind received through 
 our senses may, like the materials in the kaleidoscope, be turned 
 about exhibiting endless forms, as in case of imagination, and 
 dreams by internal and functional excitations or emotions, and 
 we may even become furious madmen by disease, but in all 
 these cases the will can do no more than the mirror. The will, 
 I have said, is nothing more than a result, the reflection of our 
 sensations and thoughts, and the madman's will is just as much 
 the result of his unavoidable feelings and thoughts, as the man 
 better balanced. And if there be an unerring conscience and 
 will independent of circumstances, why ever act amiss as we 
 often do, greatly to our own disadvantage, as in our contracts 
 and other acts of life. As before stated, if cold, we approach 
 a fire, because the sensation in this case is pleasurable, but if 
 it burns us, we have an instantaneous and strong will to with- 
 draw from it, because the sensation is painful. These are plain 
 and simple facts, and apply to every act of life. If we could 
 perform any act without a motive or cause, then we should 
 have events or effects without causes, and if this be not so, 
 which is impossible, then man cannot be free. Every act of 
 life proceeds from desire, and desire indicates an object desired, 
 which object the will did not create, and consequently is not 
 free. 
 
 We hunger and desire food; thirst, and desire water; are 
 in love and desire the object ; hate, and avoid the object ; and 
 
188 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 just SO it is witli every other act of life called free-willing. The 
 mind, as previously stated, is a unit, simply with the sensation 
 of pleasure or pain, as external or internal agencies may im- 
 press us, so that all resolves itself into desires and gratifications. 
 God himself is under the necessity of acting according to the 
 nature of things, as acknowledged by Clark, Chahners, Dewer, 
 Dick, Butler, and other able Divines. For instance, God's will 
 is not self-created, or inconsistent with the nature of things as 
 he has established them, but is the result of immutable wisdom 
 and infinite goodness, and comprehension of what is right and 
 best; and truth, honor, and justice being uncreated, underived, 
 immutable and eternal, God can not act contrary to the nature 
 of these independent entities and paramount motives, for that 
 would be acting ignorantly, untruthfully, dishonorably and un- 
 justly, which would make him neutrahze his own attributes and 
 sink beneath the dignity and honor of a God. So that in ac- 
 cordance with his own nature and the laws he has stamped upon 
 all things, he is under the moral necessity of acting with an un- 
 deviating rectitude of purpose. These are august verities and 
 sacred principles, grounded in the constitution and nature of 
 things, and that cannot be denied by Christian nor by Deist, 
 and which prove that many charges in the Old Testament 
 against God — capricious, aribitrary, partial, jealous, false, and 
 unjust, cannot be true. 
 
 God^s laws, then, are not right, simply because of his authority, 
 or his having willed them, for he willed them not from any 
 arbitrary feeling, but because they were in themselves, indepen- 
 dently and eternally right. His will, then, was not a self-created 
 will, but was promoted by, and founded upon, the inherent, un- 
 created, underived, immutable and eternal principles of truth 
 and justice. One moment's reflection will prove to us that there 
 must have been a perceptive morality. We do not, then, derive 
 morality from the mere dictations or commands of the law, but 
 from a higher and anterior source, from which all law, if just, 
 both divine and human, must be derived. 
 
VOLITION. 189 
 
 After having shown, then, that God himself had a foundation 
 and reason for all he did, shall we assign to man a power to 
 originate things from nothing, and to possess a will that is gov- 
 erned by no law or rule of action, a broken link in the great 
 chain of causality and without the pale of God's government, 
 a thingless thing, and an efficient nothing and effectual no-cause, 
 that can act without a motive, choose without a choice, and 
 decide without a difference, and above all that it can create and 
 annihilate itself at pleasure. As puerile and contemptible as 
 these doctrines may seem to one who has long studied the laws 
 of God, and the phenomena of his own mind, it is not wonder- 
 ful that they should be sustained by the mystic schools of theo- 
 logy, as best suited to the various isms and dogmatisms of 
 these institutions. If will be the result of our judgment, it is 
 not free, and if determined by reason^ or the dictates of con- 
 science it is equally a result and not an efficient and independent 
 entity. We have father seen, as in the decision of judges, juries, 
 and in all other cases, that our reasonings, judgments, and con- 
 victions'of right and wrong are dependent upon the facts of the 
 case, or in the nature of things, so that it must be seen that 
 neither the will, nor the foundations of will are free ; all depend- 
 ing upon circumstances, and consequently under the laws of 
 causality, or in other words, necessity. Even after all the testi- 
 mony has been heard and a judgment formed, a speech will 
 change that judgment, and, consequently, the conscientious de- 
 cision of a jury. Where, then, is this innate and immutable, 
 immaculate and divine conscience thus warped and driven before 
 the breath of eloquence as a feather before the storm. In short, 
 if we had that infalhble monitor, maintained by model copyists, 
 we could as well decide without law or testimony, as by any of the 
 fortuitous and adventitious aids of life. I at this moment think 
 of a case which of itself is sufficient to decide the question, 
 whether we have a will, that can, under any circumstances, come 
 to our aid, or decide anything without the causes or objects that 
 creates that will. Suppose, for instance, we come to the forks 
 
190 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 of a road, (as I have often done,) of equal size, and no finger- 
 board to decide or beget this wonderful will, so independent of 
 all causes ; we have no will with us, nor can we summon it to 
 our aid, but let a man come along and say this is the right road, 
 and then does this paradeful and no caused will rise up and 
 claim the honors of an infallible guide. 
 
 If we will disregard the abstract and inexplicable refinings 
 to be found in the innumerable and perplexing books upon me- 
 taphysics and apply the phenomena of mind to the practical 
 purposes of life, we shall find no difficulty in understanding all 
 the laws of mentality, which are so few and simple, that a child, 
 as before said, may master them in a short time, and that, too, 
 by the most pleasing exercise of its own mind. But the schools 
 now destroy the mind by stupifying it with memorising abstract 
 and technical nonsense, ijistead of enlarging, elevating, and en- 
 lightning it by familiar conversations and lectures in science, and 
 upon those laws of our nature by which we are to be made 
 healthful, prosperous and happy. Our youths are not now 
 taught to get rid of local, petty, and personal prejudtees, and 
 to believe in one God, one church, and one brotherhood ; but 
 are early stultified and blinded to truth and justice by idolatrous 
 isms, schisms, and dogmatisms that seers the heart and vitiates 
 the soul, thus engendering fiendish and implacable parties, who 
 in religion drag each other to the stake, and in violation of the 
 laws of both God and man, assume the authority of God's par- 
 tial favoritism and approbation, get up bloody wars and sub- 
 vert governments, thus making man the greatest enemy of 
 man. 
 
 But to return from those reflections upon the results of 
 education to the argument, it is admitted by many free-will 
 writers, that where the mind is under a preponderating influ- 
 ence, that it has no power within itself to change itself and 
 make a choice contrary to its own choice, which in reality is 
 as impossible as to be and not to be at the same time ; but, 
 say those authors, throwing off part of their absurdities, there 
 
VOLITION. 191 
 
 are conditions of mind, as in a state of perfect equilibrium, 
 where things are equal, and there is no choice, then can this 
 will come forward and make a choice. In proof of this, they 
 offer a case that has figured through their numerous and be- 
 wildering volumes, for centuries past. It is simply the old 
 stone, balancing the grain, and they have not yet seen how to 
 do without it. This celebrated and most notorious case is the 
 offering ; the choice of two guineas to a beggar or miser, 
 wherein it is contended there can be no difference in the thing 
 chosen to create a choice. Now, the choice being made, as 
 they think, without a difference, they thus exultingly affirm it 
 to have been done without a motive or preference in the thing 
 itself; therefore the will is free to act or choose without a 
 choice or distinction in the thing chosen. Of all the puerile and 
 shallow shifts that I have yet seen in their ponderous works, this 
 is certainly most grossly and glaringly false and contemptible ; 
 for it must be seen by the most common reader that indiffer- 
 ence and choice are wholly incompatible; and, moreover, that 
 the question, when properly understood, and as acted upon, is 
 simply this — a guinea or no guinea ; for the begger or miser sees 
 at once, that if he makes no choice he gets no guinea, and as 
 there be no difference, it makes no difference which. This 
 case, well known to every man who has studied psychology, 
 actually proves the reverse of what it is intended to do, to 
 wit, — that will acts upon tire motive for action, or in other 
 words, according to the motivity of things, and the immutable 
 laws inherent therein. This proposition of a balanced or equi- 
 poised will of the two equal guineas reminds me of the Greek's 
 Jack that starved to death between two hay-stacks, because 
 his mind was thus equal, and he could go to neither. Such 
 propositions have a seeming something in them that might 
 perplex the pupil or common reader ; but it is like the question, 
 whether if one stove saves half the fuel, two, by the rule of 
 three, may not save all. These are abstruse and ingenious 
 subtilities, it is true, but profitable only to mechanical teach- 
 
192 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ers, and stupid book-makers. Bring such mystic and mis- 
 guided teachers to the light of nature, and they are as blind 
 and dumb as owls and bats. I have seen unthinking persons 
 perplexed to account for what becomes of all the old moons, 
 when the new ones appear ; a problem of equal weight with 
 the guinea question and many others that support the schools, 
 and make big books, so vague and tangled by mystic and deep 
 learning (so called by idolatrous novices), as to be as indeter- 
 minable as the tenets of witchcraft, but a short time since so 
 gravely and grievously maintained by law. 
 
 There is a grave question that has long divided and dis- 
 tracted the learned clergy, and that is still under discusssion, 
 whether concupiscence be a crime. Were it not that the 
 records are before me, it would seem incredible that those 
 archetypes of perfection and conservation of human peace and 
 happiness should not have their souls elevated above such 
 indecent, petty, and unprofitable manglings. But then again, 
 when we consider that, by throwing off all such vague and 
 mystic disputations, and reducing theology to a simple and 
 practical piety, and a pure-hearted religion, the common people 
 would understand the divine law themselves, and come in for 
 their heavenly father's inheritance without the deep learning 
 and benefit of clergy, we should not wonder at their sustain- 
 ing such subtle follies. Those contentious gentlemen might, 
 with equal propriety, get up the question, whether hunger, 
 thirst, and other passions and emotions of mind and body, be 
 crime, or whether black or blue eyes be most criminal ; and 
 whether a fit of fever, or of being ugly and deformed, be not an 
 unpardonable crime. Had they have put the question, whether 
 the indulgence in such passions be a sin, there would have 
 been some ground for a discussion ; but as the question stands, 
 it is not one worth the notice of a decent man, or one of the 
 most superficial thought. 
 
 It is a very common remark by such men, well, I would not 
 suffer such and such thoughts to come mto my mind, I would 
 
VOLITION. 193 
 
 cast them off ; such self-stultified and puerile drivellers have 
 not the expansion of the soul to know that the leopard could 
 as easily change his spots as we to cast off our nature and its 
 thoughts. Why not cast off all disease and mental afiliction, 
 and these wandering thoughts that keep us tossing all night 
 upon our sleepless beds. Say to the mother, cast off all affec- 
 tion and distress for your dying babe, and she will say in her 
 heart, you are an unfeeling fool, and so may we say to all 
 superficial thinkers and teachers who are wholly ignorant of 
 nature and of their own constitutions. I do, from the bottom 
 of my heart, pity the youths of oar country who have to 
 undergo the drudging and dwarfing influences of our present 
 schools. It is memory, memory of arbitrary nothings, till the 
 mind is actually incapacitated for those enlarged and ennobling 
 thoughts of God and of his mighty works, which alone can 
 make us wise and good. If we had schools freed from the 
 galling yoke of the dark ages, and teachers that would lead 
 their pupils out into the groves, and before the unfolded book 
 of nature their bodies would be strengthened, and their minds 
 stored with wisdom from the God of reason. If the books 
 studied in the schools be worth anything^ they are founded 
 upon nature and the eternal fitness of things, and as the mind, 
 which we carry with us by day and by night, is the substratum 
 of all knowledge, w\ry not apply it to nature itself, and instead 
 of a copy of ten thousand copies that may have been corrupted 
 by ignorance or design. To show the natural propensity of 
 the mind to pursue the laws of God, I make the following 
 quotation: — 
 
 " Iq' the pleased infant see its power expand, 
 When first the coral fills his little hand; 
 Throned in his mother's lap, it dries each tear, 
 As her sweet legend falls upon his ear; 
 Next it assails him in his top's strange hum, 
 Breathes in his whistle, echoes in his drum; 
 Each gilded toy that doting love bestows, 
 He longs to break, and every spring expose." 
 
 Lead the little child out into the meadows and along the 
 
 9 
 
194 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 purling streams, and his propinquity for nature will induce him 
 to throw aside his artificial toys, and oh, with what delight 
 will he paddle in the water, and play with the peebles. As the 
 larks skim the air before him, and light with their soft shrill 
 notes upon the tops of the waving weeds, he with extended 
 arms struggles after them, and by his joy-lit countenance and 
 ecstatic manner speaks in the language of nature: "Oh; see, 
 see!" Soon, and a child becomes an ardent florist, and while 
 yet young, might become scientific without ever looking into a 
 book, and without the aid of the degrading lash and stupifying 
 drudging of our commonplace and routine schools. A lisping 
 child may be led onwards and upwards in the laws of its creator 
 with as much delight as it is known to take in exciting narra- 
 tives, ghost stories, and things new to the mind. And should 
 it be, that by casting off the stale and mechanical details of 
 dead languages and other dwarfing studies, we too early learn 
 all that is to be learned in this world, as such teachers say, we 
 can direct the mind of the pupil from the dazzling streams and 
 verdant fields of earth to the gorgeous and glorious universe, 
 where clustering worlds in heavenly harmony roll their bidden 
 and eternal rounds. Here may science exhaust her every rule 
 and the imagination roam in these untrodden fields of endless 
 space and ceaseless time. But I would say to these nut-shell 
 teachers and pettyism preachers, who grovellingly, yet gravely 
 maintain that the human cranium, contracted as it is, may, by 
 the innumerable appartments and departments they have so 
 liberally assigned to it, have ample room for all the arbitrary 
 and unmeaning trash they have doggedly drilled and crammed 
 into the brain, and yet have room for every thing that is to be 
 learned in this world. That this assertion will stand as a 
 glaring and grievous falsehood, till we shall have learned the 
 laws of life and enough of our own constitutions to rid them of 
 all disease and bodily afflictions, and leave old age as the only 
 outlet of life, and till the statesman and divine shall have 
 learned enough of their own minds to live at peace with them- 
 
VOLITION. 195 
 
 selves, and to unite the human family in one harmonious 
 brotherhood, that wars may cease, and all mankind cry out 
 with one transporting voice, there is but one father, one faith, 
 one people, and one heaven, where God, the author of our 
 being, will be our guide and protector through the blissful and 
 unending ages of eternity. 
 
 You have a will to raise your arm, as I grant, in accord- 
 ance with your own will, biit which I affirm to be in support 
 of the doctrine of necessity. The arm, if it could speak, would 
 at once, like a ball, struck by another, having no power to resist, 
 and feeling its necessity to act, say that it could act in obedience 
 to the will, or impelling power. The ball certainly moves with 
 freedom, because it is made to move, and the will, in like manner, 
 works freely under the influence of its motive cause. The ques- 
 tion here, how did your will or desire to raise your arm, come? 
 Think a moment and the question will solve itself. Such a de- 
 sire would never have come into your head but for the word I 
 spoke, defying you to raise your arm, which fired ^ your mind 
 and at once excited a spirit of defiance to show that you could 
 and would do it. My word, there was the motive or moving 
 power, and in like manner will be found an antecedent motive 
 for every act of life. I frequently use the word voluntary, 
 when I mean necessary, for as it has been established by com- 
 mon usage, I cannot express my meaning to others, who know 
 no other language without it, and yet it is quite certain to mis- 
 lead the pupil, who has ever been taught that the word volun- 
 tary means a self-creating and self-controlling something without 
 the pale of reciprocal influences or the laws of causation, and 
 different from all other things in God's creation. If we had 
 always used the word necessary instead of voluntary, the true 
 principles of mind would be easily understood, but as it now 
 stands, it is only with the most resolute and close-thinking 
 minds that argument can counteract this false and mischievous 
 conventionalism. The rifle ball, true to its centre, can say, I am 
 free thus to drive the center as I please, could it not look back 
 
196 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 to its source, the rifle; the rifle might say, from me and through 
 me, and my mechanism was the work of perfection done, yet it 
 was only the passive instrument, for the powder, an antecedent 
 power, claims the agency; but when we come to investigate this 
 wonderful power, powder, we find that it has no more power 
 of itself than the cold iron of the rifle barrel had. The motive 
 spark that set it off and gave it all its power may now claim 
 the exclusive supremacy in the moving chain of events, but how 
 delusive again is this, for though, but for the spark no such 
 events could ever have occurred, yet when stript of its preten- 
 sions is found not to be self-created, nor has it of itself any pro- 
 pelling power. We might thus trace back, in like manner, and 
 find an interminable chain of antecedent links that fatally moves 
 the link or event, be that what it may, of which we are at the 
 moment conscious, and why then say, because of our ignorance 
 to look back of the present link, that every conscious act is free. 
 God is the author and mover of all things, and has stamped 
 upon his works a uniform and undeviating law under which they 
 are doomed to act, and though the manifestations may seem 
 whimsical, as viewed by the contracted eye of man, they are all 
 fated links in the eternal and immutable round of causality. 
 
 After this explanation we will return more fully to the argu- 
 ment. I said that my banter was the motive for you to act 
 as you did, for without it you certainly would have had no mo- 
 tive to do so. Pause here awhile, and think and watch every 
 movement of your own miud, and you will find that some sight, 
 some sound, from without, or some internal feeling begets every 
 desire and act, called voluntary. All this, I think, you will 
 readily grant, but still feel that you can do as you please, and 
 right here, rests the cruel death of millions of our fellow-mortals, 
 in this deception lurks the wily serpent of Eden, who has caused 
 all the intolerance, hatred, and persecutions of the world. Every 
 man feels, like Sir William Hamilton, though he can offer no 
 reason for it, as he himself grants, why it is that he can do as 
 he pleases, and consequently infers that his will is free to beget 
 
VOLITION. 191 
 
 its own motives and inclinations. But strange, yes, truly strange, 
 that any man of sound mind, seeing that his own actions are 
 always directed to some end, should not know that that end 
 was the cause of such action instead of referring it to casual- 
 ties that have neither motives nor ends fOr action. The whole 
 deception of this long perplexed question is in feeling the un- 
 deniable fact that we do as we are inclined, desire or please, 
 but search no farther to see why we do as we desire or please, 
 or what it is that begets that desire. As we desire to exist and 
 feel that we do exist, were it not from palpable contradictions 
 we should certainly imagine that our desire begot our existence, 
 simply because we desire to exist and do exist, just as we desire 
 to act and do act. It is this delusive feeling that begot and 
 sustained the doctrine of witchcraft, and the power of spells. 
 Desiring the thing and finding the act follow, will naturally 
 beget a belief that the desire was the cause of such act. The 
 daughter of the Governor of Massachusets, as recorded in his- 
 tory, wished that the arm of a certain young lady might be 
 shrivelled, and that her tongue might be palsied, and such com- 
 ing true, she confessed before the Court, and had her own 
 tongue bored, the least punishment then inflicted for witch- 
 craft. Hundreds have confessed their guilt before the wise 
 courts of England and suffered the dreadful ordeals of fire and 
 water, showing how necessary it is to guard against our false 
 and imaginative feelings. Amongst the last prominent cases 
 brought before the Court of England was one of a poor old 
 woman, who was formally arraigned before Lord Mansfield, and 
 though the facets were plainly proven by the most respectable 
 witnesses, that she had been seen riding through the air upon a 
 broomstick, he humanely let her off, by granting that the re- 
 spectability of the witnessess proved the fact beyond contradic- 
 tion, yet that there was no law to prevent any one who might 
 see proper, to ride through the air upon a broomstick. 
 This case may be found among many others of similar 
 character, amongst the records of the Courts of Great Britain. 
 
198 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 Sight-seeings, great revivals, and stampedes amongst men as 
 well as horses all proceed from the same false feelings, A 
 feels that B has wronged him even to death, and B, having the 
 same feeling towards A, they seek each other's lives, proving 
 a deception in that divine and unerring conscience so highly 
 extolled by authors, and which every man unfortunately feels 
 to be a divinity within him that justifies the cruel persecution 
 of identically the same unerring divinity in others. Ignorant 
 as we are in the science of medicine, when a patient dies of 
 fever, we grant that the fever killed him, yet we-do not think 
 the fever self-begotten, but look beyond the active and efficient 
 cause of death to an antecedent or remote cause, that begot 
 the fever, just as we would to the rusty nail that lacerates the 
 nerve, but which is not to be found in the muscles that lock 
 the jaw in death. We cannot deny that will or desire is the 
 proximate cause of every act, yet if we look back whether in 
 every case we see it or not, we are forced by every sound rule 
 of induction and the granted laws of science to admit an object 
 of desire, as the antecedent and ample cause of desire, which 
 shows the will to be an effect, and consequently, like all other 
 effects, an unavoidable result, and not a cause, yet like fever 
 that kills it in turn becomes an efficient and proximate cause 
 of all our desired and willing acts. Thus, then, we see that the 
 motive begets will, and will begets action, and this, in reality, 
 simple and short as it is, is the sum total of a question, upon 
 which thousands of books have been written. The reader must 
 here take particular notice of these connections, and by practic- 
 ing his own mind, will discover the fact that such is the estab- 
 lished relation between desire and deed, or will and action, that 
 the moment we desire to act, the nerve of connection with the 
 part conveys the power to the muscle. If a sensitive and high- 
 toned man be called a liar and a coward, the will to strike is 
 at once excited, the spark is put to the powder, and as quick 
 as a flash it passes from the pan to the rifle barrel to send the 
 ball ; — does the nervous fluid fly from the brain to the arm ? 
 
VOLITION. 199 
 
 We will or desire to walk, and the legs are put in motion, one 
 moving alternately before the other, — the mind now commands 
 the legs to stop, and more certainly than a master command- 
 ing a servant, do they obey and stop. Yet the mind is as 
 separate an existence from the muscles and body, as the master 
 is from the servant, and the connection that God has seen 
 proper to establish here is only to serve our present domestic 
 relation in life, and when that relation shall be severed, the 
 mind will exist as independent of the body, as the master when 
 separated from the servant. To witness with what marvellous 
 skill the great designer has established will and action, exercise 
 your mind upon the various muscles of your body. Will to 
 flex or extend any one finger fixed upon, and it is instantly 
 done, showing incontestably a mental control over our locomo- 
 tive and procuratory muscles. God, however, has wisely severed 
 the action of the heart, and all our vital organs from any tam- 
 perings of the will, and endowed them with separate and more 
 inherent energies. Here is actually a universe of dynamic and 
 normal forces with vitalizing and renewing powers of which we 
 I are wholly unconscious, and through whose dominions our in- 
 » tellectual and telegraphic messengers pass from our censorium 
 ' communi or head office to their destined points of execution 
 without interruption. From this short excursion after collateral 
 and amusing facts, we will return to the argument. We have 
 seen that motives have a full control over our desires or will, 
 ..iand that will has a like control over our voluntary or motive 
 muscles, and analytically or synthetically, there is nothing 
 more to be found in this mighty question about the nature of 
 ;/ volition. Let us try the power of motives a little farther, and 
 I test whether our assertions be correct. Suppose yourself sitting 
 jl in a house, and it takes fire, and the flames envelope you, would 
 I it not prove an ample motive or a sufficient power to put your 
 j legs in motion to escape. I hardly think you will deny it, and 
 if not, the question is at an end. You may answer, yes, it 
 certainly was a sufficient cause, but I was at liberty to stay 
 
200 MAN FROM HIS CPwADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and perish in the flames, for many a martyr has gone to the 
 stake voluntarily and been burnt. True, but these are cases 
 full in hand to prove the power of motive and the doctrine of 
 necessity. You could have been consumed, had you seen proper, 
 but it is certain you did not see proper, and now we turn the 
 key that shows the mighty secret. It is, why did you not stay 
 and be consumed ? and as an honest man you answer, because 
 there was no motive to do so. No motive — true — true — yes, 
 true as that there is a God in heaven, and that he has estab- 
 lished his laws, mentally and physically, upon fixed and im- 
 mutable principles, that cannot be subverted by casualties or 
 the whims of man. It was as impossible for you to stay with- 
 out a motive, as to fly without wings, the stronger motive as 
 certainly controlling your will, as the heavier body will turn 
 the scale. The weight in your case was in the scale of self- 
 preservation, and it turned you out of the house and saved 
 your life. But you say, many a martyr has gone voluntarily to 
 the stake to be burned, which is true, and many a man has 
 walked voluntarily to the gallows to be hanged, not that he 
 preferred death to life, but there being no escape, the stronger- 
 motive to die like a hero, rather than be dragged up and hung 
 like a dog prevailed. The man who goes to the stake might 
 escape, but he goes there selfishly and under the same motive that 
 induces a miser to exchange one dollar for two. The martyr simply 
 exchanges temporal for eternal happiness, and instead of getting 
 two for one, as in the case of the miser, he expects an hundred-fold. 
 Perjury to a false faith might release him to a life of disrespecl; 
 and self-reproach, and at last sink him down to the undying 
 torments of hell ; all of which calculations come in as motives 
 to sustain him in his trying but momentary struggles. I could 
 not select a stronger case to show the power of motives, and 
 how the stronger motive will always prevail, even unto death. 
 Thousands upon thousands of the superstitious, have starved, 
 and maimed themselves to death under the powerful motive 
 of rapturous and eternal joys. The man who commits suicide, 
 
VOLITION. 201 
 
 has an overwhelming motive to get rid of some agonizing dis- 
 tress and hopeless despair. The poor drunkard, whose gastric 
 and nervous influences are aggravated to an insufferable ex- 
 tent, might seem to act upon reverse principles in seeking 
 temporary relief to the hazard of permanent disgrace, want, and 
 squalled misery; and yet, his motive acts are perfectly legitimate. 
 He bears with the urging wants, and with his sinking spirits, 
 till his feehngs are overwhelmed by a depressing melancholy 
 that obscures the future. Besides a pri(ie and self-vanity, 
 which blinds us from seeing ourselves as others see us, and 
 then that blessed hope, delusive as it may be, that buoys us 
 up through life, comes in and sustains him with a belief, that 
 he will not go like others, and by relieving his agonies for a 
 moment, he will not loose the resolution that is ultimately to 
 reform him. Under a clear sky, however, he sees himself mir- 
 rored as he is, when he shudders and shrinks with horrors from 
 the sight, and then it is that he takes Bible-oaths and tem- 
 perance pledges ; but soon again, dark clouds overhang his 
 ill-fated star, inward storms arise and our poor, frail, and af- 
 iiicted brother feeling what we cannot, the irrepressible mon- 
 ster gnawing at his heart's strings, yields his every earthly 
 prospect and becomes the raving maniac, or a mournful 
 melancholy seizes upon him, and depresses him down to hope- 
 less despair. He, under these circumstances, takes palliating 
 draughts, just as one suffering under an excruciating and in- 
 curable malady, is prone to do. Here is a case that shows 
 the necessity of an early and well-grounded education in sober 
 'and steady habits, and in a knowledge of our constitution of 
 mind and body, and the laws of nature, under which we "live, 
 ^move and have our being." If, instead of spending our lives 
 in the study of dead languages and clogging our brains with 
 a chaotic mass of other such trifles as ignorant and presumptu- 
 ous dogmas and isms in religion, we were put to early training 
 in the active and efficient laws of nature that hourly act upon 
 our sensibilities for weal or for woe, education, instead of be- 
 
 9* 
 
202 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ing pedantic and degrading to humanity, would become elevat- 
 ing and ennobling. And thus, instead of making an arrogant 
 and supercilious display of a vascillating and artistic nonsense, 
 we should be well grounded and wise in the immutable and 
 eternal laws of our Creator. Were thus this the case, and 
 nine-tenths of our canting demagogues, who are more corrupt 
 and wily than the devil himself in sowing the seeds of Jacobin- 
 ical corruption and dissipation, made inmates of our peniten- 
 tiaries, there would yet be some hope of reform from the 
 threatened destiny of man, and the pending dissolution of this 
 happy government. 
 
 But to return again from results to the argument. You 
 have said that you could have sat in the burning house and 
 been consumed, if you had had a mind to do so ; but I say it 
 was in the nature of things impossible for you to have such a 
 mind, and therefore impossible for you to do otherwise than 
 you did. In recurring to the more powerful passions and 
 emotions of soul that absorb every other feeling, and that 
 often leads us as blind captives to disgrace and misery, I will 
 mention a clergyman of my acquaintance, who having no reso- 
 lution to restrain his amative propensities, and believing that 
 even concupiscence was a sin, liis motive for honor, virtue and 
 religion was so powerful as to enable him to take the knife 
 and emasculate himself. Under an all-absorbing passion of 
 revenge, men often take life, and then, under a change of feel- 
 ing, equally uncoutrolable, they destroy themselves ; a horrid 
 act which no one would commit had he power to feel or do 
 otherwise, for he could not desire death but as a dreadful 
 alternative from greater evils. 
 
 A very common argument in favor of free wills is this — if 
 persons cannot control their will, why should every body think 
 so, and blame them for their acts. The only answer to this 
 seeming something is, that the error lies in our own selfish sensa. 
 tions, so much so, that we hate every thing which gives us pain, 
 or that is even unpleasant to our sight, and hence it is that we 
 
VOLITION. 203 
 
 kill snakes that are not accountable for their nature, and hate 
 and punish many a poor creature because uncomely to our sight, 
 or round counter to our feelings. God has implanted in us the 
 pleasure of sexual connection in order to propagate and per- 
 petuate his works, and then a principle of self-defence to pro- 
 tect and sustain them. This principle is sensation in the 
 voluntary muscles, and technically, the " vis medica.trix naturae," 
 in the vital and involuntary functions, which guard us under all 
 circumstances, whether asleep or awake. Hence it is that a 
 blow aimed at the face, though known to be in sport, causes 
 the eye to close and the body flinch, before there it: time to 
 think, and contrary to all efforts of will. Prick the hand, or 
 apply a spark when asleep, and it consciously flinches from the 
 threatened danger. The portending evil from the fire of guns 
 or the peals of thunder startle us, and horrible sights mar every 
 feeling of the soul. Any thing that obstructs our view to hap- 
 piness, or excites painful sensation is at once hated, and hence 
 the unreasonable prejudice against the innocent vessel out of 
 which we have taken medicine when sick, and the unavoidable 
 disgust at serving of soup in a night-vessel, though equally as 
 clean and. as pure as a china tureen. We cannot avoid hating 
 the looks of a man scabbed all over with small-pox, or leprosy, 
 or any deformity, though such unfortunate persons cannot help 
 it, and so with every object of life, our fancies, our loves, and 
 hatreds, not necessarily being founded in justice, but in our own 
 feelings that arise from our individual and varied organizations, 
 sensations, and aptitudes to impressions made by the objects of 
 sense, or arising from our emotions within. Were love and 
 hatred bestowed upon merit, we should have more happy 
 matches, and men of moral worth would fill the offices of gov- 
 ernment, instead of canting demagogues, who cater to the lowest 
 and grossest prejudices of the masses, who are led astray by 
 those very feehngs that I am combatting. Hasty and inconsid- 
 erate persons will take up and brake an innocent stone against 
 which they have stumpted their toe, and the poor and undefend- 
 
204 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ing brute is unmercifully beaten because unable to bear the 
 burden imposed upon him, but this resistance of ours is no proof 
 of a just foundation in the nature of things. It is a common 
 expression, I hate such a person, or an offending object, not 
 from any merit, or demerit, or willful act, but simply because 
 such are our feelings and hatred to all who do not act in accord- 
 ance with our wishes. Let any man try whether he can keep his 
 own temper in riding a stumbling horse, where it is obvious the 
 animal cannot help it, and he will find that his flash of passion, 
 and the application of his lash to an unavoidable act, was actu- 
 ally simultaneous with the inoffensive offence, and before he had 
 time /to think or reason upon the injustice of his own conduct. 
 I once rode a blind horse on a journey, not knowing him to be 
 go when starting, but thought it a happy mishap that would en- 
 able me to school my quick and unhappy Irish temper, that had 
 led me into many difficulties before I had time to think and 
 honorably get out. But to the point. The poor horse was old, 
 and stiff as well as blind, and withal, was much afflicted with an 
 apothetic and imperturbable temperament, requiring the usual 
 antidote of spurs. So down he often went, and as often was, 
 the remedy appHed, till by piteous groans I was induced to dis- 
 mount, and then, seeing the sweat of toil and blood of cruelty 
 dripping from his sides, when a new feeling, that of shame and 
 self-reproach, came over me, when a tender pity instead of a 
 cruel reproach possessed my soul, and a new motive was got up 
 to throw my spurs from me, and a pardon which the injured 
 creature could not receive I referred to the great fountain of 
 love and mercy, who, I hope, did grant it upon the plea of 
 ignorance. Notwithstanding all this, however, every stumble 
 after, as quick as a flash of lightning, came a flush and burning 
 to my cheek, before I had time to think, showing that unavoid- 
 able things, as well as avoidable, when they bring pain upon us, 
 get up at once a feeling of resistence, and, on the contrary, when 
 they give us pleasure we desire to embrace them. So that we 
 will see from the ever varing counter currents and emotions of 
 
VOLITION. 205 
 
 our own minds, that we should be cautious how we inflict cruel- 
 ties upon our fellows, who it is impossible, in the nature of things, 
 can feel and think with ourselves, or act to please us. The im- 
 partial observance of such facts, then, as I have related, must 
 clearlyconvince us, that though God has endowed us with watch- 
 ful feelings of self-preservation, and a hatred to everything that 
 runs counter to our interests ; that it requires close guarding 
 not to become the instruments of great injustice, and the de- 
 stroyers of others rights. He has also given us fire and water 
 as blessings, when properly used ; yet if not strictly guarded, 
 they may become elements of destruction. It must appear, then, to 
 the observing reader, that 'we are governed by circumstances, 
 and, farther, that we are made to differ as much in mind, as we 
 do in body, in constitution, in temperament, in health, and in 
 the various vicissitudes of fortune and afflictions of hfe, all 
 which tend unavoidably to form the character of man. Our 
 feelings, thoughts, and emotions of soul are as diversified as the 
 objects that surround us, every new scene in nature, and all the 
 changing events of hve, develope in the human mind their appro- 
 priate feelings and affections. The fondest love and the fellest 
 h^'te, may, alternately, possess the same soul, while the most 
 jalignant revenge may be quickly followed by remorse, humility, 
 jpentance and forgiveness. 
 
 ' How, then, in the face of all these facts, can any author 
 r aintain that we are not influenced by circumstances, but that 
 we have a divine, instinctive and unerring conscience as a 
 guide and a will to execute, that is above circumstances, and 
 w^hich can bring the thoughts and movements of all men under 
 one undeviating rule and standard of action. We hear such 
 men constantly saying, '* Well, I would not let such and such 
 feelings trouble me." The mother is told to dry up her tears, 
 and to consider the loss of her child a blessing. The lover is 
 a fool for entertaining such frivolous and childish passions j 
 and the man who has lost his all on earth, is weak to permit 
 a regret to enter his mind. Such ignorant creatures are doubt- 
 
 1^ 
 
206 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 less honest enough in their soothing injunctions, but they 
 certainly fly directly in the face of both God and man, in at- 
 tempting to subvert the established and undeviating laws 
 of mentality, that can no more be severed from the circum- 
 stances that beget them, than effects can from the causes which 
 produce them. Just as rational would it be to say to a man 
 whose hand is in the fire, "Why, my dear sir, I would not al- 
 low the idea of pain to enter my head, but sum up resolution, 
 and consider the feeling pleasurable;" or to admonish a hungry 
 man not to allow so vulgar a thing as the stomach to control 
 his feeHngs. 
 
 But still you will afl&rm that you can do as you please, and 
 so I say ; and farther, that you cannot, to save your life, do 
 otherwise than as you please ; for then, indeed, could you will 
 to be free to act contrary to your will, or in other words to 
 all the motives and feelings that beget will. To say that you 
 can do as you please, is exactly the same as to say you can be 
 pleased with what you are pleased, will as you will and do as 
 you do. This is certainly talking nonsense and saying nothing 
 in favor of free will, or well got up without a cause or motive 
 to act contrary to what we please. Pause, and think tVis 
 over and over till by and by you will see it clear enough, tly"- 
 there is no voluntary act of life without a desire to act ; ail 
 farther, that desire cannot exist without an antecedent, t 
 object of desire ; and again, that the mind can no more alt;',r 
 the nature of that motive or object of desire, or avoid its im- 
 pression, than it can alter the nature of a red hot iron npplied 
 to the surface, or avoid the pain resulting therefrom. But \^ e 
 constantly feel that we can do as we desire, upon the application 
 of the object of desire, just as we can feel as we feel upon the 
 application of the red hot iron, they both bring results, and as 
 unavoidable as the impression of light when it flashes upon 
 
 the eye. 
 
 How the will can be both the determiner and determined, 
 I cannot'conceive. Again, for the will to change itself from 
 
VOLITION. 201 
 
 itself, and make itself what by nature itself is not, is equally 
 difficult. And again, for the will to rise without an object and 
 fit itself to an object of action without any necessary connection 
 or causal dependence upon that object, is, if possible, still more 
 absurd. The will to change itself from itself, must make a 
 change in itself, and consequently leave itself not itself. So 
 we see, that, by the mutation of selfwills, would the identity of 
 mind soon be destroyed, as for a thing to change from what it 
 was, is to be no longer the same that it was. How a will can 
 will a will into existence for a particular purpose, without a 
 purpose or motive to will, is again wholly incomprehensible. 
 If the will be determined to a certain purpose, it must be by- 
 something that determines it to that purpose, which determiner 
 is assuredly the motive to action, and nothing else. There 
 can be no voluntary action without a will to act, and no will 
 to act without a choice or object of action. So that it must 
 be found that the object is the foundation, both of will and 
 action. There being a preference in every active will, that 
 preference is the cause of action, otherwise we must prefer 
 nothing to nothing, and as such preference exists in the quality 
 and nature of things themselves the will has no independent or 
 self-creating powers, that which fixed and determined the mind, 
 being just as independent of the mind, as the medicine wh'ch 
 acts upon the body is independent of the body. To say that a 
 man can will as he wills, or choose as he chooses, or that he 
 can follow his own inclinations, is the same as to say that a 
 man can grow as he grows, die as he dies, or that water can 
 run the way that it does run or is inclined to run. And to 
 say that a man can act contrary to his prevailing inchnations, 
 is to say that we can choose contrary to our choice, or prefer 
 contrary to our preference, or that a thing can be diflfereot 
 from what by nature it is. The mind has no more power to 
 cause itself to prefer contrary to its preference, or to prefer and 
 not to prefer at the same time, than it has to cure a fever, or 
 mend a broken leg, or to be and not to be at the same time. 
 
208 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 He simply has power to do as he wills, but has no power over 
 his will to do what he does not wish to do. According to the 
 free will doctrine, the good will, in order to get rid of the ill- 
 chosen will, determines without a motive or choice to get up a 
 will without a choice, or to annihilate itself till it can consult 
 with itself upon the best choice. They talk about one will 
 suspending another will, but this again must be found grossly 
 absurd. Suspension and action being as incompatible as motion 
 and rest, for in that suspension there can be no change of will, 
 and change and action being the same, there can be no action, 
 good or bad, attending a suspension of will. Now, as it has 
 J)een shown that all wills spring from motive or design, these 
 motives or objects of design exist without and independent of 
 the will, or the will before it can will must will to give itself 
 a motive to will — which power must be a creative power — no 
 such motive or object having existed previous to such will. 
 And thus it is seen that these free wills are free Gods without 
 God's government and beyond the sphere of his causal de- 
 pendencies — that they are governed by no fixed law or rule 
 of action, and what is more startliog still, is that they give 
 the lie to God's revealed word, that he is the author of all 
 things and the law-giver and ruler over all things by fixed and 
 undeviating principles. Thus we find that the doctrine of free 
 will is encumbered with a thousand vague and selfcontra- 
 dictory assumptions, logomachical quibbles, and shallow shifts, 
 at war with nature, while that of necessity being founded upon 
 the immutable and eternal laws of causality is as truthful, 
 simple, and comprehensible as nature itself, being nothing 
 more in reality than a conformity to the universal aptitud j, 
 fitness and causal dependencies of all things as founded and 
 fixed by the hand of Almighty God himself. 
 
 A few illustrations will show how simple it is to have our 
 wills excited by the things we will to do. Suppose a desire 
 or will comes up in the mind from some prevailing cause to go 
 and see a neighbor, how quickly will the legs be put in motion 
 
VOLITION. 209 
 
 to do so; but if told by the way that the friend is not at home, 
 which fact the will has nothing to do with, yet this fact at 
 once creates a will for a counter-movement, and just so with 
 all the acting, counter-acting, and checkered movements of 
 life ; the nature, or quality, or inducement of the thing 
 presented for choice being the cause of will or motive of choice, 
 having neither room nor apology for self-created wills, inde- 
 pendent of, and holding no necessary connection with the 
 properties and nature of the things themselves. This is all 
 natural and easy, while the idea of the will creating the 
 quality sought by the will, and then creating another will to 
 obtain that quality, is complicated and unnatural. In farther 
 illustration of how wills are got up, I say to a man, sir, you 
 are not free to get up and walk, this, at once, creates an am- 
 bition, will or desire to walk, and he does so, falsely feeling 
 that the will was got up by himself, when, in reality, that will 
 was the necessary result of my banter, for no such will would 
 ever have existed, or such movement have taken place, but 
 for that banter. The very expression of a man, that he is 
 free and can do as he pleases, at once betrays the fact that he 
 is already possessed with a feeling inclination and ambition 
 to do so, which feeling, inclination and ambition are not 
 inherent qualities, or veritable things in the mind, but mere 
 conditions or modes of mind, produced by the inherent 
 quality or nature of things that operate upon the mind. 
 The mind of a man may be in a perfectly pacific mode or con- 
 dition, and he is called a liar and thief, and the mind is at once 
 agitated and bellingerent in its feeling, not from anything in-, 
 ternal or from nothing, take notice, but from the words 
 spoken. Here were no self-creations of words or thoughts ; 
 but you will say, now is the time to show that a man can do 
 as he pleases, strike or not strike in revenge, and I will agree 
 with you that he can, as he may please, strike or not strike ; 
 but his being pleased to act or not act, is to be the result of 
 agencies, over which he has no more control than he had over 
 
210 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 the words which excited him. If by constitution he be apa- 
 thetic and cowardly, or if by education he is in principle op- 
 posed to vulgar conflicts, he will not resist ; but if on the 
 contrary, he, by his unavoidabable nature, has an irritable 
 temperament, and has by his education a different view of 
 what constitutes honor, and obtaining chivalrous cast in society, 
 he will certainly, if not a coward, strike. All the temptations, 
 passions, and emotions of soul, are alike governed by their ex- 
 citing causes. The best tobacco in the world offers no temp- 
 tation to me ; and where then the virtue in me, for avoiding 
 both it and spirits, for which I have^ as little desire. 
 These are, however, irresistible temptations to others, when 
 no counteracting inclination prevails. I cannot help, from my 
 nature, but dislike both whiskey and tobacco, while others 
 cannot, from their nature, avoid liking both. And now it 
 will be seen, that the mind is governed in the exercise of faith 
 by abstract things, just as our desires are by concrete things ; 
 and it moreover must appear, upon investigation, that there 
 is neither merit nor demerit in faith ; for where the merit in 
 believing that which we cannot help but believe ; and where 
 the demerit in disbelieving that which it is impossible to be- 
 lieve For instance, that two and two make four, carries a 
 conviction to the mind that cannot be resisted, while the asser- 
 tion that two and two make six, conveys as irresistible a dis- 
 belief; and these simple facts and illustrations show the 
 principles upon which all faith is founded. There is every 
 degree of natural organization and temperament, every degree 
 of education and of maturity and experience in Ufe, every de- 
 gree of circumstances that hourly impress us ; and there are 
 endless vicissitudes of fortune and aflQiction moulding us to 
 the necessity of the case. Sore afflictions beget sadnesis, 
 sonow and sighing, while the flush of fortune and buoyancy 
 of health produce mirth and laughter, and these vascillations 
 of soul are the necessary results or effects of their appropriate 
 causes. The Protestant and the Catholic who go to the stake. 
 
VOLITION. 211 
 
 and the Hindoo who is crushed under the wheels of Jagger- 
 naut, ai'e governed ahke bj their unavoidable faith, and each 
 are entitled to equal merit, if merit attaches to that which it 
 Is Dot in our power to resist ; so that the man who believes 
 either in religion or in the common affairs of life, is upon a 
 footing with him who unavoidably disbelieves. Now, though 
 a man cannot help his belief, we hate him for it, and even put 
 him to death, because his unavoidable faith runs counter to 
 our own unavoidable faith, and lessens our interests and pro- 
 spects of happiness, here and hereafter. We hate a disagree- 
 able sound, and things that are unpleasant to sight, smell, 
 taste and touch ; and even hate a man because he is homely 
 or loathsomely ugly, while we love those who are beautiful 
 and charming, though we know they cannot help their nature, 
 and that they have neither merit nor demerit in them. These 
 illustrations I introduce to explain the constant question 
 asked — why are people punished? and everybody think they 
 ought to be punished if they could help the belief, or faith, for 
 which they are punished. Though it is impossible that God, 
 without violating his attributes of love and mercy, can punish 
 us for an honest belief, yet it is necessary that man should 
 punish man with a view of reform in himself or example to 
 society, or confine him to avoid evil to others ; just as we 
 would kill a snake, shoot a mad dog, or confine a madman,, 
 though all of them act under their unavoidable nature, and 
 the injurious power of circumstances. Punishments and ex- 
 amples have their necessary influences upon us to do good as 
 well as evil, and hence the consistency of punishment under 
 the law of necessity. A man who knows he will be punished 
 for certain acts, will be necessarily impressed with the fact, and 
 the fear which counteracts the temptation to indulge. Know- 
 ing, for instance, the fatal fact that fire will burn and water 
 drown, will deter us from running into them ; so that it will 
 be seen, as before examplified, in the early part of this article, 
 it is the doctrine of an early and well grounded education in 
 
212 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 whatever direction we wish the youth to be guided ; for be 
 assured that education has as powerful a government over the 
 youthful mind, as the reign has over the guidance of the 
 horse. 
 
 A man, I repeat it, can certainly do as he pleases, and he 
 cannot do otherwise ; but in every feeling of pleasure to act, 
 there is a sufficient, and consequently necessary cause of pleas- 
 ure, which cause is not the subjective mind, that cannot act 
 upon itself any more than a stone can act upon itself, but is 
 without the mind, and an object of desire by the mind, which 
 two, v/hen brought into contact, create a new condition of 
 soul (this pleasure we so much harp on) to act. This is 
 simple, and in full harmony with the universal laws of cau- 
 sality, while for a thing to operate upon.atself and bring forth 
 a new creation within itself, without materials on which to 
 work, is complicated and incomprehensible — yes, impossible. 
 How one thing can operate upon another, everybody can un- 
 derstand, a-s an acid upon an alkali or salifiable base, where 
 the product is a new creation by the union and combined 
 agency of them both ; nor is there a conception, action or pro- 
 duct of any kind, mental or physical, short of God himself ; 
 but what must proceed from the fixed and unalterable laws 
 of dualism. It is just as reasonable to suppose that the mind 
 has made itself, that it can resist the tragical scenes, and un- 
 numbered fluctuations and afflictions, yes and even death it- 
 self, to which it is fated in time, as to say it can create or 
 originate ideas within itself If the reader will reflect a mo- 
 ment, he will see that this would be to make something out of 
 nothing ; a thing I have said, and say again, is impossible. 
 If a man's thoughts and desires have an existence, they either 
 came from something or from nothing ; and as they invariably 
 come fitted to some object, end or desire, such object or end 
 of desire must have been the cause of that desire. It is just 
 as simple and reasonable that the mind should turn to the 
 object, as that the needle should turn to the pole. 
 
VOLITION. 213 
 
 The question under consideration, when properly understood, 
 is not whether we can do as we will to do, for that is granted 
 to be unavoidable, but what it is that causes us to will or desire 
 to do what we do ; and whether that will or desire be in the 
 object willed for or desired, or a mere spontaneity of mind, 
 having no antecedent or necessary cause of existence, an off- 
 spring of nothing; and what is more miraculous, is that a self- 
 created will should come fitted to a specific purpose without a 
 purpose. This proximate feeling and conscious fact, that we 
 can do as we desire, is like the feeling that we can call up to 
 mind, by memory, what we desire to do; but in neither of 
 which cases do we feel or are we conscious of the remote causes 
 that brought these desires to the mind, any more than we feel 
 the miasma of fever or the cause of small -pox; though we 
 acutely feel, and are conscious of the present action, and see the 
 results; just as we do those of will, without knowing what 
 caused us thus to will. Now it would be just as rational to 
 say that the fever, small-pox, the lock-jaw which proceeds from 
 a rusty nail, as well as all other diseases, and excitements of 
 our bodies, are self-created things and without a cause, because 
 unconscious of a cause, as to say that our mental phenomena 
 is without a cause. 
 
 Persons will assert that they can call up by name anything 
 they may please, without knowing the fact that that very thing 
 is already in the mind, for otherwise they could not name that 
 thing as an object of thought. For instance, a man says, I 
 will now call up Australia, but except he first thought of 
 Australia, how, I ask, could he call for Australia, To call for 
 a thing without knowing what to call for, or name a thing 
 without already knowing the name of that thing, is too ridiculous 
 -to argue about, and just so, in regard to our strong and con- 
 scious present feeling of being able to do as we desire, so long 
 have we been in the habit of acting from the immediate prompt- 
 ings of our feelings, like seeking the cooling water under a burn- 
 ing fever, that we never search back for the remote cause, and 
 
214 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 thus it is that we naturally enough imagine that our own will, 
 before we have a will, begets a will, aside from all causes, 
 motives, inducements or qualities in the things sought for. One 
 may say, I will now repeat the alphabet, but who could ever 
 do so, simple as it is, without first learning and knowing it. A 
 first comes into the mind by the name being called, or like our 
 dreams, by some remote and unconscious association, or by 
 internal agencies over which we have no control. Now, as 
 easy as the alphabet may seem to one who has been long 
 trained and deeply grounded in it, it would be just as impos- 
 sible for him to repeat it, without first learning it, as to speak 
 a foreign language, by the creative exercise of this wonderful 
 will, which is independent of God's established and unalterable 
 laws of causality. And more to the point, even after we have 
 learned the alphabet in accordance with God's appointment, 
 we cannot repeat it without a desire or will so to do, and as 
 there are no effects without causes, take notice, this desire or 
 will must be grounded in something that produces it, as the 
 outward command through the ears, or some internal associa- 
 tion, over which we have no more control than we have over 
 the vital functions that sustain us, or the pulsations of the heart 
 itself. These obvious facts may be granted, and yet the question 
 asked, whether, when such inclination, desire or will arises, we 
 may not have resolution to resist it, by a counteracting and 
 stronger will; to which I answer, certainly, we may, if a stronger 
 will should arise from a stronger motive, not to obey the com- 
 mand than to obey it. Suppose, for instance, a man is com- 
 manded by high authority to do a'certain act, he is, at once, 
 given a will, by the command, so to do, but, as in cases of 
 martyrdom, if a silent command arises within him, from a belief 
 that God's coilimand is greater than that of man, a counter- 
 acting and paramount will will certainly control his actions, 
 and now, though the first command was from without and the 
 second and prevailing from ruminating causes within, they were 
 both the result of actually existing and uncalled for causea 
 
VOLITION. 215 
 
 Kor is the result in such cases any more obscure or difiBcuIt 
 of comprehension than the testimony which forces conviction to 
 the mind, the will to do or not to do, being the invariable 
 result of prompting passions, or of delivered judgment, founded 
 upon anticipated results, in neither of which causes are there 
 any self creations of wills without causes, the will being as un- 
 avoidable a result as was the cause, both being as firmly linked 
 together as is the endless and eternal chain that binds God's 
 vast and harmonious universe. We may not see or feel but 
 the first, second or third moving links, but could we trace them 
 back, they would unerringly lead us on and on to the throne of 
 God, the original seat and foundation of all causality. Here, 
 by infinite wisdom and boundless power, were all God's laws, 
 both mental and physical, designed and irreversibly fixed 
 beyond the power of earthly vanity to subvert. 
 
 Thus having established the supremacy of God's unalter- 
 able laws, all we have to do, is to understand and obey them. 
 If we plant and pray to God to cultivate for us, he will not 
 do it; and should we plunge our beard into the Ocean, and 
 cry. Lord save! he will not heed us, nor will he even admin- 
 ister an antidote to a poison, though ignorantly innocently 
 taken. Those laws of our vital and normal existence are 
 fatally fixed, and the health and happiness of man depends 
 upon studying them well, a thing least thought of by the 
 present artistic age, when men with their idle hypotheses, 
 religious creeds, and political squabbles distract the human 
 mind. To these debasing influences over the mind, may be 
 added the stultifying nature of dead languages and unmeaning 
 technicalities, which engross all the early and more suscept- 
 ible portion of our lives. Yes, this is unquestionably true, 
 and the reason why we become dupes to patent pills and reli- 
 gious creeds, and the ready tools of political oppression. In 
 consequence of the neglect of God's laws (science) in early life, 
 the benighted mind seeks turbid streams, and pools of art, 
 while the limpid fountains of nature flow sparklingly around 
 
216 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 US, and the glowiog light of heaven radiates to the utmost 
 bounds of God's universe. Were we to study well those laws, 
 to which we are hourly subject through life, the Doctor, then, 
 would practice upon a science, and we should not daily be- 
 mourn the loss of our friends, butchered through ignora.nce, 
 for old age would, as certainly as we now exist, be the only 
 outlet to life, for, as sure as there is a God, there is a law of 
 hygiene, ample for every morbid influence that can assail us. 
 The wonderful discoveries, which have been made in science, 
 as the telegraph, for instance, can leave no longer doubt of the 
 powerful agencies and counteracting agencies that are at play 
 around us and of which we are wholly ignorant. In proof of 
 our medical ignorance, and as a reproof to the vanity of our 
 little technical popinjays, I introduce the following introductory 
 lecture by the great Magendie of France, the ablest and most 
 renowned physician the world has ever produced: — 
 
 "Gentlemen: Medicine is a great humbug. I know it is 
 called a science — science, indeed ! It is nothing hke science. 
 Doctors are mere empirics, when they are not charlatans. We 
 are as ignorant as men can be. Who knows anything in the 
 world about medicine ? Gentlemen, you have done me the 
 honor to come here to attend my lectures, and I must tell you 
 frankly, now, in the beginning, that I know nothing in the 
 world about medicine, and I don't know anybody who does 
 know anything about it. Don't think for a moment that I 
 haven't read the bills advertising the course of lectures at the 
 Medical School: I know that this man teaches anatomy, that 
 man teaches pathology, another man physiology, such-a-one 
 therapeutics, such-another materia medica. — Eh Men! et apres? 
 What's known about all that? Why, gentlemen, at the school 
 of Montpellier (God knows it was famous enough in its da}' I) 
 they discarded the study of anatomy, and taught nothing but 
 the dispensary; and the doctors educated there knew just as 
 much, and were quite as successful, as any others. I repeat 
 it, nobody knows anything about medicine. True enough, we 
 
VOLITION. 21 T 
 
 are gathering facts every day. We can produce typhus fever, 
 for example, by injecting a certain substance into the veins of 
 a dog — that's something; we can alleviate diabetes; and, I 
 see distinctly, we are fast approaching the day when phthisis 
 can be cured as easily as any disease. 
 
 " We are collecting facts in the right spirit, and I dare say, 
 in a century or so the accumulation of facts may enable our 
 successors to form a medical science; but, I repeat it to you, 
 there is no such thing, now, as a medical science. Who can 
 tell me how to cure the headache ? or the gout ? or disease of 
 the heart? Nobody. Oh! you tell me doctors cure people. 
 I grant you people are cured. But how are they cured ? 
 Gentlemen, nature does a great deal. Imagination does a 
 great deal. Doctors do — devilish little — when they don't do 
 harm. Let me tell you, gentlemen, what I did when I was 
 head-physician at the Hotel Dieu. Some three or four thousand 
 patients passed through my hands every year. I divided the 
 patients into two classes: with one, I followed the dispensary, 
 and gave tbem the usual medicines, without having the least 
 idea why or wherefore; to the other, I gave bread-pills and 
 colored water, without, of course, letting them know anything 
 about it — and occasionally, gentlemen, I would create a third 
 division, to whom I gave nothing whatever. These last would 
 fret a good deal — they would feel they were neglected, (sick 
 people always feel they are neglected, unless they are well 
 drugged — les imbeciles ! ) and they would irritate themselves 
 until they got really sick; but nature invariably came to the 
 rescue, and all the persons in the third class got well. There 
 was a little mortality among those who received but bread- 
 pills and colored water, and the mortality was greatest among 
 those who were carefully drugged according to the dispensary. '^ 
 
 This is pretty plain speaking for a doctor. 
 
 And were Divines in like manner to become thorouorh 
 
 o 
 
 bred students of nature, instead of burthening their minds 
 with dead languages and theological follies, they would neither 
 
 10 
 
218 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 respect the religious codes and dogmas of men, nor glory m 
 their own folly ; — no, nor could those detestable demagogues, 
 the veriest varlets of earth, humbug a community thus en- 
 lightened by the elevating and ennobling study of God's 
 harmonious and glorious works, that will unerringly lead us to 
 health, to happiness, and to Him. But we will return from 
 consequences more directly to the argument, and show how 
 we are influenced by physical causes that make us happy or 
 miserable in this world. 
 
 The influence of disease upon the mind, every man in the 
 community has both seen and felt. To a sick man, the luxuries 
 of life loose their zest — nothing tastes or smells right, and 
 sights and sounds are disagreeable. All his feelings are as 
 whimsical as his appetites. The brave man becomes timid, 
 and the imperturbable and generous soul becomes irritable 
 and selfish. The patient and affectionate mother grows fret- 
 ful and captious towards her children. Every vocation and 
 profession in life looses its interest, and our resolutions for 
 any enterprise become weak and capricious. The aberrated 
 mind is dark and vacillating in its religious and moral affec- 
 tions. Even tooth-ache, gout and sick head-ache will spoil 
 the temper and greatly afflict the mind ; and ! how often 
 do we become silently demented or harrowed up to raving 
 maniacs, while others sink under the crushing weight of accu- 
 mulated afflictions down to a settled and hopeless melancholy. 
 Now, if these afflictions of mind be unavoidable and incurable 
 by the will, the will cannot be free to control itself or the des- 
 tinies of the mind, but is under the laws of necessity, which 
 at once establishes the doctrine I contend for. 
 
 To show how we are led captive through the dark and 
 checkered paths of our anxious and toiling existence here, not 
 by the power of disease, as above named, but under the guid- 
 ance of natural and normal influences ; I will give a few addi- 
 tional examples. Our journey of life is at best but a day, and 
 affords us but little knowledge of the innumerable and wonder- 
 
VOLITION. 219 
 
 ful agencies in nature that play around us, and in which and 
 through which we unconsciously live and move, being seduced 
 by more sensible objects to follow our veering fancies. We 
 set out in the morning of life, unconscious of guilt and fearless 
 of consequences ; the whistle, the drum and hobby-horse, 
 with the nightly legends of the nursery, filling our cup of 
 innocent and early joys. Little do we think how " one genera- 
 tion passeth and another generation cometh," nor have we yet 
 any knowledge of our own flitting and transient lives ; but on 
 we journey, joyously picking up by the way the early flowers, 
 and chasing the butterfly with his gilded wings, which gives us 
 more rational delight than a monarch can receive from the 
 temporal bawble of jewelled crown. Charmed with every 
 changing scene of nature, we are led through flowery lawns, 
 by purling brooks, and into fragrant and warbling groves 
 where our enchanted minds are lulled into elysian reveries, 
 and our thoughts elevated far above the vulgar realities of 
 life, not dreaming that soon, and we shall enter dark and 
 dreary abodes of sorrow, where we are to be afflicted by cares 
 and torn by contending passions. Fresh in youth, buoyant in 
 health, and animated by the hope of future bliss, we still pur- 
 sue our unclouded path, nor think we are so near the troubled 
 ocean of life and the vale of tears. All has been serenity 
 and sunshine ; but now, and the noon of our day has come 
 with a clouded sky, and the troubled elements are warring 
 around us. The day is far spent in the toys of life, and the 
 unwelcome fact is forced upon us, that we have a living to 
 make ; and now it is that envy, pride and ambition enters the 
 unstained and tranquil soul. The tumults of life now begin ; 
 and hope and fear, love and hatred, and joy and grief, with all 
 the distracting passions, alternately occupy the soul, and im- 
 periously direct the will to this, that or the other act. 
 
 As the evening of our journey approaches, circumstances 
 again change and throw us upon a smoother path. The stimu- 
 lus of ambition is gone, and the heart grows cold to the world. 
 
220 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 The lengthened vista is closing upon our sight, and the memory 
 is fast fading of the past. Our hearts beat faintly, and we feel 
 that every pulsation brings us one step nearer to the brink of 
 eternity, when our journey will be at an end. The pleasures of 
 early life have fled for ever, and we worship the Lord of nature 
 no longer in his flowery meads, his flowing streams, and shady 
 bowers, but seek him in a higher sphere, far, far beyond the con- 
 fines of earth, where we hope for a happy haven of rest when 
 our stormy voyage shall be over. The heart that once glowed 
 with love, with humanity, and kind affections, has been left but 
 to sorrow. Every tender tie to earth has been broken and our 
 friends have passed to worlds unknown. The lone and feeble 
 soul has now no consolation but in religion, when it again be- 
 comes firm, and tranquil, and buoyant in its glorious hopes, which 
 warms it with seraph fire and wings it for its eternal flight. 
 
 Now all these vassalations of mind and workings of will to 
 suit the occasion, must have been from the progress of age, and 
 the power of circumstances, farther showing, what I think has 
 been already amply proven, that the will is governed by circum- 
 stances, and, consequently, under the law of necessity, which is 
 not an accident, or broken link in the chain of causality, but a 
 fixed and unalterable law given by God himself to preserve the 
 unity and harmony of his universal dependencies upon the one 
 great will. 
 
 I now think it must be granted by every impartial reader, 
 that my arguments in this Essay have established the following 
 axioms ; and first — That God's foreknowledge of man's conduct, 
 and man's freedom from all fixed rules of action, is impossible ; 
 for how could God certainly know a thing to be, that might op 
 might not be ; the ten thousand casualties of a self-creating and 
 independent will affording no fixed rule by which to antici- 
 pate events. Even we short sighted creatures can, by the fixed 
 and unalterable laws of our solar system, calculate eclipses to 
 the minute, for thousands of year's to come, but were those 
 laws fortuitous, or left to chance, no such calculations could be 
 
VOLITION. 221 
 
 made. Even every game of chance, improperly so called, has 
 its laws by which it is governed. No die was ever cast that 
 did not have its reason and cause, why it fell this way instead 
 of that; but when ignorant of causes, we refer them to mystery* 
 miracle, and chance, or something beyond natural law and 
 human power. We also know by the determinate laws of the 
 vegetable kingdom, that an acorn will bring an oak, and a 
 peach seed a peach and not an orange, but did acorns bring 
 oranges or apples, as they might whimsically determine, by an 
 almighty power of self-creation, such as is given to the will, 
 above all law, and beyond the pale of God's government, 
 neither God nor man could anticipate or have any positive 
 knowledge. No Christian, however, can consistently maintain 
 the doctrine of casualties, or contend for a free and sovereign 
 will independent of, and above all law and rule of action ; as 
 in so doing he would deny the truth of God's prophesies, for 
 as above shown, neither God nor man can certainly know a 
 thing to be, that may or may not be, as chance shall determine. 
 The very affirmative of the proposition is an impossibility, that 
 subverts itself ; for it is the same as to say, that God can 
 know a thing to exist that has no existence, or that he can 
 anticipate an event which has no antecedent cause or law by 
 which such an event may be brought about. If the reader will 
 but reflect for a moment, he will see how ridiculous the idea 
 is, that God can certainly know that a man will do a thing, 
 when the man is at liberty not to do it ; God himself, in such 
 case, being thrown into the vortex of fortuity and left without 
 a law or rule of action by which to anticipate events. No 
 event which he prophesied, yet had any existence, but he knew, 
 by the law of mentality, with as much certainty as we know 
 by the laws of motion, that the moving of the first and pre- 
 sent link of a well connected chain, will move every other link, 
 it matters not how distant the links and endless that chain may 
 be. But now suppose, there were no laws of causality, or con- 
 necting links, how could God or man prophesy upon future 
 
222 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRATE. 
 
 events, or know how far the chain would move. The man 
 who designs and constructs a clock to run eight days, knows 
 that it will run eight days, but he who knows nothing of the de- 
 sign, or connecting wheels and moving power, could have no such 
 knowledge. And now, here I must be indulged in correcting a 
 great error, which prevails, even amongst philosophic men. 
 It is often taunted against those who teach the doctrine of 
 moral necessity, that the fore-knowledge of an event does not 
 make that event. For instance, the man who calculates an 
 eclipse does not make that eclipse ; and were God, at this mo- 
 ment, to enable me to see future events, ray knowledge of such 
 facts would not, necessarily, have any agency in bringing them 
 to pass, Now, though this is all true, it is a miserably shal- 
 low and shameless shift, and has nothing to do with the case 
 in hand, any more than a man's knowing he is made by a 
 superior power has to do with the making of himself. Such 
 tiros should be made to know, that there is a vast diiference 
 between the creator and the created, the designer and the 
 thing designed, and that though man may become acquninted 
 with many of the laws of God, it is no proof that man made 
 those laws, I grant that my knowing, a clock will run eight 
 days does not make it run eight days ; but I also know that 
 the man who designed and made that clock, made it to run 
 eight days, as otherwise it would not run eight days. Yes, 
 and I farther grant, that my knowing the sun will rise at a 
 certain minute to-morrow morning does not make it do so ; 
 but with equal certainty do I know, that the God who made 
 that sun, made it to shine, and gave it its laws, by which it 
 is governed. God has brought nothing into existence which 
 he did not, in his pre-conceived plans and wise designs, pur- 
 pose so to do : and there can, therefore, be no broken links 
 in his eternal chain of causality ; but all things work, as in the 
 case of the clock, just as they were made to work. The hue 
 and cry, and vulgar prejudices got up against the doctrine of 
 Decessity, is that it makes God the author of sin. The doc- 
 
VOLITION. 223 
 
 trine I have taught throughout, is a conditional necessity ; but 
 take the ground of the strongest fatalist, and I ask in com- 
 mon honesty, where is the difference, so far as either God or 
 man is concerned, what instruments God employs in the 
 punishment and death of men ? Whether he uses a revolver, 
 throws an old tree upon him, kills him with a slow fever, or 
 dispatches men in mass, by earthquakes, wars, pestilence, 
 and famine ? If God can be made guilty of sin in one case 
 for killing a man, he is equally so in every case, it mattering 
 not whether he uses one man as an instrument in killing an- 
 other, or employs more protracted and painful means. We 
 know that the best of men on earth have suffered greatly, and 
 that we have many unavoidable afflictions ; but it is our duty 
 to bear patiently with them as did Job, and believe, as I 
 firmly do, that all will work together for the best. God has 
 bestowed upon us many blessings, showing that he is kind and 
 careful of us, and will, as he has promised, in the maturity of 
 time, and in the consummation of his ultimate plans, make us 
 eternally happy. We should, as observing men, grant what we 
 cannot honestly deny, and offering no apology for things we 
 know nothing about, leave the how and the why to God him- 
 self. Now, it cannot be denied, as in the case of the clock- 
 maker, that if God foresees what a man will do, and he makes 
 that man, that he makes him to do that thing ^ for if he had 
 made him otherwise, he would, in accordance with his nature, 
 have acted otherwise. Every thing is made to be what it is, 
 and to do what it does, -as otherwise God is not a wise God, 
 and has made things in vain. Many weak-minded, but good 
 men, have, in order to get God, at they think, out of this 
 dilemma, robbed him of his sovereignty, and denied to him a 
 fore-knowledge of his own works, thus unintentionally main- 
 taining a system of atheism. There are but two views that 
 can be taken, in regard to the creation and government of 
 the universe : that it was either created and is governed by 
 an all-wise, powerful, immutable and eternal God, who fore- 
 
224 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 saw all things, and created nothing in vain ; or it made itself, 
 and is governed by chance, as free-willers and fortuitous 
 philosophers would have it. 
 
 Axiom 2. — That the doctrine of casualism and self creating 
 powers leads to atheism, for if God be not the creator and 
 governor of all things, then may things create and govern 
 themselves, as pantheists affirm. 
 
 Axiom 3. — That God fits means to ends, and comprehend- 
 ing all things from eternity to eternity in one most perfect and 
 unalterable view, his fore-knowledge of events is as certain and 
 unerring as man's after-knowledge of things, which, having once 
 taken place, can never be altered any more than time can be 
 called back, and things made naught that are. 
 
 Axiom 4. — That there is as indissoluble a connection be- 
 tween motive and action, as between cause and effect, and that 
 all things in God's vast and harmonious universe are dependen- 
 cies upon the one great and moving cause. 
 
 A^iom 5. — That both God and man, as certainly exist 
 under a law of necessity as they exist in time and space, neither 
 being able to act rationally and voluntarily without a motive 
 in view and end to be obtained, which motive in view and end 
 to be obtained must be the ground and reason of such action. 
 
 Axiom 6. — That motives or inducements are correlative, 
 are not real substantial and independent entities, and do not 
 inhere in the mind any more than light and sound or other sen- 
 sations, but in the motive objects, over which the mind has no 
 more control than has the powder over the spark that explodes 
 it, or the wax over the seal which impresses it. 
 
 Axiom t.^That God, being absolutely perfect in his un- 
 created, underived, immutable, eternal, and consequently un- 
 avoidable nature, every motive to action must be for the best, 
 and that there is not, therefore, any evil in God's universe, but 
 that all apparent evils are dispensations of mercy and end in 
 universal good. He, who maintains an all-wise, all-powerful, 
 and good God, cannot but grant this doctrine of optimism, 
 
VOLITION. 225 
 
 which affirms, that all things are wisely ordered, and ordered 
 for the best. 
 
 Axiom 8. — That to say that God's pre-science is perfect 
 and infallible, and yet, that the connecting links of causality or 
 laws by which events are to be brought about, are fallible, or, 
 in other words, fortuitous and uncertain, is ridiculously absurd, 
 for God himself cannot see the evidence of a thing, which in 
 itself has no evidence, or antecedent cause of existence. 
 
 Axiom 9. — That an effect does not create its cause, the 
 child its father, nor the will its motive, but that the cause 
 produces its effect, the parent the child, and the motive its 
 wiU. 
 
 Axiom 10. — That the motive power or quality in objects, 
 which beget our volitions, are inherent in those objects, and not 
 created by the mind, and consequently independent of it, as for 
 instance, the quality of sweetness is in the sugar, heat in the 
 fire, and coldness in the ice, the sensation only or effect being 
 impressed upon the mind, while the quality is as certainly in 
 these objects as the impression made upon the wax was in the 
 original seal. 
 
 Axiom 11. — That it is impossible to act voluntarily with- 
 out a motive or desire so to do, and as the quality desired and 
 motive to act is in the object of desire, which begets the will, 
 the will does not beget itself, and consequently cannot, m the 
 nature of things, be free. 
 
 Axiom 12. — That the doctrine of spontaneity and a self- 
 creating power is incompatible with the sovereignty of God, 
 and with the unity and harmony of his universal and immutable 
 laws. 
 
 Axiom 13. — That it is impossible for God himself to know 
 a contingence, as to do so, would be the same as to know a 
 thing to be certain, which, at the same time, he knows to be 
 uncertain, involving the absurd idea and impossibihty of to be 
 and not to be at the same time. 
 
 Axiom 14. — That to say, because we act from our unavoid- 
 
 10* 
 
226 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 able nature and the force of circumstances under which we are 
 placed, that our lovely acts are not to be loved, nor our hate- 
 ful deeds not to be hated, is a false position, when all will ac- 
 knowledge that God is, in his unavoidable nature, absolutely- 
 perfect, pure, and holy, and that his acts are in accordance 
 with his nature, and yet that we adore him, because of his 
 natural perfections. The angels are, also, so confirmed in holi- 
 ness, as in the nature cf things, to have no will or wish, but to 
 act in accordance with their inherent nature. From these facts, 
 might we, with equal propriety, say that we give no thanks 
 either to God or to holy angels for acting just and holy, be- 
 cause it is their nature so to do.- In like manner, to,o, might 
 we say, that we cannot love a lamb or an infant, a beautiful 
 woman or any other lovely object, because it is their nature; 
 or that we should not hate a serpent, because it cannot help 
 but be a serpent. Our passions and emotions are always suited 
 to the nature of the objects or actions, whether voluntarily or 
 involuntarily. Gold is gold from its unavoidable nature, and 
 yet we admire it more than lead, which cannot help its nature. 
 Christ, himself, was under a law of necessity in acting out the 
 will of the father, in his pre-conceived and determined plan of 
 redemption, and therefore, according to the doctrines of free- 
 willers, was entitled to no more thanks than was Judas, who 
 betrayed him, as they both acted in perfect obedience with 
 God's own plans, positive decrees, and unerring predictions. 
 We cannot help disliking those whose hearts God wilfully 
 hardened, as instruments for certain purposes, and of loving 
 those who God made perfect. No Christian can help but ad- 
 mire Paul, though he was forcibly checked in his wilful acts of 
 wickedness, and compelled by a divine and resistless power to 
 be good. 
 
 Axiom 15, — That in every act of volition, an object of 
 choice or desire must be presented to the mind, and that in as 
 much as the quality or exciting nature of that object begets 
 the will, the will is not free to beget itself, without a motive, 
 
 i 
 
TOLITION. 22t 
 
 wish or end in view, which at once explodes the doctrine of 
 self-creating, free and motiveless wills, and bringing the mind 
 back within the pole of divine influences, restores to God his 
 sacred, immutable and eternal laws of causality. It is true, 
 that we may, yea, must do or not do, as the strongest motive 
 may bias the mind and direct the will, but in this case again, 
 as in every other, we have no alternative but to do or not to 
 do. If the motive for action be wicked, and the man be a 
 good man, the motive not to act will control him; but if the 
 temptation be strong, and the man insensible to virtuous deeds, 
 he will yield to the temptation, ^ow this case, simple and 
 plain as it is, represents every other imaginable case that can 
 occur through life. It clearly shows that the good man and 
 the bad man are governed alike by motives, and that the con- 
 troling power of those motives arise from ten thousand hidden 
 agencies. The mind is biased and the will directed from ori- 
 ginal organization, education and our endless degrees of sensi- 
 bility, as well as the peculiar state of mind, and our ever vacil- 
 lating condition of health. It is not probable that any two 
 men on earth can be made to think alike, upon all subjects, 
 any more than they can be made to look alike in every form 
 and feature; and yet, yet, how sad to say, we have cruelly 
 strove to crush all mankind into one mould, made by our own 
 vile prejudices, but for which God never created man. It- 
 would be just as rational to affirm, because we feel and are 
 conscious of the possession of life, that we gave ourselves that 
 life, as to say, because we feel volition to arise in the mind, 
 that we produce it, or that it is free to create itself. It re- 
 quires close observation to see that the cause of determination 
 in the mind must be as separate from it, as any other cause is 
 from its effect, and that it must preceed the will or act deter- 
 mined on. In every choice there is a causal and indisoluble 
 connection between the choice and the thing chosen. Every 
 thing that exists must have a cause of existence, and as voli- 
 tions rise by myriads, invariably and unerringly fitted to the 
 
228 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 objects and ends in view, those objects and those ends to be 
 obtained must be the cause of such volitions. The kindred rela- 
 tions and causal dependencies of our volitions, are often obscure 
 and even unseen, yet they, like the occult and remote causes, 
 both of mental and bodily disease, must have had their exist- 
 ence, and have acted upon us, in order to produce their effects. 
 Our ignorance of causes, can, therefore, be no argument against 
 their existence, and in favor of effects without causes. 
 
 Axiom 16. — That because all our actions proceed from the 
 will, we naturally and unwarily suppose that the will arises 
 from the will itself, which brings us back to the old absurdity, 
 and often repeated impossibility of a thing creating itself, for, 
 as to do so, would be to move without a motive, and to design 
 itself, and create itself, before itself had an existence. 
 
REASONING. 
 
 TJpHAM in his "Philosophy of Mind," (page 190,) says : — 
 " That without original suggestion we could not have any knowl- 
 edge of our own existence, and without consciousness, we should 
 have no idea of our mental operations, and without judgment," 
 which he says is also a distinct source of knowledge, " there 
 would be no reasoning ; and unassisted by reasoning, we could 
 have no knowledge of relations." " Reasoning, therefore," he 
 says, "is to be regarded as a new and distinct fountain of 
 thought, which, as compared with other sources of knowledge, 
 just mentioned, opens itself still farther into the recesses of in- 
 ternal intellect." " Reason," he says, " is a distinct source of 
 knowledge, that enables the internal mind with a new and valu- 
 able form of ideas, and that it brings to light hidden truths, 
 that no other faculty could do." 
 
 I have quoted TJpham as a popular work, and one that 
 pretty fairly embodies that chaotic mass of nonsense to be 
 found in our text's books that our schools generally teach. All, 
 in common with Upham, assign to the mind a number of facul- 
 ties and powers, which they say can create, call up, handle, and 
 turn about, or set aside, ideas at pleasure. It is true, but hard, 
 yes truly hard, that our youths, intended for future usefulness, 
 should be compelled to memorize and answer, as the learned pig, 
 to all this abominable and wholly unmeaning jargon of external, 
 internal minds, and of intellectual faculties and powers, that 
 have no archetypes in nature. 
 
 The pupil is perplexed and confounded by these external 
 and internal intellects of intellectual states of mind, and external 
 internal knowledge, original, secondary, and subordinate facul- 
 
230 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ties, active and complex powers, with the classifications, divisions 
 and sub-divisions, and abstractions, making, as the reader can 
 see, bj looking into those books, an ordinary volume of index, 
 taking up, most unfortunately, as much space as the entire 
 science of the human mind should occupy. These fountains of 
 knowledge, and their almost innumerable departments, powers, 
 and faculties within our little heads, are greatly more extensive 
 than the " Mammoth Cave." Indeed, these fancied divisions of 
 minds have carried to such a ridiculous extent, that a great 
 preacher and divine teacher, Dr. Alexander, Professor of 
 Theology at Princeton, has affirmed in his book of " Moral 
 Science," "that the corrupt principles of a man does not vitiate 
 the essence of the soul," which must mean that each of those 
 independent faculties or powers acts for itself, and contrary to 
 the desire of the soul. This doctrine of the great Professor, 
 though glaringly false and mischievous, is but the legitimate 
 consequence of the numerous divisions of an indivisible thing, 
 and the many independent faculties, not to be found in the mind, 
 but taught in all the works on moral and metaphysical philo- 
 sophy. When such mendacious doctrines then can be maintained 
 by such minds, and enforced by their divine mission and official 
 authority, what can we expect better from the tyro in science, 
 or a community indoctrinated in such institutions. 
 
 As I have before affirmed, the mind is a unit, indivisible and 
 unextended, occupying some portion of the solid brain, needing 
 no great cavities or numerous spaces for the location of those 
 many powers and faculties. The doctrine then taught of its 
 many parts and distinct divisions, is at variance with facts and 
 ridiculous in its tendencies. Those who believe in the spiritual- 
 ity and identity of the soul, cannot consistently teach its ma- 
 terial divisibility and inidentity. It is granted by all thinkers 
 that no two objects or actions can occupy the same space at 
 the same time, and how is it possible then, for the mind occupy- 
 ing but one space, it being an identity per se, can occupy or en- 
 tertain within the same space all the faculties, powers, and dis- 
 
REASONING. 231 
 
 tihct agencies, so ludicrously allotted it by metaphysical writers. 
 What I here teach from the book of nature, and have striven 
 throughout to maintain, will, when all the paper books of men- 
 tal philosophy on earth shall be thrown aside as trash, stand 
 as a simple, immutable, and eternal work of God himself. The 
 factitious works of men have ever led us blindly astray from the 
 paths of truth, and distracted us in all things of opinion or faith. 
 The simple fact is, that other than metaphorically speaking^ 
 there is no such thing as faculties or powers, separate and apart 
 from the oneness and essence of the mind itself Sensation or 
 feeling is this only characteristic of the sentient and percipient 
 being, that exalts the mind above common organic matter, and 
 gives us all our knowledge. In short, feeling is the mind itself, 
 and the ultimatum of every thing known in regard to it, 
 and it is that and that alone, which gives us all the knowledge 
 we have of our own existence and of the world around us. 
 When deprived of it we are dead, the soul having departed 
 from its tenement of clay. Sensation is the " vis medicatrix 
 naturae," and conservative power of normal action. From it 
 arises the universal desire for happiness and self-preservation, and 
 more than this, all the kind feehng and sympathy for our fellows 
 are prompted from what we have felt or suffered ourselves, and 
 in short, but for the feeling we have, we could not feel for others. 
 Were it not for feeling or sensation, which God has interwoven 
 nto our very constitutions, we could not be moral agents, as 
 we should have no sympathy for others, nor could we feel our 
 obligations to our Creator. All the force of education and our 
 hopes in life are founded upon it, and without it, rewards and 
 punishments would be of no avail, as we could not be punished in 
 Hell, nor could we enjoy the gifts of Heaven. Whence, then, 
 that inveterate mass of prejudice in authors, John Locke except- 
 ed, against the doctrine of sensationalism, but from the con- 
 temptible and iniquitous arrogance of man, who has condemned 
 the plain and simple laws of God as low and brutal. 
 
 I hope to make the doctrine of sensationalism so plain, 
 
232 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 that the reader may think it untrue that it was ever opposed. 
 But in this he would be mistaken ; for every writer, who has 
 attempted to sustain it, has been denounced as a slanderer of 
 his species, and borne down, not by argument, but by ribaldry 
 and Billings-gate abuse. Those ecstatic and transcendental 
 authors, who gratuitously assume for the soul inherent and 
 divine intelligence, independent of our gross senses and the 
 influences of the external world, hold sensation or feeling to 
 be a vulgar thing, belonging in common to man and brute. 
 I give these facts in the history of our race, to show how the 
 supercilious vanity of man will blind him to those sacred 
 truths that God has so plainly made manifest to his unpre- 
 judiced reason. In China, this ungrounded pride, and unjust 
 prejudice, is even more inveterate than in our own country. 
 They hold that their imperial intellects flow from a higher 
 and purer fountain than those of the lower cast ; and hence it 
 is that they feel contaminated by the very touch. A book of 
 true philosophy there, would be committed to the flames, and 
 the author with it. If these startling examples, with the fact 
 I have shown of the world being governed by blind prejudice, 
 will not open the eyes of the reader to his own condition, and 
 give him resolution to turn his attention to the unmistaken 
 laws of God, and think for himself, we may despair of ever 
 elevating the soul of man to that noble and independent 
 standard, which it has ever claimed, but never attained. 
 
 Amongst Christians, Catholicism is founded upon the in- 
 fallibility of the Church, and Protestantism upon the creeds 
 of man ; while none base their faith upon the positive and 
 eternal truths of God. Let our degraded race reflect upon 
 the millions whom Confucius has thought for ; the millions 
 whom Zoroaster has thought for ; the millions whom Mahomet 
 had thought for ; the millions the Pope has thought for ; and 
 then the remaining millions who are under the slavish domin- 
 ion of the thousands of distracted petty leaders ; and instead 
 of condemning the man who will sacrifice his own popularity 
 
REASONING. 233 
 
 in defence of his God, and the nobility of his own race, they 
 will surely applaud him. This taint of superstition that leads 
 to idolatry, and the aping impotence of man, ever has, and I 
 fear, ever will suppress the power of reason, and make him the 
 dupe of his corrupt and designing fellow mortals. That high- 
 sounding and spiritual philosophy, so self-styled, has ordained 
 to itself a vast amount of complicated and inexplicable trash, 
 called by their ignorant devotees dark and deep learning. 
 All this mystic veiling of truth, and the mazes of superstition, 
 arise, as before said, from the prejudice of religious writers 
 against the vulgarity, as they call it, of sensation, it being a 
 thing common to low as well as high life, to the brute as well 
 as man, and even to the lower grade of organism. But should 
 we, because God has seen proper to give sensation to brutes, 
 refuse it, or shut our eyes to the glorious orb of day, because 
 he has ordained it to shine alike upon all his creatures down 
 to the most humble in creation ? As well might we refuse to 
 breathe the vital air, and reject the genial and refreshing 
 showers, because they sustain the vegetable kingdom, which 
 is still lower in the scale of animated nature. Why the curse 
 of God should not have fallen upon those, who profess to be 
 his interpreters, for their traitorous dissemblance of truth has 
 ever been my marvel. That their doctrines have led man into 
 dread confusion, endless strife, and religious bloodshed, is a 
 sad and melancholy fact ; and that more than two thousand 
 years of labor, and vain display in controversial theology, has 
 ended in disrespect, and even contempt, by such truly philo- 
 sophic thinkers, as Comte, is too obvious to the reading eye 
 for denial. 
 
 But we will return from these sad results to the solid 
 argument. Discarding those thingless and distracting names 
 as powers and faculties, with their innumerable progeny of 
 subordinate and hidden agencies, we will tarn our thoughts in 
 upon our sensitive soul, thus cleared of its rubbish, and see what 
 is there to be found. Let us ask ourselves what is a thought 
 
234 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 or idea, if not an impression made upon our feeling mind. We 
 cannot think without feeh'ng, nor feel without thinking. They 
 being identically one and the same, but in sound. Twice two 
 make four, and four ones or three and one will be the same, 
 though very different in sound. We cannot think without 
 reasoning, and we certainly cannot reason without thinking. 
 We cannot judge without reasoning, nor reason without judg- 
 ing; reasoning being nothing more in fact than a connected 
 train of thoughts. Apply a coal of fire to the surface, and we 
 think we feel it, and infer the cause; we believe we feel it, we 
 judge we feel it, and reason tells us we feel it, we are conscious 
 we feel it, we imagine we feel it, we suppose we feel, we pre- 
 sume we feel, we perceive that we feel, we conceive that we 
 feel, and in fine we know that we feel. These, now, I will, say 
 to the pupil, are nothing but arbitrary associations and lying 
 sounds, and not even as much as different modes of sensation 
 or thinking, showing the fact, as I have said in many parts of 
 this work, how deceptive, bewildering, and vague the language 
 used by metaphysical writers is. Such books are not entities 
 in nature, nor are the words they contain the representatives 
 of real things. But such is the supremacy of habit over the 
 human mind, and such, also, the indissoluble tie of association 
 of things, that have no real or necessary connection in nature, 
 that it is hard to convince the credulous and ordinary thinker, 
 but that every word must have its separate ' and appropriate 
 meaning, and, therefore, that feeling, reasoning, thinking, etc., 
 as they difi'er in words, must be difi'erent in nature. 
 
 Before advancing farther in the argument, I must ask to be 
 indulged a little in the clearing away the rubbish and moulds 
 that the lapse of ages has accumulated around this important 
 subject, that the common reader may, with his untutored and 
 natural perceptions, view the naked fact and beautiful symmetry 
 of nature its(;lf. We, for instance, are not conscious of the fact, 
 that we use a metaphor, when we speak of a long and a short 
 time and, also, of a long and a short distance. JS'"ow, in these 
 
REASONING. 235 
 
 cases, we unconsciously linken both time and space to a line, 
 and then measure accordingly, when, in reality, there is no more 
 necessary connection or relation than there is between solidity 
 and pain. In like manner, we associate color and extension, 
 simply because we see them in connection. This association is 
 brought about by our measuring time, by motion, and motion 
 by extension. For instance, the hand of a clock moves over a 
 certain space in one hour, and in two hours it doubles that 
 space. 
 
 The despotic of fashion is sustained, in like manner, not 
 from any merit in the object itself, or from any real existence 
 in nature, but from our accessary and associated ideas. A 
 fashion may be formless, and even offensive and forbidding at 
 first, but soon, and it becomes tolerable, and by a farther asso- 
 ciation with the idea of the great and fashionable, it becomes 
 beautiful and irresistible over the taste of the aping and fashion- 
 able world. A borrowed and factitious beauty is engrafted 
 upon the human mind, the fruit of which there is no archetype 
 or stable existence in nature. Things obtain a common rusti- 
 city or nobility, according to their intimate associations. A 
 costume habitually worn by persons of high rank acquires an 
 air of elegance and beauty, when the same form, if associated 
 with the idea of low life, would be repugnant to our erratic and 
 fastidious taste. Hence the studied and constantly guarded 
 effort of snobs to an air of elegance and of exclusive importance. 
 Dugald Stewart very justly remarks that the only reason why 
 the Scotch language is esteemed as rough, disagreeable, and 
 vulgar, is that Edinburgh is a provincial town, and London the 
 seat of court. All who are thus warped and swayed by artis- 
 tic taste and human conventionalities, I call weak-minded and 
 vulgar, for upon such impotent minds have ever been entailed 
 the vices of their adored and corrupt models. Thus, by artful 
 authority, based upon the same credulity, has our moral judg- 
 ment been perverted, and the better feelings of the human heart 
 been overwhelmed with a flood of petty and party prejudices. 
 
236 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 Thus, too, upon the same principles of association, has the 
 priesthood, by coupling the most unhallowed things with the 
 sacred and overawing name of divine, vicegerency been able to 
 pin down the galling yoke of vassalage upon the masses. 
 Frauds and seductions innumerable have been perpetrated 
 under the foul cloak of hypocrisy by the soft whisperings of 
 divinity, and the tender ties of sisterhood, and the books of 
 heaven are blackened by the records of filchings from the poor 
 and oppressed. As may be seen elsewhere, then many mis- 
 takes in the name of the Lord, bound up in the Bible, but such 
 is their genuine and sacred associations that we do not dare to 
 grant our own judgments, and are afraid to separate them, 
 though we may not believe in their canonical and inspirational 
 infallibility. And thus has time, with its divine associations, 
 hallowed some of the grossest and most libellous personalities 
 against the great Jehovah himself. 
 
 In farther illustration of the deception of association, we 
 often couple the cause and effect as one inseparable idea. For 
 instance, we receive the words color, smell, solidity, etc., as the 
 ideas themselves, when, in reality, there are only arbitrary 
 sounds to express the cause of our inner feelings or ideas, which 
 cannot, in the nature of things, be read fragrant, solid or like 
 sound. These are mere feelings and exist in the soul alone, 
 and bears no exact resemblance to the external thing, to which 
 we arbitrarily give a . name for convenience sake. The rusty 
 nail bears no resemblance to the lock-jaw which it produces, 
 the knife does not look Kke the pain we feel from the wound it 
 inflicts, nor does the miasma bear any resemblance to the fevei 
 it occasions. The matter of the rose might exhale forever, and 
 no such idea or word as fragrance could ever exist, but for the 
 existence of the sentient being, upon which the thought is im- 
 pressed by such specific particles of matter; in like manner 
 might the soul have a separate and eternal existence without 
 such sensation, but for tlie actual existence of the rose which 
 impresses it. Yinegar does not look sour, nor does sugar smell 
 
REASONING. 23 1 
 
 or feel sweet, yet they have the power of producing such sensa- 
 tions, and yet it is only by experience, and not from that in- 
 tuitive, infallible and divine monitor, conscience, that we have 
 a priori known it. 
 
 Dr. Gregory, in his preface to his edition of Euclid Works, 
 says, that the ancient Greek writers looked upon grave sounds 
 as high, and acute sounds as low, and afi&rms that the present 
 taste and opinions of sounds is an innovation of recent date. 
 These facts show the controlling power of authority and custom 
 over the human mind, where things diametrically opposite can 
 be beheved from the dictum of some idle thinker and schismatic 
 leader. This fact related by Dr. Gregory farther confirms me in 
 my opinion that at the present style of music enforced by foreign 
 and great names to the destruction both of the soul and body, 
 of our good old and feehng ballads, are in like manner innova- 
 tions of recent date and contrary to nature, and the harmonious 
 and social soul that God has implanted in us. 
 
 The high-tossing and sky-larking variations that fly from 
 bar to bar, like a skipper on a griddle, will never reach the 
 heart, nor bring a tear to the eye, and can only be admired for 
 its difficulty of performance, and its exquisite execution, just as 
 the walking of a wire and balancing upon the chin, nose, and 
 every finger is. 
 
 In farther illustration of the influence of education and 
 habit, every classic reader knows the patriotism and fortitude 
 created in the Spartan by education. The savage from early 
 education and long habit of anticipation is prepared to bear 
 with magnanimity and fortitude the most excruciating torments 
 that can be put upon him, so much so, that when his sinews are 
 cracking and bursting in the flames, his heroic and immortal 
 soul disdains to change a feature or to call on man for mercy. 
 In India the wife burns herself upon the funeral pile, while our 
 Christian widow, in love with the good things of this world are 
 looking out for a younger and better-looking husband. Millions 
 crush themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut from false 
 
238 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 training and the force of religious prejudice, I have no com- 
 ments to make upon our boasted patriotism and fortitude in 
 Christian martyrdom, nor upon our high sounding self-commen- 
 dations, but will simply say, in the language of an old and vulgar 
 adage, "that the proof of the pudding is in chewing the bag," 
 and again, "that the tree is known by its fruit." — "He, that 
 exalteth himself shall be humbled, and not all that cry Lord, 
 Lord, are his." 
 
 I earnestly ask the serious attention of the reader to the 
 history of man from his cradle to his grave, and there learn the 
 force of education and prejudice upon the youthful mind, which 
 governs his after-life. In that history he will see that our apish 
 aptitude for imitation, and our blind, slavish, and habitual obedi- 
 ence to the arbitrary rule of others, has ever been the degreda- 
 tion of man, the blight of reason, and the dwarfing of our aspir- 
 ing and otherwise progressive souls. 
 
 I here quote what the Rev. Sidney Smith has said under 
 the head of Reason and Judgment, in his book on Moral Philo- 
 sophy, I literally quote all he has said upon those two subjects, 
 not that there is much in it of argument, but that it confirms 
 what I have said in regard to the incorrigible obstinacy of early 
 education and habit. 
 
 " We connect together two ideas in early life, which we find 
 it absolutely impossible to separate in advanced age ; we reason 
 from them as from intuitive truths, and upon such topics are 
 utterly impregnable to every attempt at conviction. These are 
 the principal obstacles to the progress of the reasoning faculty; 
 and they are disorders of the mind so common and so detri- 
 mental, that I shall speak of them more at large in my next 
 and concluding lecture. When they happen not to exist, or 
 when they have been guarded against by a good understanding, 
 or a superior education, the conclusions we draw upon most sub- 
 jects are sound and just; for if a question be discussed coolly, 
 if the parties have no other interest in its termination but that 
 of truth, if they thoroughly understand the terms they employ, 
 
REASONING. 239 
 
 if thej are well informed upon the related facts, and if they 
 are, both, in the habit of guarding against accidental asso- 
 ciations, the conclusions in which they terminate will prob- 
 ably be the same. There is hardly any difference of opin- 
 ion not resolvable into one or the other of these causes. 
 Here, then, we have an outline of that manly and high- 
 prized reason, which, under the blessing and direction of God, 
 arranges the affairs of this world ; which cools passion, unravels 
 sophism, enlightens ignorance, and detects mistake; which wit 
 can not disconcert, nor eloquence bear down; which appeals 
 always to realities, and ever follows truth without insolence, 
 and without fear. For it is disgraceful to the immortal under- 
 standing of man to be governed by sounds, and to be the slave 
 of that speech which was given to do him service. It is beneath 
 the loftiness of his faculties to take his notions of truth from the 
 little hamlet in which he was bred, or from the fashions of 
 thought which prevail in his hour of life: for truth dwells not 
 on the Danube, or the Seine, or the Thames; she is not this 
 thing to-day, and to-morrow another; but she is of all places and 
 all times the same, in every change, and in every chance— as 
 firm as the pillars of the earth, and as beautiful as its fabric. 
 Add to the power of discovering truth, the desire of using it 
 for the promotion of human happiness, and you have the great 
 end and object of our existence. This is the immaculate model 
 of excellence that every human being should fix in the chambers 
 of his heart; which he should place before his mind's eye from 
 the rising to the setting of the sun, — to strengthen his under- 
 standing that he may direct his benevolence, and to exhibit to 
 the world the most beautiful spectacle the world can behold, of 
 consummate virtue guided by consummate talents. ' For some 
 men,' says Lord Bacon, ' think that the gratification of curiosity 
 is the end of knowledge; some, the love of fame; some, the 
 pleasure of dispute; some, the necessity of supporting them- 
 selves by their knowledge; but the real use of all knowledge is 
 
240 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 this — that we should dedicate that reason which was giten us 
 by God to the use and advantage of man.' " 
 
 The first lesson given a child, should be to discriminate 
 between things natural and necessary in nature, and the for- 
 tuitous dogmas of man. They should study well the laws of 
 nature which controls the succession of events, both in the 
 physical and moral worlds, that we may anticipate the future 
 from the past, and thus be able to meet the emergencies of 
 life. Medical doctors are like divine doctors,- ever prone to 
 magnify inessentials in medicine from mere casual results, 
 that the after experience of impartial observers explode. 
 Strange, that this kind of association should have so far 
 blinded the great M. Boyle, who has given the following 
 grave prescription for dysentery. I copy it verbatim from his 
 works. "Take the thigh-bone of an hanged man, calcine it 
 to a whitheness, and having prepared the patient with an 
 antimonial medicine, give him one dram of this white powder 
 for one dose, in some good cordial, whether conserve or 
 liquor." Some one doubtless took this prescription, and got 
 well ; and from the accidental recovery of the patient, and 
 from this accidental association of the hanged man's thigh- 
 bone with the recovery of the patient, was inferred a neces- 
 sary and efBcient connection. This case reminds me of what 
 is recorded of a doctor with slender science, who commenced 
 the practice of medicine with a single nostrum. His first pa- 
 tient was a Dutchman, who got well, and his second patient a 
 Frenchman, who died ; from which casual results he recorded, 
 in his book of experience, the following facts : — " Be careful 
 to recollect, that what will cure a Dutchraan^will kill a French- 
 man." The dying of the privy, the flight of crows, signs in 
 the heaven, and many other coincidences with war, have been 
 taken as causes of war, simply because of their association. 
 In this casual connection, augury, astrology, and all the 
 forms of prognostication and superstition, have had their 
 rise. Advantage has been taken by the designing of this 
 
REASONING. 241 
 
 trait in the human character, and they have, by grafting these 
 superstitious ideas upon weak minds, reapt a bountiful harvest, 
 and given to the capricious masses a fanatical devotion to the 
 most absurd und corrupt institutions in religion. And right 
 here is the danger from our versatile and erratic nature of to- 
 tal scepticism; for seeing the deception and depravity of reli- 
 gious supremacy, minds equally weak are proud to revolt 
 from all authority, human and divine. If we were instructed 
 from early life in the immutable and eternal laws of nature, 
 upon which alone human harmony and happiness depends, in- 
 stead of the riddles, enigmas, and inexplicable mysteries of con- 
 troversial theology, we would not be found at this late period 
 of the world degraded by a vasallage in superstition and hu- 
 man authority. 
 
 Just as rational are the devotees of the Legend of the 
 Talmud, and Alkoran, — yes, and to the more recent tricks 
 of Brigham Young, as our deluded devotees to the distracted 
 dogmas of our day. Such opinions are beneath the dignity 
 of an immortal soul, and nothing can redeem us from the venal 
 and debasing grasp of human authority, but the sublime 
 truths taught in the Book of Nature, which elevates the soul 
 and kindly unites the heart of man to man, and to the author 
 of his being. Let us then return to her simple and easy les- 
 sons in the laws of mind; but first we will copy a few lines 
 from a text-book for high colleges. "In order to reason, we 
 must have the subject, or that concerning which something is 
 either asserted or denied, commanded or enquired; the predic- 
 ate, or that which is asserted, denied, commanded or en- 
 quired, concerning the subject; the copula, by which the two 
 other parts are connected. In these two propositions : Caesar 
 was brave, — Men are fallible, — Men and Csesar now are the 
 subjects; Fallible and Brave are the predicates; Are and Was 
 are the copulas." See Upham's Moral Philosophy, under 
 the head of Reasoning, page 192. Again I quote from 
 Moreirs History of Modern Philosophy, page 421. In treat- 
 
 11 
 
242 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ing of what the great Fichte calls the absolute principles of 
 philosophy, and which I affirm to be the absolute essence of 
 nonsense, he proceeds to say, — " In order, therefore, to ob- 
 tain a starting point, for a system of reasoning, and for pure 
 science, we must look steadfastly into our own consciousness, 
 and find some act of the mind's own spontaneous production, 
 which can be regarded in every case as axiomatically true; 
 such being found, it would give us the absolute and uncondi- 
 tional principle of all human knowledge. This primitive act is 
 none other than the principle of identity, — A — A, a principle 
 which is unconditionally certain, both as to its matter and its 
 form. No one will dispute the proposition — A — A, when it 
 is not enunciated as though A implied any particular existence, 
 but simply hypothetically ; — that if A is, then A is equal to 
 A ; and yet, in affirming A — A, I pass a judgment; I think, 
 and in doing so, I affirm myself, so that the identity of me is 
 here asserted, and the proposition becomes Ego = Ego. The 
 second absolute principle is the category of negation, which 
 may be thus expressed : A is not = A. This proposition is 
 conditional as to matter, because it depends upon the previous 
 truth A = A, but it is unconditional as to the form. Viewed 
 as an absolute act of the mind, the equation becomes the not- 
 me if not = the me. By the former proposition the me affirmed 
 itself ; by this second act, the me affirms the not-me, that is, 
 it places something before it which is opposed to self. Iq 
 other words, in the one case the mind views itself as the abso- 
 lute subject ; now it views itself as object ; forming thus the 
 opposition which is necessary to every act of conscienciousness." 
 I have quoted the above few lines not by way of burlesque, 
 but to give the common reader a fair specimen of the teachings 
 of Mental Philosophy, and thus to enable him to infer how it 
 is that more than two thousand years of labor in that science 
 has only served to obscure it, and enlarge the distraction of 
 authors upon the subject, and that 1858 years of theological 
 learning, and search for religious truth, should have ended as 
 
REASONING. 243 
 
 did the Tower of Babel, and that Brigham Young should at 
 this late day be found to be the greatest Divine on earth, for 
 the only way we have to judge of the greatness of a cause is its 
 success or result, or in other words, from its effects. 
 
 I have said that the human soul is a unit, a simple, indivis- 
 ible and feeling entity, capable not of divisions, but only of 
 modes of action, corresponding with the objects that act upon 
 it, as changes the wax to the impression of the seal, or the 
 paper to the characters written upon it. Judging, reasoning, 
 remembering, and imagining, are all but modes of conscient ac- 
 tion or thinking, and in sound excepted, there is no difference 
 in all this parade of names, for in every case it is simple feeling 
 or thinking which is the same, for we cannot feel without 
 thinking, nor think without feeling. We must here scrutinize 
 closely, and consider words worth nothing, for we can think 
 and act correctly without words, as do brutes, children, and 
 deaf people. Even the sucking infant, knowing nothing of the 
 sign or force of words that so frequently mislead adult, can tell 
 the mother from any other person, and even distinguish between 
 a smile and a frown. There has been much dispute between 
 worldly authors in regard to nominalism, and "realism," and 
 whether we can reason without the use of language. If children 
 and mutes did not decide that question, my old roan horse 
 would, for whenever I ride him through country gates, he 
 pushes his nose through the slats, and lifts the latch, and by 
 shoving hard with his head, carries the heaviest gate before him. 
 If the staves be too close for his nose, he is so reasonable in 
 thought, that he at once thrust his tongue through, and lifts 
 the latch. He has also learned, J)y observation, to lay down 
 bars as quickly with his teeth, as many man can with his 
 hands. This reasoning, and reasoning promptly without lan- 
 guage, may be said to be instinct, which is not true, for it is 
 purely the result of observation and experience, no young horse 
 ever at first attempting such a thing. Every farmer knows 
 that young horses are like young people, and that they gain in 
 
244: MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 knowledge by education and training, just as the human does. 
 Their decisions are prompt and correct, like that of Patrick 
 Henry's, without the parade of logical forms. They, like quick, 
 witted and sensible people, look right into the facts in nature, 
 and have no use for the pedantic sounds of categories, predicates, 
 copulas and sequences. Much has also been said about the 
 wonderful and distinguishing trait of personal identity, as a 
 proof of the spirituality and immortality of the soul. I would 
 ask such scribblers and book-makers, whether a cat or dog, 
 prone to fight like our bipeds, and to whom they deny a mind or a 
 soul, ever doubted of the me or the not me, or ever mistook 
 themselves for another. There is no way but by short hand 
 and stubborn facts to meet such vague and absurd abstractions. 
 The simple science of mind that should occupy but a few pages, 
 has been torn into atoms and scattered through thousands of 
 great volumes under the imposing title of mental science. Such 
 pedagogues have been called deep learned and great men, 
 when in the eyes of nature's true science they are meagre, pet- 
 ty, and stale drivellers. 
 
 Our metaphysical books are full of technicalities that in real- 
 ity have no meaning, and consequently only encumber the sub- 
 ject and distract the pupil, who is always looking for their ap- 
 plication, and not finding it, despairs of understanding the sub- 
 ject which, without such language, would be perfectly simple 
 and easy. But thus it is that those petty pedagogues, by the 
 dexterous use of senseless sounds, and harmonious nothings, 
 get the name of wise-acres, and fatten upon the credulity of 
 their demented and enslaved fellow-mortals. Yet these books 
 being established in our schools from long authority, have un- 
 fortunately misled the pupil by inducing him to believe that 
 such divisions in terms as powers, faculties, etc., must mean 
 and represent some rejd difference, and division of the mind 
 itself. There is proof ample of all that can be asked for mind 
 without resorting to such impotent and unmanly subterfuge. 
 A man's belief is nothing aside from his thoughts, for, as 
 
REASONING. 245 
 
 before stated, we believe, we think, we imagine, we presume, feel, 
 and are conscious, and know, that it is midday and not midnight. 
 These are mere solecisms or repetitions of sounds, to express a 
 simple feeling of soul. The light, flashing upon the mind, at 
 once makes its unavoidable impression, as the seal upon the wax, 
 the pictm-e upon the daguerreotype plate, the writing upon 
 paper, or the object thrown by light upon the face of the mir- 
 ror. There is a oneness of mind and a oneness of action, and 
 the multiplicity of words are but contraventions of the fact. 
 Reasoning is said to be the drawing conclusions from the com- 
 parison of two or more ideas, as though many ideas or actions 
 of the mind could exist in the same space at the same time; 
 when the *' sensorium commune " can act but one act at a time, 
 how can we, with the existing state of mind, compare two 
 other states of mind that do not exist. This would be the same 
 as a thing acting when it is not, and where it is not. Compar- 
 ing must be an act of that which thinks, or compares, so that 
 to compare two or more ideas would be to admit that an action 
 of comparing, and that two or more ideas compared must occupy 
 the same space at the same time, a thing admitted by all philo- 
 sophic writers to be impossible, they having lain it down as an 
 axiom that no two things can occupy the same space at the 
 same time. It is impossible that the same mind can be in two 
 or more different states at the same time. Comparing is think- 
 ing, so if we compare two other thoughts, three thoughts must 
 exist in the same mind at the same time. There is no such 
 thing, therefore, as complex thoughts so elaborately treated of 
 by authors, each thought being perfectly simple, but succeeding 
 each other in such rapid succession as that they all seem to 
 be present at the same time. If we whirl a fire-brand rapidly 
 around in the dark, it bears the appearance of one continuous, 
 unbroken and luminous ring, when in reality the fire-brand is 
 not in but one place at a time, one impression not dying till 
 another is presented, thus forming a continuous unbroken chain, 
 though each link of that chain is different in time, in space, and 
 
246 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRATE. 
 
 in nature, when moving. Kor is there such a thing as simul- 
 taneity in the chain of causaUtj, but all is succession. We may 
 imagine an endless chain so united and dependent, that when 
 the first link is moved, every link is in motion, yet it will readily 
 be seen, that though the whole chain moves through space, no 
 two links occupy the same space at the same time. It is com- 
 mon to speak of " synchronical," actions in physiological pheno- 
 mena, but there is no such thing in the same organ. There are 
 " peristaltic " or " vermicular " motions in rapid succession, and 
 there is the intimate connection or tie of cause and effect, yet 
 the cause must preceed the effect in nature, as well as in time 
 and space. It is common also to speak of simultaneous and 
 synchronous actions of the mind, but there is certainly no such 
 thing. All are successive modes of action, in quick succession, 
 like the turning of the kaleidoscope. Nor is there any more 
 mystery in this, than that one body, as a ball in motion, should 
 put a large number in successive motion. One idea will often 
 stir up a whole concatenation of ideas. How this is done 
 seems to be an ultimate fact, for which I have no satisfactory 
 explanation. 
 
 This I know, however, that these associations are not stored 
 away in cells, nor shut up in caves like the winds by JEolus, to 
 be let out at pleasure, as some authors have taught, who speak 
 of large stores of ideas, and shelves upon which select ideas can 
 be placed for ready purposes, as merchants store away their 
 goods. Speak one word, and it often happens, that ruminating 
 thoughts crowd upon us for hours, simply by suggestion or asso- 
 ciation, pretty much in the order and connection in which they 
 have been received. 
 
 " Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain 
 Our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain, 
 Awake but one, and lo, what myriads rise, 
 Each stamps its image as the other flies." 
 
 It is just as difficult to~ account for how it is that intermittent 
 fevers and other diseases lie dormant in the system, and are 
 
REASONING. 24 1 
 
 stirred up by trifling causes, of which we are not conscious, or 
 how small-pox or vaccination should remain unknown, and un- 
 felt for life, to the exclusion of certain other diseases. There is 
 another fact in the animal economy but little noticed, and which 
 bears a close analogy to the phenomena of mind, that no two 
 systemic or generic diseases can exist in the same system, at the 
 same time, one counteracting the other, which will lie dormant 
 till the first subsides, and then rise up and run its course. To 
 the just opprobrium of medical science, and to the neglect of 
 mental alienation and suffering humanity, the dependent rela- 
 tion of mind and body has been almost wholly neglected. A 
 close attention to our nervous influences would mitigate many a 
 sorrow and prolong the period of life. 
 
 I have said there are no such things as complex ideas, every 
 idea being in itself plain and distinct. Color and extension, as 
 I before observed, have no necessary connection, and may be 
 separated, yet we invariably receive them as one simple idea. 
 Each part of every letter in the alphabet, when we first begin 
 to learn, is closely scrutinized, the single letter A having many 
 parts which are examined by the young beginner to distinguish 
 it from B, but by and by A with all its parts, first separate and 
 distinct, now coalesce and become one simple idea. Time brings 
 not only entire letters but whole words and sentences, as equally 
 simple as a single side of A. The word man, for instance, is 
 perfectly simple and expressive, without going back, and by 
 analysis making a whole volume of metaphysical learning in 
 giving every part of every letter in M-A-N, and then that he 
 is a biped with many thousand peculiarities and relations of 
 mind and body in the great scale of organisms. If we look at 
 a table with two legs, it is simple, and one with four legs, though 
 more complicated, is equally so, as an idea being neither black, 
 blue, red, or green, nor are they solid, extended, rough, smooth, 
 angular, or circular, but a mere simple feeling. 
 
 If thinking and believing be not the same, then we can not 
 think and believe at the same time. I should like that those 
 
248 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 lavish writers would tell me where the feeling parts, the think- 
 ing parts, the conscious parts, the willing parts, the judging 
 parts, and the reasoning parts of the mind are situated, and by 
 what kind of substance they are united. Nothing can more palp- 
 ably show the absurdity of dividing the mind into parts, than to 
 think where those parts are placed, and how such parts can exist 
 separate from the mind. Not more than one desire can exist in 
 the same mind at the same time, and the stronger one will always 
 prevail with as much certainty, as the heavy weight will cast the 
 scale. Mental desires and muscular contractions are as indis- 
 solubly united as cause and effect, so much so that the deed al- 
 ways follows the desire. There is no choice neuter, these terms 
 being incompatible, but every choice is absolute ; yet the differ- 
 ence may be so indifferent or trifling, that we are not conscious 
 why we did as we did, and hence are apt, if not satisfied, to re- 
 proach ourselves, and say that we might so easily have acted 
 otherwise. One sentence, however, will show that these re- 
 reproachful expressions are thoughtless and silly, for the whole 
 pursuit of man from his cradle to his grave being happiness, 
 he could not knowingly make himself unhappy, as he now is 
 with these after-lights shining in upon his soul, so that were it 
 possible for him to go back, he would as certainly under the 
 same circumstances do the same thing, as that the same causes 
 will under the same circumstances always produce the same 
 effects. We are equally deceived by our feelings in other 
 things ; for instance : when a man says he thinks he will 
 think, he is already thinking, and when he says he can will a 
 thought, he expresses a direct contradiction ; for how can he 
 will a thought wi^thout knowing what thought to will, and if 
 he knows what thought to will, it requires no will, for the 
 thought is already present to the mind. I see those grievous 
 and vexatious errors as plainly as that two and two make 
 four, yet I know how hard it is to convince the obstinate and 
 prejudiced, who are born to the grossest errors by an invincible 
 early education. The only cure is to attach our youths to the 
 
REASONING. 249 
 
 charms of simple and unpretending nature, our immutable friend 
 and infallible teacher of wisdom. She has so constructed man 
 with sensibilities and perfections that it requires no philosophy 
 or books on ethics to tell him that he does not wish to be rob- 
 bed of his liberty, or to be injured in his person or property, 
 and knowing that his fellows have the same feelings and de- 
 sires in common with himself, a sense of disapprobation arises 
 whenever he inflicts an injury upon his fellow-man, and here 
 lies the whole secret so controverted by authors, of how we 
 come by a sense of right and wrong, and of moral obligation. 
 Thus we see how plain and simple these things of reason are, 
 requiring no logical forms to be memorised before we can rea- 
 son or understand our own rights, or be conscious of these 
 feelings of moral obligation that God has implanted in us, not 
 by direct and daily inspiration, but in our original organiza- 
 tion. These arbitrary subtleties, dead languages, and such 
 other hke trifles may be studied for seven years in college as 
 the " insignia" of learning, that may give us cast with the art- 
 istic and pedantic world, but they can never make us wise or 
 meet the emergencies of practical life. They dwarf the mind 
 to insignificance, and are contemptible in the sight of God, who 
 delights in things as things are made, and not as man by his 
 traiterous and artful vanity would have them. To grant this 
 is but to read the history of facts, and see that more than two 
 thousand years of mental and religious studies have only served 
 to create a Maelstroom of the mental world, into which the 
 ten thousand distracted parties are drawn, and are tearing 
 each other's dogmas to pieces. 
 
 We see a marked imbecility in the minds of many of those 
 learned men, so falsely called, whose brains have been choked 
 up with dead languages, party creeds, and dogmas, and in 
 some instances they are so perfectly born down to dementation, 
 as by the engorgement of blood in case of apoplexy. Look at 
 Bishop Berkeley, for instance, whose elysian reveries and trans- 
 cendental feelings involved him so deeply in the mazes of spi- 
 
250 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ritualism and superstition, that he denied the existence of mat- 
 ter and of the objective world. Swedenborg and thousands of 
 other leaders might be cited as lamentable examples of this 
 dilemma. Those, who have read the world's history to any 
 purpose, cannot forget that thousands, yes, millions have 
 starved and whipt themselves to death, voluntarily burnt 
 and crushed themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut for 
 the want of a correct knowledge of mental science, and of the 
 plain and simple laws of God, that operate daily and hourly 
 upon us for woe or for weal. The credulity of man has ever 
 led him off from these immutable and eternal laws to the 
 ever vacillating and ephemeral opinions of his erring and de- 
 signing fellow-mortals. I have been constantly led off by giv- 
 ing practical examples of the results of the world's opinions 
 which, I presume, will not be received amiss ; for in all cases 
 of dispute about the value of a tree, I think it better to decide 
 the question by exhibiting the fruit, than to write learned 
 books of mysticism and doubt. But we will again resume 
 the argument. It must be seen that even the brute, guided by 
 nature, reasons with more energy and quickness of decision than 
 man in all things appertaining to his self-preservation and hap- 
 piness in life, and had he the power of speech, hands to feel, 
 or the sense of touch, the only corrective of our senses, and 
 our greatest source of knowledge, the horse for instance, with 
 a century to live like ourselves, would, if not stupified, as we 
 are by a load of useless things, would with the mind he now 
 possesses, with those additional advantages, be equal to man. 
 And horses, though they are not poets or romance writers, cer- 
 tainly have vivid and exhuberant imaginations, equal to the 
 great Kant who has made a book of legendary philosophy out 
 of nothing, for they can transform an old stump greatly to the 
 hazard of the rider, into gorgeous and moving ghosts.- Brutes 
 also have phantom dreams, for they often wake up affrighted, 
 and the dog is frequently heard to bark in his sleep, while his 
 legs are going as in full chase of his game. Tupper says, 
 
REASONING. 251 
 
 " What hath, the noble dog less than reason, 
 Or the brute man more than instinct." 
 
 If learning in things we do not understand constitutes a 
 great man, then the learned or college pig had as great a mind 
 as Bishop Berkeley, for he was so artistically accompUshed in 
 cards, as doubtless to beat the philosopher in that game. There 
 are many bipeds so technically trained in the conventionalities 
 of man, as to enjoy the appellation of great and learned, who 
 in the eyes of merit and true science, have no more claim to 
 useful qualification than the parrot or jack-daw. 
 
 I am here again reminded that my great aversion to the 
 stale and mechanical trainings of man in useless things, and my 
 steady fondness for the simple and vital principles of nature is 
 leading me somewhat astray from the heading of this article, 
 but I must be indulged a little farther in illustrations and ex- 
 amples, when I will return to the strict argument. I now wish 
 to show the reader from the undeniable condition of mankind 
 how far the rule of reasoning has led him into the paths of 
 truth for centuries past. The countless millions of money that 
 has been expended, and the innumerable brains which have 
 been addled in our mechanical superstitions and fanatical insti- 
 tutions, have placed us in the following degraded, and insecure 
 condition. The world is filled with political and religious 
 rogues, whose hypocritical pomp and abominable tyranny are 
 worshipped by the masses, whose pockets they pick and then 
 send them to hell for the want of money to pray them out. 
 The conflicting and violent opinions have estranged man from 
 man, and led to the most heart-rending and sanguinary scenes, 
 upon which kind nature has looked with feehngs of pity and 
 anxious solicitude for the better fate of man. Ruin and deso- 
 lation has grown out of the religious and political tenets of our 
 institutions. Politics has become a trade of gross subterfuge 
 and debasing tricks, while rehgion has degenerated into vague 
 and idle ceremonies, and our consciences are ruled by the dog- 
 mas of party. Wars are yet rife in the world, and instead of 
 
252 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 humaa sacrifices and burning for witchcraft, which the laws 
 forbid, our churches are profaned by obscene garrulity, and the 
 ribaldry of party. That calm and serene dignity, and deep and 
 solemn devotion at the sacred desk is no longer seen and heard, 
 nor can that humility, meekness, and tender piety, belonging to 
 a pure and simple-hearted religion, be found. Virtue and hon- 
 esty, with an unalloyed and conscientious solicitude for the wel- 
 fare of our fellows, has not been taught, but extravagance has 
 engendered a lurking envy, while each one's wits is sharpened 
 by his education to overreach and swindle his brother. The 
 pomp, parade, and ambition of the world, and the pride of 
 modern church paraphernalia draws so hard upon the professor's 
 purse, that he cannot, while holding with the fashions of the 
 day, be strictly honest. I mention these melancholy and por- 
 tentous facts that the reader may excuse me in my bold but 
 conscientious condemnation of the abuses of society, and in my 
 efforts to estabhsh a new system of education, that of the study 
 of the immutable and eternal laws of nature, instead of the dis- 
 tracted and corrupting party dogmas of man. My plan for 
 throwing off dead languages, logic, rhetoric, and many other 
 worthless branches of study, with all sectarian teaching, and 
 attaching the pupil early to the investigation of the pure science 
 of nature (laws of God) I have laid down elsewhere, and only 
 mention it here in its legitimate connection with the subject of 
 reason, and the history of man from his cradle to his grave. 
 
 I shall not treat of judgment, memory, and imagination 
 separately, as I consider them all but different modes of action, 
 in the same identical thing, and consequently of no separate 
 importance in explaining the nature of mind. Though I have 
 justly ridiculed the vanity of authors in their vocabulary of 
 independent and separate powers and faculties, I have no ob- 
 jection how many may be added by way of diversifying and 
 embellishing our language, so that an explanation accompanies 
 them, telling the pupil that they do not mean what they say. 
 It is more convenient to say that the sun rises and sets, than 
 
REASONING. 253 
 
 to say, that the earth's diarnal motion gives it that appearance, 
 yet this should be explained to the tyro in science, who is liable 
 to be misled by such terms. Mental writers are like phreno- 
 logical scribblers, every author anxious to swell his book with 
 new discoveries, till there are now as many bumps upon our 
 little heads, as there are protuberances upon the surface of 
 the great globe. Metaphysicians, in like manner, have swelled 
 the mind, an immaterial and unextended thing, with faculties, 
 powers, and ideas corresponding with every created thing, till 
 the mind is checkered with more than can be found upon the 
 entire map of this terrestrial sphere. From which we might 
 wonder, as did Goldsmith's villagers, how so little a head should 
 hold so much. 
 
 I have said that thinking, reasoning, judging, imagining, 
 remembering, feeling, knowing, and being conscious of a thing 
 are all the same, or mere modes of action in the same feeling 
 and identical soul. For instance, apply fire or ice to the sur- 
 face, prick it with a pin, or cut it with a knife, all these sensa- 
 tions will be different, and we may view a thousand objects, 
 smell a thousand smells, and hear as many sounds, but it would 
 encumber the science of mind, to call them faculties and 
 powers, and force the pupil to memorise them, yet if some 
 great author (great fool) should classify every idea, passion, 
 and emotion of soul, thousands of, which we have by the hour, 
 they would, by long custom and the stupidity of teachers, seem 
 reasonable and necessary. I am, for instance, but one man, 
 and were my name altered, or many titles given me, I would 
 be the same, and though I may act many actions, still I am 
 the same identical man. The mind is like a pool of water, that 
 may have innumerable ripples (feelings or passions) rising, sub- 
 siding, and succeeding each other in endless succession, yet the 
 subject of all this excitement, even when lashed to a foaming 
 fury, is the same placid pool. The wax may be pressed with 
 endless shapes, and have stamps of every character imprinted 
 upon it, yet it is the same identical wax. Sensation, as I have 
 
254 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 said, is the mind which is susceptible of this feeling, that, and 
 the other, ad infinitum. That past feelings or ideas should be 
 called up by external or internal excitations, as in memory or 
 imagination, is not'more wonderful than that intermittent fevers 
 should subside or pass off, and return at will without any cause, 
 as free-willers would say. The cow ruminates as we do, and 
 like us, gets nothing back but what was objectively taken in. 
 She, then, no more gets her cud directly from heaven, from 
 ministering and the promptings of angels, nor from sacred in- 
 tuition, than we do our ideas from the same sources. The prin- 
 ciple of association, suggestion or memory, by which our 
 thoughts recur, is not understood, but this is well known and 
 granted by all, that the brute has it in a higher degree than 
 man, as the horse, for instance, never forgets his early associa- 
 tions. 
 
 Between will or desire and muscular motion or contraction, 
 there is an indissoluble tie, the deed, when the telegraphic 
 wires are up, always obeing the desire to act. I will to raise 
 my arm, and it is done, or to walk, and the legs are put in 
 motion. Indeed, such is the estabhshed order of mentality, 
 that I now constantly find myself writing letters improperly. 
 Being, by no means, perfect in orthography, and absent-minded 
 withal, I often think how such and such words are to be spelled, 
 and if I think of a letter by association or similarity of sound, 
 ahead of its proper connection, my fingers so quickly and un- 
 consciously obey the will,, that the letter or word is written 
 before I have time to reflect and countermand it. Thus my 
 page is blotted and interlined greatly to my annoyance. With 
 my dictating discipline, which is slow, I am satisfied, but with 
 my writing machine I am not. It's inditing my suggestions 
 too hastily. From this same obedience of our locomotive 
 muscles to the will, proceeds, no doubt, the fact that by giving 
 one command to the legs to walk to a certain place, they move 
 on, while the commander may meditate or converse, and they 
 are sure to faithfully keep on, even if we pass the place, till 
 
REASONING. 255 
 
 there is a counter-command given to stop, go right, go left, or 
 turn in, as the case may be. The cry, move, to a well-trained 
 horse, will suddenly check the movement of every muscle in his 
 powerful body, though in full and rapid motion, when the word 
 "go!" will again start them. The will in some cases influences 
 even the involuntary muscles, as in our alvine and urinary 
 evacuations, which are involuntary at first as in the infant, 
 who pride of decency by age obtains control over them. The 
 passions and emotions, too, have their influence over the 
 muscles. To look upon a woman with lust, the amative muscle 
 is at once erected, and it is well known that fear, anxiety, and 
 suspense will act powerfully upon the bowels and kidneys, and 
 in thousand of cases has produced death by cholera. These are 
 physiological laws of the animal economy of greatest patholo- 
 gical and therapeutic importance. There is a marked difference 
 in the organization of men that gives them a control over a 
 regular and systematic train of thought. There are men of 
 quick perception, brilliant genius, and prompt action, with an 
 obvious deficiency in their systematic association. Montaigne, 
 though a man of noted talents, was so deficient in memory that 
 he never could recollect the name of a single one of his own 
 domestics, but had to call them by their vocation. Cromwell, 
 as Hume says, was never surpassed in a correct and ready 
 judgment, and yet his arguments were " dark, tedious, and un- 
 satisfactory." It is related that Lord Mansfield had a friend 
 who was appointed to the judges bench, and upon his doubting 
 of his own ability to fill the station, as he could not argue a 
 case, Mansfield assured him that a sound judgment was not so 
 difficult as he supposed, and that, if he would always leave it 
 to his good natural sense, his judgment would be right, but to 
 be careful never to offer a reason for it, as that would most 
 certainly be wrong, or, in other words, vague and unsatis- 
 factory. Such differences of mind are all around us, nor are 
 they more remarkable than the varieties of person, and the 
 
256 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 colors of eyes and hair, and I only cite the above as prominent 
 and striking cases. 
 
 As I consider the various subjects of mind under which I 
 write as arbitrary and unscientific, I have not confined myself 
 strictly to the caption, but followed the natural freedom of my own 
 thoughts, which leads me to indulge in a few more remarks, that 
 at this moment recurs to mind, but which more strictly should 
 be found under the head of Volition. There is nothing more 
 false than the common idea and consequent remark, that we can 
 and should control our thoughts, when the fact is exactly the 
 reverse, our thoughts invariably controlling us. Of this startling 
 fact every man will be convinced by observing how he comes by 
 his thoughts, and how his actions are controlled by those thoughts. 
 A judge decides according to his opinion or thoughts, and a 
 jury does the same. Look at the noon-day sun, and can you 
 avoid thinking it mid-day and not mid-night. You cannot avoid 
 seeing every thing you see, feeling every thing you feel, and 
 hearing every thing you hear, nor can you any more avoid every 
 thought that occurs within you, than you can the stroke of 
 death when it comes upon you. Why, when sleepless, and your 
 thoughts wandering to the end of the earth, do you not con- 
 trol them and put them to rest. This you would say is foolish 
 talk, but certainly not more so than in every other case, where 
 we speak of controlling our thoughts. Every opinion, too, has 
 its unavoidable cause, as, for instance, a man presents himself 
 before us, and at once we think it is a man, and so with every 
 opinion given by every sense we have; and the talk then about 
 controlling our feelings or opinions must certainly be without 
 due reflection, and the burning of each other, because we can 
 not do it, is horrible beyond the power of language to express. 
 Again there can be no act of will without a choice, and as a 
 choice denotes a thing chosen, it will readily be seen that that 
 thing chosen must have been the cause of that choice. And 
 then again, if we can choose to do a thing without a cause, we 
 
REASONING. 25T 
 
 must have events or effects without a cause, and if not, man 
 can not be free to think as he pleases without a cause to make 
 him do so. See my article on Volition. 
 
 If we have two thoughts in immediate succession, we cannot 
 but be sensible of the difference without throwing them up side 
 by side, as authors express it, where there is no room or place 
 to be thrown; turning them about, and comparing them, which 
 acts of comparing would all be in and by the unextended and 
 thinking thing, that compares, making the mind compare itself 
 with itself, acts many acts, and be in many conditions at the 
 same time, making no allotment either for time or for space, in 
 the various acts of the censorium. This is contrary both to 
 science and to common sense, for every thing in existence re- 
 quires both time and space for its existence, in addition to which 
 every effect requires its proper and sufficient cause, whereas we 
 here have a diversity from identity, and many effects from one 
 cause, and others without any cause. When the science of mind 
 shall be understood, it will be seen that it cannot be in two 
 states at the same time, nor can it be occupied by two or more 
 ideas at the same identical moment, which facts renders the idea 
 of entertaining and of comparing a number of ideas together at 
 the same time ridiculously absurd. Thus, then, it must appear 
 that every idea or perception of the mind is simply the effect or 
 result of the thing perceived at the moment of perception, and 
 neither the archetype phantasm, nor the representation of any 
 thing existing in the mind from all eternity, as is by the great 
 duncery works and text-books, particularly of Germany, taught. 
 It would be just as sensible to say that the child existed in the 
 womb of the maid, millions of years before her own birth, as to 
 say that every idea we have, existed either in the mind of Deity 
 or man, millions of years before the existence of man, and yet, 
 strange to tell, those mystic and transcendental Spirituahsts 
 teach the doctrine. I have predicted, I think, in other parts of 
 this work, that Spiritualism, now fast calling to its aid the 
 greatest men of our nation, and Swedeuborgianism, will, by 
 
258 
 
 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 their strong and natural affinity coalesce, so that what the 
 magic arm of Brigham Young does not grasp, will in the next 
 half century be found within the pale of this most fascinating 
 doctrine of Spiritualism, which captivates and translates the 
 soul beyond any scheme of religion yet ever gotten up by man. 
 It at once arrests the soul and translates it to the ethereal re- 
 gions, where it in rapturous transports of joy revels amidst the 
 departed spirits of its once earthly joys. In corroboration of my 
 predictions I here give a short quotation from iV", O. Commer- 
 cial Bulletin: 
 
 " SwEDENBORGiANisM. — We Icam that there has been within 
 a few months past quite a stampede in the German Methodist 
 Churches of New Orleans and vicinity, toward Swedenborgian- 
 ism. One of the most popular of the German preachers, the 
 Rev. J. M. Hofer, has gone over to the mystic faith of the 
 great Swedish philosopher, and taken with him not a few of 
 his brethren and friends, and now holds forth to them at private 
 houses on the Sabbath. Metaphysical speculations appear to have 
 an indescribable charm for the German mind, and if they have 
 about them an air of the mystical and marvellous, the attrac- 
 tions seem to be increased." 
 
 This I throw up simply as a feather, amidst thousands of 
 others afloat, to show which way the wind blows, from which 
 every man of reflection who has read the various religions of 
 the world, and has seen the wonderful workings of the human 
 mind, will grant with myself, that mysticism is more fascinat- 
 ing to the ii^dolent minds of the masses, than a laborious and 
 systematic rationalism. 
 
 It is against this wild fanaticism as well as all other abuses 
 in religion I write, and am willing to devote my time and 
 feeble efforts to the establishment of a rational standart of re- 
 ligion, and true devotion to the great author and kind father 
 of our being. But in returning from consequences to the argu- 
 ment, I affirm that there is no such thing as innate or divine 
 ideas or knowledge of any kind, but what is received through 
 
REASONING. 259 
 
 the senses after birth, and so far as those ideas are subsequent- 
 ly changed and ruminated through the mind, that it is either 
 by the association with sounds, sights, and external objects, or 
 from the stirring up of our nervous influences by our internal 
 and vital functions. A strong cup of tea, for instance, acting 
 upon the nerves of the stomach, will give us a sleepless night, 
 and revolve ten thousand thoughts through the mind that 
 otherwise would never have been brought up, or recalled to 
 mind. I have said the mind cannot be in two or more different 
 states at the same time, and consequently that there is no com- 
 paring of ideas in reasoning, as is taught by the text-books, for 
 comparing as they say, is bringing and setting up two or more 
 ideas side by side in order to perceive the difference, which, of 
 course, will make many things occupy the same space at the 
 same time, throw the mind into various conditions at the 
 same moment, and make it act many acts at the same time, as 
 calling up many ideas at the same time, setting them up side 
 by side, and in comparing and inferring their difference. Let 
 us seriously reflect and ask ourselves what an idea is ; whether 
 it be a something independent, and separate from the mind, 
 or a mere feeling, sensation, or action, mode or condition of 
 mind ; if the former ideas then can exist without the mind, and 
 if the latter, the mind, not being able to act but one act at the 
 same time, or to be in opposite conditions at the same moment, 
 it renders the alternative as impossible, as for two things to 
 occupy the same space at the same time. From this exhibition 
 of facts it must now appear that there is no such thing as 
 placing a number of ideas side by side, requiring the mind to 
 be in various conditions at the same time, in comparing, infer- 
 ring, etc , which authors say constitutes the reasoning process, 
 or this independent and wonderful faculty or power called rea- 
 son. It is not in reasoning alone that those separate, indepen- 
 dent and eternal ideas has figured, but in all the lamentable 
 divisions and bloody struggles in religion, they have had much 
 
260 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 to do, each fanatic holding his own ideas to be divinely inspired, 
 and those of his adversary to be instigated by the devil, and 
 consequently to be fought by fire and sword. I again and 
 again affirm that the mind is dependent for every idea, impres- 
 sion, or conception with which it becomes pregnant, to the 
 physical and appointed causes of impregnation, and that the 
 soul or precipient principle simply becomes sensible, or in other 
 words, conscious of these impressions, and that this is the sum 
 total of physiological phenomena, or process of mentality. If 
 a cow and a horse be presented to the mind either jointly or 
 separately, they being different in nature, the mind is at once 
 impressed with the fact. The fire of a cannon and that of a 
 rifle sounds so differently that it matters not what interval 
 there may be in time, they tell the mind the difference in 
 sound, without being called up before the mind's presence 
 chamber, and there handled, turned about, and compared. To 
 know the difference in weight between two bodies, as of lead 
 and cork, it is but to take them in the hand ; and to know the 
 difference in taste between vinegar and sugar, is simply to take 
 them in the mouth, and the taste is told without pedantic tech- 
 nicalities and abstract subtleties. Let a man present himself 
 with all his varied features, and the idea produced is just as 
 simple, as if cast upon the daguerreotype plate or the face of 
 a mirror, and requires no analysis or comparisons to know it 
 from all other faces without going back through all eternity to 
 find the archetype or phantasm in the mind of deity, millions of 
 years before man was created. • 
 
 Thus it must be seen by every reader, having independence 
 to think, and capacity for the most obvious laws of nature, 
 that the laws of mind so far are perfectly plain and simple, and 
 beyond this ultimate point we shall never get ; God having said, 
 thus far shalt thou go, and no farther. Newton pursues the 
 laws of gravitation in its simple but wonderful powers, even to 
 its grasp upon the innumerable worlds that roll through inter- 
 
REASONING. 261 
 
 minable space, and yet when asked what gravitation was, he 
 answered, not in vanity, but as a wise and honest man, he 
 knew no more than the ploughman of the fields. The question 
 of soul is as ultimate as that of God himself, and we can know 
 no more of its essence, than we can of the essence and indivi- 
 duality of God. We know God onfy by his works, and we 
 have no other knowledge of mind, but by its acts. A moment's 
 reflection will convince us that the mind can no more operate 
 upon itself, compare itself with itself, move itself or create ideas 
 within itself, than the mirror can produce pictures upon itself, 
 or a stone operate on and move itself, all created things short 
 of God being as certainly dualistic and dependent as that there 
 is a God. Whenever we transcend the limits of our allotted 
 knowledge, and attempt to reach the infinite by the finite, we 
 at once launch into the regions of interminable mysticism, 
 where metaphysical writers have fled and floundered for ages 
 past. Physical philosophers who ascend step by step through 
 the unmistaken laws of nature, labor within their legitimate 
 sphere, and are to be respected for sustaining the mandates of 
 heaven, and for the great good they may do mankind ; but me- 
 taphysical philosophers and controversial Divines, who mystify 
 the purely simple mind of man by giving it innumerable 
 powers, faculties and phantasms, eternal ideas and spiritual 
 agencies, and who profess to penetrate the impenetrable veil of 
 deity, and reveal to man the will of God plainer than he can 
 do, or has done, are truly a contemptible set of impostors, and 
 unworthy the confidence of any sensible or good man. 
 
 Judging, reasoning, or supposing a proposition to be true 
 or false, is nothing more than an unavoidable result, or con- 
 clusion, from the succession of thoughts, brought up to the 
 mind by the terms of the proposition itself, with its attending 
 circumstances and reasoning, if we can make any distinction, is 
 simply repeating the order and connection of these thoughts to 
 convince others. A thought, sensation, or idea is not an entity 
 
 8* 
 
262 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 or separate something from the mind, as some have supposed, 
 but a mere censoreal tendency, or a particular mode of the 
 mind's acting, and these various modes, sensations, thoughts, or 
 conditions of mind are as numerous as the objects in nature, that 
 excite them for the moment, and then they are gone for ever, 
 except brought up by some external resemblance, or by what I 
 call the sixth sense, the functional and internal excitations. 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
COx\SClENCE. 
 
 Conscience is said to be that faculty of the mind which 
 distinguishes between right and wrong, and that chooses or re- 
 fuses in all our moral acts. It is generally supposed to be an 
 original, distinct, and independent power by which we are gov- 
 erned in all our opinions throughout life. It is taught that 
 this conscience is in reality the only spark of divinity we have 
 within us, and that it should be implicitly obeyed as an infal- 
 lible monitor. This doctrine, though maintained by the best of 
 men, and for the best of purposes, is in reality the doctrine of 
 Satan, who has ever persuaded man that he has a divinity that 
 stirs within him, and points out to him the errors of others 
 against whom he is conscienciously bound to use his best exer- 
 tions, and even to fight with fire and fagot where dictations and 
 creeds will not succeed. Every man on earth is said to possess 
 this unerring divinity and yet, what is truly marvellous, every 
 one is commanded on the pain of death, to yield his divinity as 
 false to that of others. This paradoxical and wonderful thing, 
 conscience, which claims to be what God himself, cannot be^ 
 inherent and fortuitous — mutable and immutable — just and un- 
 just — true and false ; became, under the terrible test of con- 
 science, the cruel persecutor of the Christian Church, under 
 which thousands, yes, millions, if we trace back the annals of 
 man, of the most pious men on earth, have bled and died. 
 Leaving the Christian world for the great arena of common 
 life, we find this divine conscience deceiving men and engaged 
 in the most malicious and cruel strifes. The man of observa- 
 tion needs no subtle philosophy to convince him of the absurdity 
 of this mischievous doctrine, so pertinaciously held by Divines. 
 
264 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 He has but to look at the little commerce around him and see 
 the disputes, suits, and hard thoughts amongst the best and 
 most conciencious of his neighbors. 
 
 I will not waste time in treating this dangerous and ridicul- 
 ous doctrine technically and abstractly, but with the hand of 
 truth and justice I will tear from its foul and jBendish back its 
 dark and bloody cloak, and expose it to the light of heaven, 
 that all who look may learn. We have seen its application in 
 the workings and deeds of men under the terrors of the Inqui- 
 sition, and we will spend but a few sentences in farther tracing 
 its application to the purposes of life. I will aim to show to 
 the reader that it is owing to the desertion of reason, and the 
 laws of nature, and the yielding to a mystic theology that all 
 the confusion and wild ravings in the science of psychology have 
 been brought about. 
 
 It appears that psychology (the science of the soul, or me- 
 taphysics) and theology have been inseparably connected from 
 the earliest dawn of this science; so much so that the churches 
 from age to age have been convulsed and split to pieces by the 
 books that have been issued from time to time upon these sub- 
 jects, as though God's holy and inspired word was to be subor- 
 dinated to the wild and fanatical sallies of uninspired men. Thi» 
 is undeniably so, and so much so that my whole aim in this in- 
 vestigation is to show the misconceived duty, and consummate 
 folly of the clergy in leaving the plain and practical precepts of 
 the Bible, and entering the fields of distracting and intermin- 
 able disputation. Were metaphysicians and Divines to confine 
 themselves to the simple phenomena of mind as developed by 
 the laws of God's natural revelation, the result would be the 
 confirmation of his supernatural revelation* but they have shut 
 out the light of reason, and giving to the dark and erratic feel- 
 ings of the inner soul as the voice of God, a divine monitor or 
 angel whispers, have dreamt their lives away, and written whole 
 books of petty (Juibblings about thingless names and pompous 
 nothings. The finite mind can never reach the infinite — conse- 
 
CONSCIENCE. 265 
 
 quently in the investigation of God's works we shall be involv- 
 ed, more or less, in error, and hence it is that when reason 
 fails to give satisfaction, we are prone to resort to our mere 
 feelings and emotions of soul, as inate and unerring divinity. 
 The German psychologists and Divines have soothed stern reason 
 and the unwelcome reahties of life by the pleasing emotions of 
 transcendental mysticism and elysian reveries — a quietism well 
 suited to the superstitious trainings of the German mind. I 
 will here insert a few sentences from " MorelPs History of 
 Modern Philosophy," to show the vascillation and confusion of 
 the philosophic world : 
 
 " What then is the next step to which the human mind 
 advanced after sensationalism, idealism, and scepticism had ex- 
 hausted their resources and left all in doubt ? The resource, 
 we answer, in which the mind, the last of all takes refuge, is 
 mysticism. Reason and reflection have apparently put forth 
 all their power and ended in uncertainty. The mystic there- 
 upon rises to view, and says to the rest of the philosophers 
 around him — ye have all alike mistaken the road — ^ye have 
 sought for truth from a totally incorrect source and entirely 
 overlooked the one divine element within you, from which alone 
 it can be derived. Reason is imperfect — it halts and stumbles 
 at every step when it would penetrate into the deeper recesses 
 of pure and absolute truth. But look within you — is there not 
 a spiritual nature there that allies you with the spiritual world ? 
 Is there not an enthusiasm which rises in all its energies when 
 reason grows calm and silent ? Is there not a light that en- 
 velopes all the faculties if you will only give yourself up to your 
 better feelings, and listen to the voice of the God that speaks 
 and stirs withm. To this source,, theny the mystic looks for a 
 knowledge that far transcends the feeble results of our reflective 
 faculties, and in which he would lay the basis of the highest 
 and truest philosophy." 
 
 There are more points for serious contemplation in the above 
 few sentences, thaacan be found in the whole remaining portion 
 
 12 
 
266 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 of the author's work. Morell is himself an hermaphrodite, but 
 somewhat more of the feminine gender. He cannot be classed 
 under the head of any of the systems or schemes of i)hilosophy. 
 He displays no originality or the powers of a creative genius, 
 and after vascillating through seven hundred and fifty-two pages 
 of most bewildering trash, comes to no conclusion of who, or 
 whethei any, among the numerous authors whom he reviews, 
 are correct. He may, himself, be given as a fair specimen (in 
 the study of human nature) of a man of great learning, but of 
 no depth, solidity, or independence of mind. But we will re- 
 turn from this short history he has given us of the perplexed 
 condition of mental philosophy, to the question, and see how 
 strangely wild the world has run in regard to their own exist- 
 ence, as well as in search for the best laws of human govern- 
 ment and the means of happiness here and hereafter. It will 
 readily be seen in this, as well as in every other instance where 
 we have been grossly and sadly led astray from the truth, that 
 the error has been in discarding reason — the light of heaven — 
 the only guide to God, and deserting our senses — the only in- 
 lets to knowledge, and the valid witnesses of the soul. 
 
 As we have said, space, duration, and God alone are un- 
 bounded and eternal. We finite creatures of a day, therefore, 
 can never reach the infinite, the eternal — designs and manifesta- 
 tions of God's providence. If, therefore, we keep within the 
 bounds that God has allotted us, we shall not become lost in 
 the interminable labyrinths of mystery. Whenever we throw 
 reason and common sense aside, and take mere feeling as a 
 guide, we have lost both rudder and compass — to be tossed 
 wildly astray upon the fathomless and boundless ocean. God 
 has given us a Hne that will fathom and sound every foot of 
 our way safely to the haven of eternal rest, if we will keep 
 upon the shallows and within the bounds he has prescribed for 
 us. Dissatisfied, however, with this limited allotment, we fancy 
 ourselves Gods and that there is a quasi God within us that 
 leads us bevond the bounds of reason and sense, and that can 
 
CONSCIENCE. 26t 
 
 establish an incompatible and veritable entity of its own in- 
 herent and marvellous powers. As Chalmers says, " God him^ 
 self, being reason, cannot act inconsistently with reason, for in 
 so doing he would annihilate himself," but this fancied God 
 within us can defy reason and act contrary to the constitution 
 and laws of our nature given us by our great creator. The 
 doctrine of an internal and unerring monitor superior to reason 
 is but the offspring of a chimerical and frenzied fanaticism, and 
 as the ghosts and phantoms of midnight vanish before the 
 rising sun, must these morbid musings vanish before the light 
 of reason. Those supposed intuitional promptings are but vain 
 and hopeless delusions which, if indulged in, would plunge us 
 into the vortex of wild distraction and bitter contentions, from 
 which would again arise the old scenes of horrid inhumanity. 
 Where, I ask, in the name of the great and good God, is this 
 sacred, intuitive monitor when one Christian drags the other to 
 the stake ? Are they not both prompted by the same unerring 
 guide to the most unhallowed and malignant deeds ? How wide 
 from the truth, then, must be such doctrines, when God him- 
 self is a unit and made of love, and were his professed followers 
 possessed of the same spirit, they would most assuredly be 
 united in the bonds of divine unity and brotherly friendship. 
 This doctrine, I strongly suspect as being from the devil, as it 
 is this, and this alone that has produced all the church-divisions 
 and fiendish feuds that we see prevailing everywhere. Satan, 
 on this account, has ever been opposed to reason, for well he 
 knows that earthly thrones have trembled, and demon oppres- 
 sion with all its gorgon forms has fled before the voice of reason, 
 nor can the tricks of papal sourcery or the wiles of the devil 
 himself stand against the might and majesty of reason. Reason, 
 in short, is the voice of God and the best boon of heaven to 
 man. Shall we, then, discard reason as the mystic Divines 
 have done, and rest the salvation of souls and the happiness 
 of man upon a mere creature of education. This adored con- 
 science is as beguiling to the indolent mind as the ignis fatuus 
 
268 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 or the glaring meteor that thwarts the vault of heaven, and 
 dies upon the welkin's bound — fair to be looked at, but false to 
 follow. An evanescent, ephemeral creature, governed by time 
 and place, and resting wholly upon the veering conventionalities 
 of man. 
 
 Let us again expose its inconsistencies and its want of 
 adaptation to the purposes of life. For example, here are two 
 neighbors, who, if left to reason, would live in harmony, but 
 the pastor of one has got up a creed called election, and one 
 of those brotherly neighbors, now becoming a church-member, 
 and having sworn to maintain this conscience against all the 
 other consciences of the world, he with dogmatical arrogance 
 now demands of his neighbor to give credence to this inherent, 
 this unerring and divine conscience that elevates the soul far 
 above the power of poor human and vulgar reason, and bestows 
 blessings, even life everlasting. His neighbor, in the mean- 
 time, has joined an American Church and has had an imma- 
 culate, immutable, and unerring conscience given to him by his 
 own pastor, and consequently with indignation retorts: "I am 
 conscious, sir, that your faith is the most hell-peopling that has 
 ever been invented by man; besides it is a foul and slanderous 
 libel against the justice and mercy of God, whereupon this 
 divine and saving faith makes bitter enemies of neighbors and 
 kindles the fires of destruction. Thus we see the danger of 
 being carried away by such allurements — those mere feelings 
 and emotions of soul. They are dangerously attractive to the 
 superstitious and fanatical, and are the exclusive generators 
 of witches, wizards, and all the fearful monsters that alarm 
 children and fools. We must not forget that God has endowed 
 us with reason as well as imagination, and that these lofty emo- 
 tions, though pleasing to the aspiring soul, will not bear us out 
 in the vicissitudes and struggles of life. A mystic lethargy 
 amongst mental philosophers who found it easy to fall in the 
 wake of the superstitious masses, and a sordid pusilanimity 
 
CONSCIENCE. 269 
 
 amongst the priesthood who enter to the same feeling led both 
 religion and philosophy wildly astray for many ages. 
 
 After more than two thousand years of bewildered struggle 
 in mental science, a great and leading light appeared in the 
 person of Francis Bacon, who dragged those scholastic mystics 
 from the dark closets, and exposed them to the light of day. 
 He showed by unanswerable arguments that reason was given 
 by God as our only guide to truth, and that whenever we de- 
 serted poor human reason for a supposed divine monitor with- 
 in, science would sink to insignificance, and our guide would 
 prove a delusion and a mockery of all our hopes. Under 
 Bacon's rule of Kationahsm there arose a Locke who rid the 
 world of innate ideas, and of divine monitors, and subjected all 
 things to the test of reason. And secondly, a Newton came 
 forward who, by the aid of reason, not only looked through 
 the departments of this world, but ascended high amidst the 
 celestial spheres amongst other worlds and systems of worlds. 
 But soon, however, philosophy fell back into the dark realms 
 of superstition, and gave way to our mere feelings and delusive 
 suggestions of soul. Amidst this distracted state of things, 
 there appeared a bishop Berkely, who was so transcendental 
 in his impulses that he boldly denied the existence of a material 
 and external world. He contended that everything was re- 
 presentative, that we had nothing in the mind but ideas, and as 
 these ideas were not matter, we had no proof of the existence 
 of matter ; and thus was established Berkeley's system of 
 Idealism. 
 
 Next upon the stage came David Hume, who with the great- 
 est mind of the age, saw that the idealistic doctrine involved a 
 gross absurdity, and that it struck at the foundations of all 
 human knowledge. So he at once exposed it to ridicule and 
 contempt, by showing plainly to the world that Berkeley by his 
 own principles had destroyed both mind and matter, leaving 
 us without either soul or body. From this scene of doubt and 
 confusion arose Hume's system of scepticism, and next came 
 
2*70 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 Pantheism and a renewed Mysticism, and lastly of all we have 
 the school of Electicism, which in reality is nothing more nor 
 less than a system made up of errors, but the least of errors of 
 all the other schools. 
 
 We might blazon our pages with the most glowing lights 
 that ever shone upon earth, and yet could truthfully say that 
 after all those mighty minds have been exhausted in the cause 
 of human improvement and knowledge — that the world is left 
 in darkness and in doubt. The schools of the present age, par- 
 ticularly in Germany, are psychologised. They are asleep and 
 subject to all the vagaries of their morbid imaginations. They 
 yield to the fervid impulses and to the longings of their hearts, 
 and hence the hallowed charm that encircles the soul, and 
 buoys it up in its fond and extatic delusions and its elysian 
 reveries. 
 
 To convince the reader that I have not misrepresented the 
 distracted condition of Mental Philosophy, I will here intro- 
 duce a quotation from " Appleton's Cyclopaedia of Biography- 
 American edition ; by Rev. Francis Hawks, D. D. L. L. D. 
 of New-York." From the notice of Hume which occurs in 
 that work, we make the following extract : 
 
 " The place and functions of the methaphysical speculations 
 of this great thinker, are not only peculiar, but unique in the 
 History of Modern Philosophy. At the period in question, 
 Mental Science had fallen into the lowest possible state, not 
 only in Britain, but over Europe — that viz. : of a conscious in- 
 consistency ; principles were accepted and conclusions evaded ; 
 beliefs timidly relied on, betwixt which and all grounds of cer- 
 tainty then acknowledged, lay an impassable hiatus. The sen- 
 sational philosophy, always agreeable to the practical ten- 
 dencies of the English mind, had just reached its culmination 
 under the guidance of the genius and earnestness of John Locke, 
 and we were undergoing its consequences in the dwarfing of 
 systematic morals and the gradual impoverishment of Religion ; 
 saving ourselves as to the mere form of faith, by refuge in tra- 
 
CONSCIENCE. 2tl 
 
 dition, or, what is worst of all, willing subjection to gross para- 
 logisms. When science exists only through paltering with 
 reason, when it accepts as its function, not the office of dis- 
 covering Truth, but of finding excuses for Belief, it is science 
 no longer, but a corruption and hypocrisy ; and however it may 
 come, its destruction is a blessing. Hume appeared as the 
 destroyer. Grifted with an intellect clear and fearless, he car- 
 ried principles remorselessly to their consequences ; and proved 
 beyond question, that on the grounds of the existing philosophy, 
 all belief must disappear. 
 
 " If he reached Universal Scepticism, it may be said that he 
 yet had a faith sounder than any in the philosophy he had de- 
 stroyed ; he trusted in the only ground of human certainty, 
 viz : in our human reason, and had the rare courage to follow 
 where it seemed to lead. It is not easy to conceive the degree 
 of consternation spread through every region of existing specu- 
 lation by the ' Essay on the idea of necessary connexion,' the 
 ' Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,' the ' Natural 
 History of Religion,' and their other companions. Hume had di- 
 vested himself by this time of the scholastic rudeness of the Au- 
 thor of the ' Treatise on Human Nature,' and become one of the 
 most pleasing and accomplished writers of any period. His 
 blows resounded accordingly through all cultivated Society. It 
 was heard everywhere with amazement, that by atopic, apparent- 
 ly invincible, the basis of all certainty concerning man, nature and 
 God, had been destroyed, and that doubt inremediable was the 
 sole inheritance of our race I It is needless to say that the 
 resting place of humanity was saved ; but not by invalidating 
 the reasoning of the trenchant Scotchman. Hume's triumph 
 was complete, only it was the existing philosophy that he laid 
 in ruins." 
 
 Thus we have seen the practical result of this unerring in- 
 tuition upon which a grave philosophy, and one that governs 
 the world, is based, and from which religious sight seeing and 
 spiritual revivals spring. I here boldly affirm it, and had I 
 
 II 
 
212 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 room, I could more fully prove it, that it is upon this conscious, 
 but deceptive feehng, and this alone that the numerous and 
 ponderous books of modern philosophy are founded. It can- 
 not, it will not be denied that every system, since they have left 
 the true philosophy of Locke, is more or less alloyed with the 
 counterfeit feeling, called a divine conscience, that has made Mo- 
 hamedans, Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Calvinists, Arme- 
 nians, and the ten thousand other conscious creeds. Strange, 
 indeed, that we should give this discordant and whimsical 
 creature the supremacy of reason, when it has led us so 
 shamefully astray from the unity of truth, and giving so 
 deadly and dooming a stroke to religion. This voice of God, 
 so called by most of Divines and metaphysical writers, is no- 
 thing more than a frenzied fanaticism : yet to reason against 
 it is naught but folly ; for every party has seen its sights and 
 dreamed its dreams, and is as firm as the maniac, fixed in his 
 feelings. Such deplorable perversion of reason, and such 'deep- 
 rooted and preconceived opinions can only be cured by a radi- 
 cal change in the course of education. The youth should be 
 taught to regard the might and majesty of divine appointment, 
 and to take as their guide but the eternal fitness of things, 
 as daily witnessed in the phenomena of nature. We should 
 buckle on the sacred armor of truth, and with hearty fidelity 
 pursue them as did Newton the powers of gravitation, lead 
 where they may, for God in his works will be our guide and 
 cannot err. We may be controverted and borne down by vul- 
 gar prejudice and popular clamor, yet we must rise with firm 
 and tranquil grandeur to those mighty and eternal verities, not 
 of human vascillation, but as immutable and undying as God 
 himself. The contemplation of the supremacy of such great 
 and noble ends over the petty ephemeral conventionalities of 
 man will inspire the youthful soul to ascend like the towering 
 and eternal ramparts of nature, through the storm-cloud far 
 above the thunder's brawl, where the unobstructed light of 
 "heaven forever shines. The investigation and recognition of 
 
CONSCIENCE. 273 
 
 the phenomena of nature must be by observation, experience 
 and comparison, guided by a clear and unbiassed reasoo. All 
 mysticisms and gratuitous and random assumptions as hereto- 
 fore, must be cast aside as worthless and perplexing trash, and 
 nature, and nature alone, made the ground-right and stand- 
 point of observation This is the only solid foundation and im- 
 moveable platform upon which to erect the lever by which the 
 world is to be moved. The systems of philosophy for past 
 ages have been rested upon the air, and been just as fluctuating 
 as that fluctuating element. In proof of this to the uninformed 
 reader, I refer him to the various distracted and warring sys- 
 tems of modern mental philosophy. I hold that from the days 
 of Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, 
 Hobbes, Stewart, Reid, Brown, and a hunderd other writers, 
 there has been no improvement nor a single platform agreed 
 to, upon which to erect a system of sound and lasting philosophy ; 
 each in turn having exhausted themselves in lashing the air 
 and the mists that envelope them without leaving a single 
 mark of their mighty exertions behind them. Cousin, Hamilton 
 and Morell have more recently attempted a reformation by a 
 system of electicism, but, after all, have left the science of 
 mind in darkness and in doubt. 
 
 In closing my remarks upon conscience, I will say, that, 
 though there is no unerring standard of conscience, it being in 
 reality nothing more than the result of opinion, and opinion 
 itself being the result of education and circumstances. Yet it 
 is the only criterion that each individual can have for his own 
 conduct, and were we as forgiving as our Heavenly Father, all 
 persecutions and religious wranglings about creeds and confes- 
 sions of faith would cease. " One believeth that he may eat 
 all things, another who is weak, eateth herbs. One man 
 esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day 
 alike." Again, St. Paul says : "Let every man be fully per- 
 suaded in his own mind." And again: " I know and am per- 
 suaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of it- 
 
2t4 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 self, but to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him 
 it is unclean." That is, it is wrong for any man to violate his 
 own sense of duty, it matters not how much it may differ from 
 others. Any man who acts, intending a crime, to him it is a 
 crime; but the same act, if conscientiously perfprmed up to the 
 best lights afforded, to him it is a virtue. And hence it is that 
 I have abhorred, and in bold language condemned those fiend- 
 ish and ensanguined scenes of persecution for opinion's sake. 
 And, again, " He that doubteth is condemned, if he cat, because 
 he eateth not of faith ; for whatsoever is not of faith is sin." 
 That is, if we do a thing believing it to be wrong, to us it is a 
 wrong. Our honest convictions, then, is the only unerring 
 standard and moral law of human action, and the consent of 
 mankind to this divine truth, and that alone, can ever harmon- 
 ize the human family, and reconcile the endless organisms, 
 aptitudes and conditions of life, in which God himself has placed 
 us. The poor savage cannot help his condition any more than 
 the pious man, can with all his efforts avoid the sorely afflictive 
 dispensations of providence, and it would be flying into the face 
 of God, and daring the wrath of heaven, to blame them for 
 it. An honest conviction and a pure heart is all that God can 
 ask. "Keep they heart with all diligence; because out of it 
 are the issues of life." " Blessed are the pure in heart, for 
 they shall see God." And, more to the point: " But when 
 the Gentiles which have not the law, do hy nature the things 
 contained in the law, these having not the law, are a law unto 
 themselves, which show the work of the law written in their 
 hearts ; their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts 
 the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another." Now, if 
 the Apostle's view of the case, as above given, be not true, I 
 cannot conceive of any other standard by which we are to be 
 judged: for it is certain that our conscientious views are as 
 different as the forms of our faces, and the endless organisms, 
 which, by the hand of God, makes us identically what we are, 
 and not another. Suppose, for instance, a revolution be pro- 
 
CONSCIENCE. 2Y5 
 
 posed, under a given government, some will think it right, 
 while others, equally honest and interested, will think it wrong. 
 Under the law of domestic slavery, a slave of enlarged and 
 enlightened mind, who has been cruelly treated, cannot see, in 
 conscience and in common justice, and by the approbation of 
 the God who made him, why his nation may not, as well as 
 others, free themselves from arbitrary and cruel oppression; while 
 another slave, having had a kind master and a happy home, 
 has a conscience to think it so unjust and murderous as to in- 
 form upon their brother and oppose the plot. These are cases 
 of common occurence, and in which conscience is diametrically 
 opposite. In forming a judgment of right and wrong, all de- 
 pends upon circumstances. In America, no man feels any 
 compunction of conscience in hunting and killing game on 
 others grounds, nor in breaking a switch, or pulling an apple, 
 when, if in England, he would feel it a crime. Captain Cook 
 relates, in his voyage to the Sandwich Islands, that the inhabit- 
 ants evinced a thievish disposition, openly attempting to take 
 everything they fancied, as though it belonged to them, seeming 
 to have no knowledge of individual rights. This was as natural 
 as the cases I have named, of hunting, or of taking water from 
 a neighboring creek; the soil and climate being such in those 
 islands as to produce more of all the necessaries of life than 
 could be used, Every thing was as exhaustless and common 
 as the air we breath, the waters which run, or the sun that shines; 
 and they saw no more harm- in taking what they found, than we do 
 in taking water from a public well, or a creek that runs through 
 other's lands. We have become so selfish in our vain glory and 
 civilized graspings, that we would monopolize the air itself, and 
 the sunshine, if we could, and parcel them out by the quart, at 
 prices which would leave thousands of our poor fellow-mortals 
 to perish, as has been done in soil and food. But in proof of 
 my position. Captain Cook further relates, that as soon as those 
 people discovered, in great suprise, the selfishness of the crew, 
 
276 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 who treated it as a wrong, they cautiously withheld, showing 
 plainly that they did not before view it as a crime. 
 
 While at this point, I will relate an interesting narrative in 
 the history of man, given me by an old french captain, whose 
 vessel I was on when passing those islands. He had lived 
 amongst the * * * * * for eight years and being well ac- 
 quainted with their language, he assured me that such was the 
 honesty and kind feeling amongst those people, that they had 
 no words to express liar, rascal, or thief, for such thing as 
 steahng, quarreling, or fighting he never knew. On his first 
 arrival, he was pressed by a number of the natives to take 
 lodgings with them. He accepted the invitation of one, who 
 put him to bed with his wife, assuring him that this was no 
 more than a mark of hospitality, and that a refusal would be 
 a mortification to his wife and a proof that he did not accept 
 of his kindness. Next morning he asked him how he liked his 
 wife, and on getting the pleasing answer, very well, the hus- 
 band threw his arms around his neck, and pulling off his own 
 shirt, put it upon him, exclaiming, now you live with me, for 
 you are my brother. The amatory feeling, so selfish and ex- 
 clusive generally, and considered by most of authors as innate, 
 is not so, for history tells us that the Cythians and other na- 
 tions have offered their wives and daughters as the greatest 
 mark of social courtesy, and even up to this day it is practised 
 amongst some nations; so that in this case, as well as all others, 
 we will find upon a full investigation of the history of man, 
 that there are no such things as innate ideas. We know that 
 the things we most enjoy we most disHke to divide with others, 
 and consequently become watchful and jealous of any inter- 
 ference. We have no such ideas or feelings, however, till time 
 and experience gives us a knowledge of what objects in nature 
 are fitted to our constitutions, and calculated to give us that 
 pleasure of which we become so tenacious, and consequently 
 induces superficial observers to believe them innate. If those 
 feelings were innate, they would be stronger in children than 
 
CONSCIENCE. 2TT 
 
 in adults, when, in reality, we find no such ideas in children. 
 And again, if there be any actual innate knowledge, belief cr 
 judgment of men and things, or of right and w:ong in this 
 world, it should be found most conspicuous in young children 
 and savages, where neither education nor the force of circum- 
 stances had defaced or counteracted it. Circumstances, how- 
 ever, as we will soon see, changed these people very much. 
 About the time the captain left, there was a mission established 
 on the island, and when he returned, some years after, instead 
 of a sober, truthful, honest and kindly brotherhood, he found 
 them a set of drunken, lying, thieving, and jealous Christians, 
 professing mechanically to believe what was taught them, but, 
 like many of our professors at home, having no change wrought 
 either in their heart or private actions. All the evils of what 
 we boastingly call civilization followed the mission. Goods for 
 traffic, which temptation led them to immitate our people in 
 ambition and extravagance. Next came intoxicating liquors, 
 and tricking and cheating, for which we are everywhere no- 
 torious. Our adventurers, of course, rept a rich harvest off of 
 those credulous people, but made them like themselves, suspi- 
 cious, false, and cold-hearted. The captain, on his revisit, 
 found that they had picked up English words enough to say 
 rascal, liar, and rogue, and the devil ever at the heels of profes- 
 sors, was engendering a jealous and persecuting spirit amongst 
 these once happy, but now split and warring religious parties, 
 in the bosom of this eden of the world, where naught but in- 
 nocence, kindness, and happiness once dwelt. 
 
 I wish it here to be understood, as well as in all other 
 parts of my little book, that when I speak of false religion, 
 that I do not mean genuine religion, for there could not be 
 counterfeits in anything without something to contrast with, 
 and when I speak of unworthy clergy and professors, I do not 
 mean that all are so. That Satan has ever been at the heels 
 of God's people, cannot be denied, and that he gets all of each 
 thousand but one, is certain. He commenced early with God's 
 
2Y8 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 farorites in the garden and seduced them, next we see him going 
 hand in hand with Abraham and Sarah, tempting Sarah at 
 every turn l:o ^ell her virtue, and Abraham to connive at it for 
 the sake of worldl}* gain, and great were the riches they thus 
 collected, obtaining from Abimelech alone a thousand pieces of 
 silver, with sheep, oxen, and men-servants and women-servants, 
 the reward of his deception in denying Sarah and putting her 
 out to other men. And again, Abraham was induced to take 
 his servant Hagar to wife, and then, from jealousy of his old 
 wife, most cruelly drove her and her child, his own offspring, 
 to the wilderness. Even when the miraculous delivery of God's 
 chosen, was fresh in their memory, and Moses was personally 
 called upon by the Lord to go up into the mount and receive 
 the commandments, the devil appeared amongst them, at the 
 foot of the mountain, and tempted them to the worship of 
 idols. Through Adam he caused the destruction of the world, 
 and then he began the new generation, or re-peopling of the 
 world, through the drunkenness and incest of Noah, a worse 
 example and beginning than that of Adam himself. He caused 
 David, a man after God's own heart, to commit one of the 
 blackest crimes known to earth, and Solomon, the wise, he made 
 more unwise and worse than Brigham Young himself, the new 
 bugbear of the religious world. He, certainly, caused God's 
 select and elect people, the Jews, not to be saved, as was anti- 
 cipated and promised, but to be scattered and lost amongst the 
 ungodly of God's wide world. Yes, and this same old prince 
 of darkness tempted Christ's chosen disciples, one after another, 
 to desert and deny him, and even followed him into the wilder- 
 ness and to the mountain-top, and there boldly urged his 
 temptations, face to face. Yes, and it is well known that he 
 in the end caused these chosen people of God to crucify Christ. 
 It cannot, then, from this brief history of facts, be supposed 
 that T misrepresent, when I say, that the devil is ever at tlie 
 heels of our missionaries, nor is it strange that he should make 
 
 i 
 
CONSCIENCE. 2T9 
 
 vagabonds of the uninformed and mechanical converts about 
 those missions, as I have long observed. 
 
 The Captain's narrative of the Sandwich Mission reminds 
 me of what took place under my own observation amongst a 
 western tribe of Indians, the most upright, sober and honest I 
 ever knew ; good enough to a man, for heaven (without that 
 contemptible vanity and selfish boast of name, the chief merit 
 of the white man,) for they bore with Christian fortitude all 
 the grievous outrages of our flibustering boarder-ruffians. 
 A missionary applied to the Chief for the privilege of estab- 
 lishing a mission amongst them. The Chief asked him what 
 he expected to do for his people, and whether he could make 
 them sober, honest,^ kind and truthful ; and upon receiving the 
 answer. Yes, he solemny rebuked him by the wisest and most 
 philosophic of all advices. "If this be true, sir, go back 
 to your own people who understand your language, and 
 what Cliristianity means, and when you make truthful, sober, 
 honest and good men of your Christians, come to me, and my 
 people shall hear you. Your Christians bring whiskey and 
 tempting goods amongst us — lie, cheat and insult our wives 
 and daughters, and if we resist, shoot us and threaten us with 
 destruction by your nation. The Great Spirit we worship 
 admits of no such fraud and cruelties, and we do not wish to 
 desert hira for the God of such Christians as come amongst us.'^ 
 The whites at this time were boasting of the number of In- 
 dians they had disgracefully betrayed and cruelly butchered. 
 One of the young braves, having had his father murdered, shot 
 a white man which, as usually, got up a great excitement at 
 the out-posts, and a war was at once threatened, except the 
 murderer were brought in. The Chief of the tribe called upon 
 the officers and assured them that he did not know the guilty 
 person, but that his people were not like ours, to sneak and 
 hide from the authority of their nation, and all he had to do, 
 was to put out a proclamation, when the person sought would 
 appear before them. In a few days the young brave came in, 
 
280 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and the chief delivered him over to the authorities of the gar- 
 rison at Prairie du Chien, requesting that they would burn or dis- 
 patch him as soon as possible, as he had come to see him die as 
 a man ; upon which the officers informed him that imprison- 
 ment and delay by courts was necessary. This could not be 
 understood by the prisoner, who assured them that he would 
 offer no resistance, and supposing they wished to cow him by 
 confinement, he exclaimed : "My father was murdered, I have 
 had revenge, and am ready to die. I feel no crime in taking 
 life for life in accordance with the laws of my nation, and now 
 submit my life to your law. I care not for your prison and 
 chains, or for the pain you can inflict ; the Great Spirit waits 
 to see me die like a brave, and is ready to receive my soul !" 
 And thus speaking, he took from the hand of the old Chief a 
 stole which he had just whittled out, and driving it in on one 
 side of his thigh, pulled it out upon the other, holding up the 
 bloody instrument in the officer's face, saying that he was at 
 their defiance, for they could only kill his body, and that no 
 pain they could inflict, would break his spirit, or cause him to 
 disgrace his nation. This operation he often repeated, driving 
 the stole through and through the thick of his thigh, without 
 changing a feature. These facts were related to me a few days 
 after their occurrence, by Lieutenant Davess of the fort, who 
 was present at the occurrence in 1832. 
 
 It is a well-known fact in the history of man, that the 
 savage will exultingly mount upon the flaming pile and broil 
 himself to death, without changing a feature ; showing what I 
 aim to teach throughout this book : the power of education 
 and circumstances over the human mind, and that there is no 
 such things as innate ideas, there being no identity either 
 in thought or action, all yielding to the force of circumstances 
 in the various conditions of human life. These narratives may 
 seem to be a digression from the argument, but as I propose 
 to give the history of man from his cradle to his grave, they 
 are perfectly legitimate j besides, a few facts of this kind will 
 
CONSCIENCE. 281 
 
 show more clearly the true and varied character of man, and how 
 that character is formed under the circumtances of his exist- 
 ence, than a thousand volumes of abstract, vague, indefinite and 
 learned nonsense, such as now fill our books of moral and 
 mental science. In pursuance of this same history of facts, I 
 will mention another, v/ell worthy the serious consideration of 
 the Christian philosopher, how it is, and what can be the 
 cause of the great honesty under the influence of the Moham- 
 medan religion, and the very great dishonesty every where 
 found under our more civilized and Christian government. 
 It is a notorious fact, related by all impartial and observing 
 travelers, that merchants in Constantinople never close or bar 
 their doors on going out, except there be Christians about ; 
 and when travelling, if the day turns warm, a person may 
 throw their cloak on the road-side, with the certainty of finding 
 it on their return. 
 
 Now I wish it recollected, that when I speak of the many 
 great and grievous defects in the moral tendency of our 
 religion, I do not mean in the practice of it, but that it is in 
 our mistaken instructions and pretensions to it. Were we to 
 observe the precepts of Christ, and to follow his example, 
 there could be no defect in the Christian religion ; but since we 
 have deserted Christ and adopted the worship of creed-makers, 
 the devil has had unstayed supremacy over the church, and it 
 is devilish and downright dishonesty to deny it. My whole 
 object in publishing these essays, has been to expose the above 
 fact, and to add my mite in the restoration of the simple, pure- 
 hearted, and unfeigned worship of Grod. I am well assured 
 that so long as a united belief in the teachings of Christ, and 
 a brotherly love and unalloyed piety hold possession of our 
 hearts, the devil can obtain no influence over us. 
 
 I am at a loss what more to say about conscience, as I have 
 treated of it more or less under every other head, it in reality 
 being nothing separate from that sentient and percipient being, 
 called soul or mind, and into which all the separate heads, im- 
 
282 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 properly treated of, as powers and faqulties resolve them- 
 selves. To have a conscience, is to be conscious of a thing, and 
 to be conscious of a thing is to know a thing — believe it — 
 think it so — to be assured of it — to judge it so — to have reason 
 to believe so — to be confirmed, persuaded, or convinced of it — 
 or in fine to feel that it is so, for feeling is the soul, and the 
 soul is feeling. A thing without feeling and knowledge or a 
 consciousness of impressions, can have no soul, while to be 
 sensitive, or to be possessed of an accute perception of all in- 
 structions or impressions of whatsoever kind, is to have a sonl. 
 We feel, and therefore infer we have a soul, and I boldly affirm 
 that this is the only proof we have of a soul. If a red-hot 
 iron be applied to your surface, you feel it, and may incumber 
 that feeling with many substituted words that can neither add 
 to nor take from the simple fact of being conscious of it, for, 
 as I have said, we cannot be conscious of a thing without 
 feeling it, nor feel and know it without being conscious of 
 it; and why then make so many separate and complicated 
 departments of this one identical thing, feeling or conscious- 
 ness. To teach, as is done in our colleges, that that unit, feel- 
 ing, when applied to a belief of right and wrong, makes it a se- 
 parate or independent faculty or power, is to teach as falsely as 
 did Professor Alexander of the theological school at Princeton, 
 who was so blinded in this polytheistic deity of the mind, 
 that he affirmed one of these powers, the will, to be so inde- 
 pendent of the soul, that the soul was not responsible for 
 the acts of the will. Absurd as this doctrine may seem 
 to one who has been a close observer of the operations of 
 his own mind through life, the great divisibility of an indi- 
 visible soul is still kept up greatly to the perplexity of 
 the pupil, who cannot comprehend an incomprehensible and 
 impossible thing, A man may change his name for every 
 hour of the day and for every act he performs, yet he is 
 identically the same man, and the soul, in like manner, may 
 love, hate, and have ten thousand thoughts, passions and 
 
CONSCIENCE. 283 
 
 emotions possessing it alternately, and yet not loose its identity 
 of being. 
 
 Much has been said and written, in regard to the laws, rules 
 and obligations of moral action, and why we are bound to any 
 particular course of virtue. Paley's Moral Philosophy has 
 been greatly misrepresented and the author much abused for 
 his sentiments upon this subject. Paley says that the will of 
 God is the rule of moral action, and in other parts of his 
 book, that the good of society binds us to act virtuously. His 
 position that the will of God should be the rule of moral obli- 
 gation, is said to be false and arbitrary, and does not reach the 
 source of moral obligation which such objectors contend was 
 anterior to and independent of the word and commands of 
 God. This is in one sense true, which fact Paley knew as well 
 as Chalmers or any of his school, that there is an inherent and 
 eternal Tightness in the nature and fitness of things, and that 
 the arbitrary command of God cannot make a right, as that 
 command must be founded upon a right, and made, because it 
 is right. Paley also knew that God, from his own inherent 
 nature, would not violate these great and prim ordeal principles, 
 and therefore very justly taught, the will of God was the safest 
 rule both of religious and moral action. Chalmers and many 
 other petty quibblers upon good old Paley's doctrines, say he 
 does not reach first principles, and that his teaching the good 
 of society to be a main obligation of moral conduct, is danger- 
 ous to the morals of our youth, and that his book should there- 
 fore be thrown out of our schools. This obligation to the 
 good of society Paley's objectors pronounce to be Utilitarianism, 
 and not only false in morals, but corrupting in its tendencies. 
 "We know that virtue has an inherent, independent and eternal 
 Tightness that constitutes the ultimate and highest possible 
 ground and obligation of moral rectitude ; but how this can 
 invalidate Paley's position, I cannot conceive, as the will of 
 God and the good of man must come within their own cate- 
 gory of moral rights. True, that acting with the will of God 
 
284 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRATE. 
 
 and for the good of man does not date back to the primordeal 
 principles upon which God's will was founded, nor go beyond 
 the creation of man for man's good, yet as God's will had its 
 foundation in the eternal fitness of things, and as he has created 
 man to be happy, it certainly can neither be corrupting to 
 virtue nor detrimental to the happiness of man, to act in ac- 
 cordance with the will of God. Nothing could more clearly 
 show the vanity and litigious spirit, of Chalmers and other 
 distinguished Divines, than their disingenuous and unfounded 
 attack upon the inestimable labors of their pious old brother, 
 William Paley. Chalmers says that " virtue has an inherent 
 character of her own, apart from law, and anterior to all juris- 
 diction. Instead, therefore, of deriving morality from law, 
 we should derive law, even the law of God, from the primeval 
 morality of his unavoidable, immutable and eternal nature." 
 And again, he says that " the great and everlasting principles 
 of God's moral law had their residence in the very constitution 
 and nature of the God-head, before he willed it as a law or 
 uttered it forth in his book of revelation." 
 
 The Rev. J. R. Boyd, in his moral philosophy, says that 
 " virtue hath a higher original than the will of God." Now, 
 though God may have had all the conceptions of supreme 
 moral excellence, as well as the efficient plans of his gorgeous 
 universe, in his mind, before he uttered his moral law or showed 
 forth his mighty w^orks; it does not prove that the will of God 
 is dangerous or unsafe, as a guide of moral action for erring 
 man. The idea of Chalmers, Dick, Devvar, Boyd, and others 
 of the Chalmers' school of high-tossing and primordial flourishes, 
 is that God has been bound by the moral necessity of his nature 
 to do and say all he has; and that, as his laws and acts have 
 been founded upon an anterior, inherent, underived, independent, 
 and eternal rightness in the nature and fitness of things them- 
 selves, he could not, by any possibility of consistency or moral 
 justice, have acted other than he has. Thus is God himself, 
 from the inviolate and eternal supremacy of truth and justice, 
 
CONSCIENCE. 285 
 
 and the perfections of his own nature, bound to act in accord- 
 ance with the laws of moral justice. The law of Grod, then, is 
 not right, because he has arbitrarily commanded it, but he 
 commanded it, because it was right. Now, though Paley's 
 philosophy has been condemned, because suspected of Arianism, 
 how will Chalmers' own showing of God being bound by a 
 paramount law of eternal justice apply to God's giving to his 
 harmless pots, acute sensibilities, and ill shapes in order, by 
 whim, to cast them into hell, regardless of the mighty law of 
 eternal justice, by which he is eternally bound to do justice. 
 
 Thus we see, that, though Paley, because he allows other 
 people to go to heaven, as well as himself, has been condemned, 
 while the orthodox Chalmers is permitted with impunity to 
 make God a mere copyist, whose laws are nothing more than 
 transcripts from the tablets of an antidated, underived, un- 
 alterable, and independent Tightness in the nature of things 
 themselves. 
 
 My object has been and will be, throughout these essays, 
 to open the eyes of the community to the glaring abuse of reli- 
 gion, and of the consequent want of truth and honesty, in our 
 Christian land, improperly so called. The countless millions 
 of money spent, and the vast amount of labor used in the gar- 
 dens of God, during a period of 1859 years, have but served 
 to bring forth thorns and thistles, which will in time be sweeped 
 off with the besom of destruction. I fear that the Christian 
 religion has become so interwoven with the worldly interests, 
 and with the pride and ambition of man, that there can be no 
 farther hope for reformation. Both religion and politics have 
 become a trade of cold and studied artifice, and the pride of 
 party and the pomp of the world, is the ruling passion in every 
 man's breast. It cannot be said, that I exaggerate, when 
 every religious paper and every pulpit in our land, sounds the 
 tocsin of the alarming increase of crime in our Christian com- 
 munity. 
 
INSTINCT. 
 
 On this subject there certainly has been as much idle 
 controversy as upon any other that has ever been agitated, and 
 all arising, I am well assured, from an unjust prejudice against 
 the poor brute, and a selfish, contracted, and unjust fear of 
 their rivalship in crowding the seats of heaven, which are doubt- 
 less ample for all God's creatures, shall he see proper to take 
 them there. 
 
 The Rev. Sydney Smith, in his "Moral Philosophy," says: 
 " There are observable in the minds of brutes faint traces and 
 rudiments of the human faculties." This position, he goes on 
 to say, has been maintained by Reid, Locke, Hartly, Stewart, 
 and all the best writers on these subjects. The two extremes 
 in writers may be found in Descartes, who looked upon the 
 brute as a mere machine, and Helvetius, who says: " he is quite 
 certain that we only owe our superiority over the Ourang 
 Outangs to the length of life conceded to us." Between those 
 two extremes hundreds of volumes have been written — each 
 author taking his direction, not under the guidance of reason 
 and the light of nature, but according to his contracted and 
 preconceived prejudices. Such, indeed, has been the extent of 
 vulgar prejudices against the brute, that all who have had a 
 soul to feel for our poor dumb servants, and a fortitude to de- 
 clare it, have been denounced as defamers of the human race; 
 and this is doubtless the reason why the Rev. Sydney Smith 
 begins his article on instinct thus: 
 
 " I confess I treat on this subject with some degree of ap- 
 prehension and reluctance, because I shall be very sorry to do 
 injustice to the poor brutes, who have no professors to revenge 
 
 286 
 
INTSTINCT. 28 T 
 
 their cause, by lecturing on our faculties, and at the same time 
 I know there is a very strong anthropical party wlio view all 
 eulogiuras on the brute creation with a very considerable degree 
 of suspicion, and look upon every compliment which is paid to 
 the ape as high treason to the dignity of man." 
 
 Such mean envy and selfishness I consider by far more de- 
 grading to human nature than any analogy that can be summed 
 up between the brute and man. Uncle Toby let the fly go 
 from a kind sympathy and God-like feeling for God's humbler 
 creatures, saying, there was room enough in the world for both. 
 And I cannot see whence comes this cruel envy and disposition 
 to rob the poor brute of the little their kind Creator has given 
 them. If the idiot be allowed a soul, and the ape deprived of 
 it, the grant cannot be upon the superiority of mind, and why 
 then make man the exclusive possessor because of his mental 
 rank in the scale of organic life. Again, if the soul is to claim 
 rank and superiority according to its strength and varied powers, 
 Shakespeare is certainly entitled to the first seat in heaven, 
 and if this rule be not established, as Dicke and others have 
 striven at, in their scale of progression, why entirely deprive 
 so many of God's creatures of a soul because of a slight in- 
 feriority of mind, much less than exists between the races of 
 men themselves. I have heard many say that they did not be- 
 lieve that the degraded Africans who were made for slaves, had 
 a soul, and that it would be degrading and offensive to the 
 master for their advocates so to contend, as this might establish 
 an equal claim and equality in heaven. No doubt that many 
 a despot would think it humiliating in God himself, to admit 
 the humble and degraded of earth into their presence, but of 
 all this uneasiness they may be relieved, as was Dives, by having 
 assigned to themselves a bed in hell, where there shall be ample 
 room for all the despotic oppressors of earth. 1 well know that 
 in thus sustaining the unfortunate and humble of earth, I shall 
 give offence to the ignorance and arrogance of many a bigot, and 
 particularly such as claim the exclusive inheritance of heaven from 
 
288 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 all eternity. But in this, as in «very other case, I will sustain 
 my position by the sacredness of truth and justice. It has been 
 objected to the brutes, and even to the more degraded classes 
 of man that they have no moral conscience or correct view of 
 religion. This is an arbitrary and equivocal expression, for 
 though every bigot professes to know what true religion is, he 
 may differ with others and be punished on earth even to death, 
 for heresy. The best test of religion, in my humble opinion, is 
 to act as God has designed us to do, and this the brute does, 
 while man has rebelled and been destroyed with a curse, and 
 yet does he, with unblushing effrontery, come forward and sit in 
 judgment, not only upon the consciences of his fellow-mortals, 
 but upon the happiness and destiny of all other portions of 
 God's creation. But the brute, it is said, acts under the direct 
 guidance of God himself, or the inherent nature he has placed in 
 them, while man is left a wreck upon the stormy ocean of life, 
 under the contingent guidance of that corrupt nature entailed 
 upon him by Adam, and subject to the intrigues of Satan and 
 of evil spirits. Be it so. Yet in this argument of the con- 
 demner of the brute I cannot see where, in the eyes of God, 
 they can claim a just superiority over those less offending sub- 
 jects of their Creator? 
 
 After this exposure of the unjust prejudice against the 
 brute, and the bigot's puerile showings of any superior moral 
 or religious claim that traitorous man has over those faithful 
 and obedient brutes as we degradingly see proper to call them, 
 we will give a couplet from Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy : 
 
 " What hath the faithful dog less than reason. 
 Or the hrute man more than instinct?" 
 
 Many more quotations might be made from men of true 
 philosophy and Christian spirit to the same point, but as 
 argument is before all authority I will resume it. 
 
 In regard to any just claim to God's favor that man may 
 have over the brute, or the brute over man, it has nothing to 
 
 i 
 
INSTINCT. 289 
 
 do with the question as to what is really the meaning of in- 
 stinct. Had authors defined their positions, there, certainly, 
 could never have been any honest pretext for controversy, as 
 the whole subject resolves itself simply into the will of God or 
 the fixed laws of the animal economy, and the only question 
 that can be asked, is, why God did as he did in giving to all 
 things their inherent nature. The instinct of an animal is 
 nothing more than the nature of an animal, and as that animal 
 did not create itself, the ultimate question will always return 
 upon us, why or how God made it so ? We might as rationally 
 spend our time in arguing, why the beast was given hair, and 
 the bird feathers ? And one made to fly in the air, and the 
 other to walk on the earth ? They are both instincts, nor is 
 there any original principle or property but that is instinct, if 
 instinct means anything. If by the word instinct we mean an 
 innate, connate, primordial or congenital faculty, principle, 
 power or property, then the question is with God, and returns 
 upon us as before, and puts the question to an end. For what 
 God did is done and admits of no dispute other than why he 
 has so done. And if, on the contrary, we agree that the word 
 instinct means an acquired knowledge, faculty, principle, power 
 or property, there is yet no room for any difference of opinion, 
 as every honest man must grant, that both man and beast gains 
 much by time, observation, and experience. God's primitive 
 properties or attributes consist of power, wisdom and goodness 
 that make him what he is, and take them from him, and you 
 annihilate him as a God. Gold is what it is by its properties, 
 but take color, solidity, and extension from it, and you leave 
 nothing; and in like manner is it with all things in creation, 
 so that at last we depend upon a primitive power or capacity 
 for every acquired property, which again returns the question 
 upon us in a different form, who gave us those powers ? — to 
 acquire what we do acquire ? God gave them, and the only 
 question left after all is how or why ? The acorn has implanted 
 in it by its creator the capacity to develope the oak with all 
 
 13 
 
290 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 its varied and specific properties that make it what it is, and 
 distinguish it from every other tree. The egg has in it the 
 chicken, and in like manner, every animal is what it is by the 
 power and will of its original designer, and it is puerile and 
 presumptuous to dispute it. If one, either ignorant or dishonest 
 enough to invite controversy, will af&rm that every seed brings 
 forth its kind that God originally designed, I grant the fact, 
 and should he say that a tree acquires its bark, branches and 
 roots by growth and the aid of the elements that sustain it, I 
 grant the fact, and just so both with the animal and mineral 
 kingdoms. To admit a God, the author of all things, is to 
 admit all I have said, and how, then, but by the denial of a 
 God, are we to get up a difference of opinion about instincts, 
 or in other words, why things are as they are, other than by 
 the sovereign and unalterable will of the eternal designer. If 
 an adversary take the position that there are spontaneities in 
 existence, and that the government of the universe is casual or 
 contingent, then we are cast loose upon the limitless and track- 
 less ocean without either compass or designated port of entry, 
 and we might as well dispute about the hmits of space or the 
 end of time, as the why of ultimate results. All phenomena 
 are at once merged in the chaotic and inscrutable fortuities of 
 uncaused and unauthorized agencies under which the universe 
 must inevitably tumble into ruins. Thus I think that in giving 
 the true position of this question, the reader must be convinced 
 that if there be a God, the author of all things, all things must 
 be instinct or, in other words, inborn. Now, as the specific 
 capacity and mental tendency of every animal must depend 
 upon the organization God has given it, all we can rationally 
 do, is to trace these tendencies and point out the differences in 
 degrees. 
 
 We know the beast to be possessed of every characteristic 
 of intellect that distinguishes mind from matter, and I must 
 farther say, of every faculty of the human mind, and only differs 
 from it in degree, as one mind differs from another. 'Now, as 
 
INSTINCT. 291 
 
 oflfensive as this doctrine may be to some, I conscientiously hold 
 it to be undeniably and religiously true, and if in this close 
 identity there be a fault, it is not in the writer, but in the 
 creator — God himself. Sensation, the soul of soul, the founda- 
 tion and great fountain of love, of moral rectitude, of sympathy, 
 of kindness and virtue, cannot be denied to the brute. They 
 have pleasure and pain, love and hatred, hope and fear, in 
 common with man. Hope will ever turn the course of a horse 
 homeward, and if you give him rein, he will press on with as 
 much labored anxiety, as a man in seeking his beloved home. 
 He is very social, and from kind attachments to his companions, 
 will, when separated from them, become as frantic and dis^ 
 tressed, as a human, when separated from his friends. The 
 faithful dog is more to be trusted as an unflinching friend than 
 man in the same circumstances. For in times of danger maa 
 will desert man, while the dog will fight to the death for his 
 master, and there are many instances where the dog has pined 
 -to death for the loss of his friend. A dog in Cincinnati was 
 so notorious for his kind attachment and melancholy bereave- 
 ment as often to be noticed in the public papers. Upon the 
 death of his master, he lay by his corpse and followed him to 
 his grave, and when they put him in, the dog looked down, 
 whined, and ran round and howled with great distress, and 
 evinced in every way, that a human could, the greatest possible 
 anguish. Nor did he leave the grave for days and nights, till 
 hunger drove him home, but soon he returned to the grave 
 with solemn and melancholy step, and never afterwards did he 
 seek the company or companionship of other dogs. It was a 
 well known fact that no interment ever took place from the 
 interment of his master to the death of himself that he was 
 not present. 
 
 " The dog may have a spirit as well as his brutal master, 
 A spirit to live ia happiness, for why should he be robbed of his existence? 
 Hath he not a conscience of evil, a glimmer of moral sense ? 
 Love and hatred, courage and fear, and a visible shame and pride ? 
 There may be a future rest for the patient victims of the cruel. 
 And a season allotted for their bliss to compensate for unjust suffering." 
 
292 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 The above are the beautiful and pathetic sentiments of 
 Tupper. 
 
 Mj son had a dog, he called Ponto, that was more attached 
 to him than I ever saw one human to another. Montrose, (my 
 son,) let Ponto take a book in his mouth and accompany him 
 on his way to school as far as the top step of the style, at which 
 point he ordered him to stop and not go on to the streets in 
 town. Ponto soon learned his hour of return from College, 
 and never failed to meet him at the style, which was regularly 
 kept up with invariable fidelity for more than a year, and up 
 to the time of his death. It was really distressing to see the 
 affectionate creature sitting on the style and looking with such 
 intense anxiety down the street, and if the time was delayed, 
 he would whine and set up a doleful howKng, and then of a 
 sudden, a thought would seem to strike him that his master may 
 have come in some other way, and round the lot he would dash, 
 as though crazy, with his nose to the ground. After thus 
 coursing around the buildings and finding that he had not come 
 in by any other path, he would with full speed return again to 
 the style as before, evince great anxiety at his master's delay. 
 I have often sympathized with the poor creatures distress and 
 tender solicitudes, nor could I but know from actual experience 
 with the world that but few of the human race exhibited such 
 divinity of feeling. No meeting of dearly beloved and long 
 parted friends could be more joyous than the daily return of 
 Montrose from College. Ponto with an extatic grin and audible 
 laughing, that showed all his teeth, would frisk around for a 
 time, and then take his books and deliberately walking up stairs, 
 lay them on the table. Ponto found, by hunting with his 
 master, that he was fond of rabbits, so that setting out early 
 one morning he caught one by fair running, and took it up 
 stairs to his master, who being asleep, Ponto woke by gently 
 pawing at the bed clothes and turning over, Ponto picked up 
 the rabbit, saying as plainly in thought, as language could ex- 
 press it: " Here it is 1" 
 
INSTINCT. 
 
 293 
 
 From one among tne many celebrated poets who have born 
 witness to the dog's devoted attachment to man, we quote the 
 following bitter but beautiful reflections: 
 
 *' When some proud son of man returns to earth, 
 Unknown to glory but upheld by birth, 
 The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe 
 And storied urns record who rests below: 
 When all is done, upon the tomb is seen, 
 Not what he was — but what he should have been 
 '■ But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend — 
 
 The first to welcome, foremost to defend — 
 Whose honest heart is all his master's own — 
 Who labors, fights, lives, breaths for him alone; 
 Unhonored falls, unnoticed all his worth — 
 Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth . 
 While man, vain insect, hopes to be forgiven, 
 And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven. 
 Oh man ! thou feeble tenant of an hour, 
 Debased by slavery or corrupt by power, 
 Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust- 
 Degraded mass of animated dust 
 Thy love is lust — thy friendship all a cheat — 
 Thy smiles hypocrisy — thy words deceit; 
 By nature vile — ennobled but by name, 
 Each kindred brute might bid the blush for shame. 
 Ye who perchance behold this simple urn. 
 Pass on — it honors none you wish to mourn — 
 To mark a friend's remains these stones arise— 
 I never knew but one, and here he lies!" 
 
 Byron's Epitaph on his Newfoundland dog. 
 
 Rev. Jno. Kewton, of England, long after being confirmed 
 in the Christian faith, was personally engaged in the African 
 Slave-trade, and from the influence of a single name, (as he says 
 himself,) never doubted the justice and morality of this most 
 inhuman traffic. Aristotle, in those days that made old sayings 
 sacred, consigned to long suffering and hopeless misery a large 
 portion of our fellow-mortals by a few words. " Black people," 
 said he, " were intended by God to be slaves. Afi'icans are 
 black — therefore intended to be slaves." And thus by a single 
 syllogism was the poor African condemned to slavery, and a 
 man of great mind and known piety seduced to the most atroci- 
 ous and damning acts. A hollow-hearted sanctimony and 
 
294 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 puritanical tyranny grants nothing but by name, and by the 
 arbitrary and partial favors of God claims not only the suprem- 
 acy over all other creatures on earth, but the exclusive rights and 
 enjoyments of heaven, and hence it is that it turns a deaf ear 
 to the just claims and piteous cries of all other creatures. And 
 upon this despotic and gratuitous assumption is the doctrine 
 maintained that God has created the universe for the benefit 
 of a few favorites, and neglecting his other creatures, administers 
 alone to their luxurious and wanton craft. 
 
 " What, man ! are there not enough of hunger, and disease, 
 
 and fatigue, 
 And yet must thy goad or thy thong add another sorrow to 
 
 existence, 
 What, art thou not content — thy sin hath dragged down 
 
 suffering and death 
 On the poor dumb servants of thy comfort, and yet must thou 
 
 rack them with thy spite!" 
 " The verdict of all things is unanimous finding their master 
 
 cruel, 
 The dog, thy humble friend, thy trusting honest friend, 
 And all things that minister alike to thy life, and thy comfort, 
 
 and thy pride, 
 Testify with one sad voice that man is a cruel master. 
 The dog cannot plead his own right, nor render a reason for 
 
 exemption, 
 Nor give a soft answer unto wrath to turn aside the undeserved 
 
 lash. 
 *' The galled ox cannot complain, nor supplicate a moment's 
 
 respite. 
 The spent horse hideth his distress till he panteth out his spirit 
 
 at the goal. 
 ''Alas, in the winter of life, when worn by constant toil. 
 If ingratitude forget his services, he cannot bring them to 
 
 remembrance. 
 
INSTINCT. 295 
 
 " Behold he is faint with hunger — the big tear standeth in his 
 
 eye. 
 " His skin is sore with stripes, and he tottereth beneath his 
 
 burden. 
 " His limbs are stiff with age, his sinews have lost their vigor, 
 And pain is stamped upon his face, while he wrestleth unequally 
 
 with his toil. 
 " Yet once more — mutely and meekly endureth he the crush- 
 ing blow, 
 " That struggle hath crocked his heart-strings, and the generous 
 
 brute is dead. 
 " Liveth there no advocate for him, no judge to avenge his 
 
 wrongs ? 
 " No voice that shall be heard in his defence, no sentence to 
 
 be passed. on his oppressor ? 
 "Yea, the sad age of the tortured pleadeth piteously for him, 
 " Yea, all the justice in heaven is roused in indignation at his 
 
 woes. 
 " Yea, all the pity upon earth shall call down a curse upon the 
 
 cruel, 
 "Yea, the burning malice of the wicked is then' own exceeding 
 
 punishment. 
 " The angel of mercy stoppeth not to comfort, but passeth by 
 
 on the other side, 
 " And hath no tear to shed when a cruel man is damned." 
 
 1 so much love the sacred reason and the godly harmony 
 of things in their own merit, that I regret to take up a single 
 line with quotations, but knowing that most of readers are 
 governed more by the authority of standard and pious writers 
 than by solid argument, I have thus indulged, though to a 
 very limited extent. If there be a God who feels for the suffer- 
 ing of his unoffending and defenceless creatures, Tupper's ana- 
 thema of those thieving and lordly heirs of heaven, who, not 
 satisfied with pilfering their brother of every gift from above, 
 deny to the poor brute the little allotted him, cannot be too 
 
296 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 severe. But why all this sensitive jealousy and intolerance 
 against the brute and his defenders, when heaven, (or in less 
 offensive language,) God's universe must be ample for the 
 accommodation of all his creatures. But to soothe the haughty 
 arrogance of those special claimants to heaven (for I like peace), 
 I will suggest that there may be separate appartraents for the 
 rich, the poor, the master and slave, the simple child of nature, 
 and even the brute and every sensitive creature that God has 
 made, and thus compromising the matter, I will give a few 
 more facts in regard to the brute without intending offence 
 to any. 
 
 In proof of the immortality of the soul of man, we exult- 
 ingly say to the materialist: Can matter feel, think, and act? 
 And if this be a good argument for the spirituality of man, it 
 is equally so for the brute, as no honest man will deny that 
 they feel, think, and act. This is all granted, but then it is 
 said to be instinct in the brute, as though a name would alter 
 the facts. But in regard to this, we ask with all sincerity 
 what is instinct but a power, principle, capacity, or property 
 created by God, and if so, are not those creations of God equal 
 to contingent creations or the creations of man ? For, if God 
 be the infallible dictator or prompter of the brute in his thoughts 
 and actions, must not their thoughts and actions be equal to 
 the blind and fortuitous thoughts and actions of man ? Again, 
 it is said in favor of man's superiority that the brutes act by 
 an original implantment of perfection in their nature, called 
 instinct, and that they consequently cannot sin or violate the 
 will of God, while man is abandoned to his own innate cor- 
 ruption, and to the guidance of evil spirits, and to the govern- 
 ment of the devil himself, at all of which evil calamity and con- 
 demnation God winks. This is the whole of the argument that 
 has ever been given for the superiority of man over the brute, 
 and of which superiority, God forbid, I should hold any claim, 
 for it is a claim that the wicked man may hold as superior to 
 the humble and obedient Christian. Who, I ask. but God. 
 
INSTINCT. 291 
 
 makes the instinct and places it in the brute, and whether he acts 
 in the brute by primary or by secondary causes, does not alter 
 the case, for the brute must either have a self-creating and un- 
 erring will of his own, or he must act by the will of God, and 
 as a self-creating will is denied to the brute, we must fall back 
 upon the immediate dictation of God himself — a condition for 
 which I have ever prayed and to which end alone tends our 
 Savior's prayer: Guard me from evil and lead me not into 
 temptation. 
 
 Now leaving the argument, for it appears to me to require 
 none, I will give a few more interesting and confirmatory cases 
 of rationality in brutes. But, then, what influence can it have 
 with those religious opposers of the brute — because of the want 
 of reason — when they condemn poor human reason in man in 
 matters of faith as unequal to the mystery of things unseen, 
 and consequently of no avail in the most weighty matters in- 
 volving our interest and happiness both here and hereafter. 
 We will, however, premise a few facts that now come up before 
 the mind as important in fixing the foundation upon which the 
 minds of men and brutes, in common with all things in creation, 
 must rest. 
 
 Brutes, like men, must act from a choice, desire or will 
 to act ; and to act is to exist, for nothing can act without au 
 existence, or when it is, and where it is. And that which 
 has an existence must have existed from all eternity, connate 
 with God himself, or have been brought into existence at some 
 period and by some power, leaving but two alternatives — a self- 
 creation, or a dependent creation. Now it will be seen that a 
 thing, to bring itself into existence, must think, plan and act 
 before itself had an existence — a proposition too absurd to ad- 
 mit — which brings it back to God at last as the Designer, 
 Creator and Preserver of all things, leaving nothing to the 
 contingencies of either mind or matter. And now again it will 
 be farther seen that, as God is wise, he has created nothing in 
 vain, that all things are of equal importance in the 'eyes of 
 
 13* 
 
MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 God, SO that no creature, even the most humble in creation, 
 should be despised by us vain and invisible specks in his mighty 
 Universe. And in fine, as God is loving and kind, we should 
 not despise or cruelly mistreat any of his sensitive creatures, as 
 in so doing we prove traitorous to God and ungrateful for his 
 goodness to ourselves. 
 
 " No flocks that range the ralley free 
 To slaughter I condemn — 
 Taught by that power that pities me, 
 I learn to pity them." 
 
 That brutes, in common with man, have sensibility to plea- 
 sure and pain, and that they perceive, think and act, has been 
 amply proven, and it only remains to be shown from their 
 habits of thought and action, to what extent those powers are 
 possessed. It cannot be contended that there are different 
 qualities or grades in the essence of the soul without destroying 
 the teachings of Holy writ and giving to the unworthy great 
 ^superiority over the more humble and pious minds ; nor can it be 
 rational and just to say that our claims to a future existence de- 
 pend upon the extent or acuteness of our rational powers, for 
 that would be to consign to death and oblivion a large portion of 
 human souls. Now, that brutes reason, no one acquainted with 
 their varied actions, can doubt, but whether just enough or not 
 quite enough, to save their minds from the grossness of matter 
 that must perish with the body, I cannot, according to that con- 
 temptible and sacrilegious standard of gradation, say. If those 
 haughty monopolists of all God's favors, had seen the feastings 
 and heard the exultations of the wolves after one of Napoleon's 
 battles in Russia — claiming as they did, the special favor of 
 God, who had sent those rebellious human outlaws to their 
 very doors to butcher each other for their benefit — they would 
 find that other beings had been favored of God as much, or 
 more, than themselves, and that their boasted tenure in the 
 supreme and eternal courts of equity must be questionable. 
 
 Behold, cries man, all things created for my use ; 
 Behold them all for mine, replies the pampered goose." 
 
INSTINCT. 299 
 
 But to show that brutes think, feel and act, we will begin 
 with the well-known case of the elephant who, when passing 
 down a certain street to water, thrust his snout into a tailor's 
 window where there was an apple on the bench, when the 
 tailor pricked his snout with his needle. And now, by way of 
 revenge, the elephant filled his proboscis with muddy water, 
 and on his return spouted over the tailor and the royal suit he 
 was making. It is well known that when tame elephants are 
 sent out to decoy wild ones over false causeways, that those 
 who escape the pit-fall, rush at their treacherous leader, and if 
 they catch him, beat him to death — showing precisely the same 
 train of reasoning and feeling of revenge that belongs to 
 human beings. Nor is their revenge more remarkable than 
 their kindness and gratitude. The children of their keepers 
 are frequently placed under their care, when no tiger or other 
 beast dare approach. If the child should crawl too far out, 
 it is tenderly drawn back under its ponderous frame ; nor has 
 there ever been an instance known of their stepping upon their 
 delicate charge. All animals change habits very rationally, 
 according to the necessities of the case. The same animal 
 that will lay up food where it comes but once a year with hard 
 winters, will neglect it where food is plenty all the year, prov- 
 ing beyond the possibility of doubt that they perceive the facts, 
 draw conclusions, and act upon the premises just as rationally 
 as we do. The ostrich in the colder climates will set upon its 
 eggs, but where the sand is warm enough to relieve it of this 
 duty, the eggs are left to the warmth of the sand. Bees, where 
 there are flowers all the year, make no honey, except a little 
 for their young. Captain Cook mentions islands where the 
 birds and beasts, fearing nothing from man, on first acquaint- 
 ance were as gentle as domestic animals — the foxes running 
 about their feet, and the birds lighting upon their heads and 
 shoulders. But they soon learned, by a few shots made 
 amongst them, that man was their enemy, and consequently 
 kept out of his way. I have seen squirrels in their native 
 
300 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 woods that I could take in my hands, and upon one occasion I 
 saw near the base of th«e Rocky Mountains a drove of turkeys, 
 so gentle that we walked up to them, and shot a number, 
 when they began to learn the danger, and took both to their 
 legs and wings. Cowper, the poet, puts this language into the 
 mouth of Alexander Selkirk, the Solitaire of Juan Fernandez. 
 
 "The beasts that roam over the plain 
 My form with indiiference see, 
 They are so unacquainted with man, 
 Their tameness is shocking to me." 
 
 Crows of experience know as well as a man the diflference be- 
 tween a gun and a stick, and this knowledge is certainly ac- 
 quired by observation. I once obtained a bird of the Crane 
 family from a Menagerie — that had been taught to dance to 
 music, and to do almost everything that man can — but speak. 
 He was very large, with white body, black wings, and red top- 
 knot. Call Jake — for that was his Christian name — from any 
 audible distance, and he would come as fast as legs and wings 
 could bring him. And no pantomimic performance could ex- 
 press feeling more graphically than he did in his actions. He 
 acquired knowledge to a certain extent, with as much facility 
 as a human. I saw Jake, upon one occasion, looking at the 
 young ladies^ picking flowers and laying them in bunches to 
 make bouquets, and when they left the garden he went to work. 
 He plucked a number of bunches and laid them along carefully 
 as they had done. He was in the habit of noticing the servants 
 running the knife in the ground and taking up asparagus, till 
 he himself, took to running his long, sharp bill into the earth, 
 and clipping the stems, took it up as fast as they could — and 
 became so troublesome that we were compelled to cover the beds 
 with brush. When preparing for fishing, he would evince as 
 much anxiety and pleasure as a dog will do when his master is 
 preparing for the hunt, and walking side by side with the fish- 
 ermen to the water, would claim all the small fish taken out. 
 He was not like the " whole hog" politician, who swallows his 
 whole hog, tail foremost, bristles and all; but with more good 
 
INSTINCT. 301 
 
 sense, took his jQsli carefully by the head, and if dirty from 
 flouncing in the sand, washed it carefully before he swallowed it- 
 I was told that he had been seen to wipe his fish upon the 
 grass which grew green and thick around the pond; so, to test 
 the fact, I intentionally threw a fish to him — covered with dirt — 
 which he picked up and aimed at the water, but I had him in- 
 tercepted at every turn, till pausing for a moment, as in rational 
 contemplation, he stepped off to the grass, and wiped a side at 
 a time — occasionally holding it up and eying it as carefully as 
 any human could do. If this was not thought and reasoning 
 to suit the necessity of the case, we cannot infer what means 
 to ends intend. Jake, by the bye, was a very sprightly and 
 amusing fellow, not only for his fancy dances, but his many 
 pantomimic actings, and such was his flow of fun, that he often 
 hazarded his life with the washer-women, whose blueing bag he 
 frequently stole from under the rocks where they would try to 
 hide it from him, and dashing along the shore out of the way of 
 their missiles, he would shake it in the water till all around 
 was colored by it, and then look at the result and at the women 
 most amusingly, and set up a chuckling, that a person who did 
 not see him, would take to be a laughter. I made him a guard 
 over my fruit trees, which the little boys of the town frequently 
 troubled, and it was truly amusing to see what chases Jake had 
 after them. Pretending to run his best to catch them, he would 
 keep close to their heels with his mouth wide open, till they 
 would jump the fence or clear the gates, when Jake would 
 throw his head up with loud laughter and strut back to his post. 
 These little incidents I name to show that other animals as well 
 as man, have intellect enough both to think and act. 
 
 I have seen a dog in scuffling for his food, snatch up a bone 
 and run behind some hillock or hiding spot, and scratching into 
 the ground with all possible haste and burying it, return to take 
 a share of the common mess. Yes, and when all was over I have 
 witnessed him take a circuitous route back to the hidden trea- 
 sure, and smelling all over it, scratch additional earth upon it, 
 
302 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and smell, and smell again, until he was satisfied that it was 
 secure from discovery. Men in their thievings are not always 
 so rational or successful in their hiding. It is well known that 
 monkies will form a long line and put out regular guards, 
 for entering and robbing orchards, and some will get on the 
 trees to throw down the fruit, while others gather it up and 
 pass it along the line. They have a watchword well known to 
 themselves, and, in fact, every animal has its means of making 
 its alarm or distress known to its companions. I am so well 
 acquainted with the habits of wild turkies that I can, by fraudu- 
 lently imitating their social notes, call them up at pleasure, 
 when hunting in the wild forest, nor are men themselves 
 exempt from the delusions and tricks of hypocritical and 
 treacherous counterfeits. I have several times witnessed what 
 is called the charming of birds by snakes, and I can tell by the 
 cry of those little creatures in the forest what is going on, and 
 I am satisfied from close observation that it is nothing but 
 dread alarm that causes the timid bird to become paralyzed and 
 to fall at the open mouth and glaring eyes of the serpent. Upon 
 their discovery of their enemy, they send out their notes of 
 alarm, when large numbers of birds collect, when flying around 
 with great agitation, till getting closer and closer, they fall at 
 the mouth of the monster. 
 
 Children have been scared to death in their cradles, and 
 grown up persons upon their feet — so it is not surprising that 
 the little timid bird should flutter out its last breath at the 
 mouth of so dreadful and appalling a monster. Persons as well 
 as horses have been known to stand and be burnt up in their 
 rooms under the paralyzing power of terror, when with presence 
 of mind and firmness of resolution they might have escaped. 
 Many have under a kind of horrible temptation thrown them- 
 selves from dismal and giddy heights, and Byron relates the fact 
 that in approaching the fearful brink of a towering crag upon 
 the Alps, he drew back with trembling horror at his own feel- 
 ing of wanton destruction that came over him. 
 
INSTINCT. 303 
 
 This I have felt -myself, when poised as a speck in mid- 
 heaven, far above the thunder's cloud and looking down upon 
 the lightnings at fearful depths beneath me. 
 
 I well recollect, when a boy, of approaching an object that 
 almost scared me to death, and putting my hand tremblingly 
 upon it, for I had no power to escape. The threatening voice, 
 the flashing eye and infuriate manner of one man will frequently 
 strike terror to the hearts of others, and this is the secret of 
 the mental control obtained over the most furious wild animals. 
 The influence of fear, and the power of mind over mind, I give 
 as a proof that the passions and emotions of men and brutes 
 are identically the same, and that their minds are governed by 
 like causes. 
 
 Cats, when they beg for a crumb round the table, will first 
 put their paw gently upon your knee, and if not noticed, they 
 claw just enough to make you feel, and when sporting with 
 children, they will both bite and scratch with most skillful glee, 
 but never to hurt or make a child cry. No human could under 
 the circumstances reason more correctly, and children rarely 
 act with as much tolerance and good feeling towards each 
 other. 
 
 My servants had a young dog that played daily with the 
 children in the yard, but had not been noticed about the 
 house. The children being confined to the house one day, 
 Reuben, as they called him, came dashing and frisking into the 
 house amongst the children, falling down on the carpet, rolling 
 over and over, jumping up and running out with a marked grin 
 upon his face, all of which social feelings gave to poor Reuben 
 a crazed appearance, so much so, that the cry of " mad dog 1" 
 ran through the house, producing great consternation. The 
 children were locked up, and I was sent for to shoot the crazy 
 beast. One of my men, knowing Reuben's habits and inferring 
 his object, begged for him, assuring me that he had been daily 
 in the habit of wrestling and tumbling over the grass with the 
 children, and having got lonesome by the absence of his com- 
 
304 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 panions, it was his way, and as he could not speak — the only way 
 of coaxing them out. This I found to be true, and often after- 
 wards witnessed as much kind and social feeling in Reuben's 
 sport with the children as any human being could possibly 
 evince from a pure and unsophisticated heart. 
 
 Who but a brutal and God-deserted bigot could cruelly 
 mistreat or deny a mind to so humble and kind a creature ? 
 Parents and children, pledged friends, prelates and professing 
 Christians break their tender and sacred ties in deserting each 
 other under great panics, such as plague, cholera and other 
 calamitous trials, but this faithful (what, dog or angel, surely 
 God-like) spirit would have died in defence of his little com- 
 panions. But they call him a dog, and be it so. There are 
 but few pastors who have the same kind and watchful care 
 over their flocks that the shepherd-dog has aver his, and those 
 who have read to any purpose, cannot but know that the St. 
 Bernard and New Foundland dogs will hazard their own lives 
 in rescuing from death those fiends in human form who enviously 
 and unfeelingly deny to them a soul, and instead of returning 
 a gratitude, condemn every effort of their faithful and affection- 
 ate zeal to a brute instinct, as if God was not the author and 
 the prompter of every act of instinct, for otherwise the brute 
 would be the Creator and donor of his own nature. 
 
 A pedlar was murdered in the mountains of Kentucky, and 
 his body never found till more than twelve months had elapsed, 
 when a party of my friends were hunting, and near the camp 
 they found a beaten path leading to a deep sink into which 
 they searched through logs and leaves, and there found the 
 remains of the murdered man. They then followed the path 
 which lead to a large fallen tree under which the faithful watch- 
 dog was found, starved and worn down by distress, for food 
 had become so scarce in the forest, it was hard to obtain. 
 This dog might have taken the road to a settlement, but a 
 glimmering of reason rested upon the poor fellow's mind that 
 his master was there, and he preferred death to desertion. 
 
INSTINCT. 805 
 
 "Now, if these dogs exercised their own will, they certainly are 
 entitled to mind and moral merit, and if they have neither 
 minds nor wills of their own, it follows as an axiom that God\s 
 will must act within them ; and as the will of God is to be 
 honored and adored, the works of his faithful creatures express- 
 ing his will, should be treated with kindness and respect. 
 
 Here, again, I must remind the reader that as there is but 
 one God and Creator of all things, that the dog did not create 
 himself, and that he is a much more obedient subject of God 
 than traitorous and cruel man with all his vain boastings. We 
 Christians, however, as we term ourselves, found our prejudices 
 upon the presumption of many separately creating and warring 
 Gods, thus rendering ourselves more inconsistent and ridiculous 
 than the devotees of the Oriental God, Boodh, whom more 
 than one third of the human family worships, and grant that 
 everything came from Boodh, and that every thing must re- 
 turn to him. And this, by the bye, with a change only of 
 name, is the sacred truth of the one uuderived, unequalled, im- 
 mutable and eternal God, the great designer, creator and 
 governor of 1;he Universe, who numbers the hairs upon our 
 heads, and suffers not a sparrow to fall to the ground without 
 his notice. It is in him we live, move and have our being, and 
 from him in common with man, does the brute derive his exist- 
 ence, his every thought and every act. So think not that the 
 brute has a separate God, a separate government or a separate 
 merit in the eyes of that God who in his wisdom and goodness 
 did create him, and may allot to him a future happiness for all 
 his miseries. 
 
 I could give a thousand instances of sagacious thought and 
 sound reasoning derived from age, observation and experience, 
 that have fallen under my own notice, but I will only mention 
 a few of them, such as the notorious marauding old town-hogs, 
 who, by stealthy steps and covert ways, enter lots, and getting 
 to the slop-tubs, evince as much sagacity in their movements 
 as man would under the same circumstances. When young, and 
 
306 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 before being taught better, they will boldly go where they can, 
 and like children grasp at everything their appetites may crave, 
 but soon, by punishment, they are taught to withhold, and then 
 it is that, like the human, they take to stealing. They will lie 
 around till a late hour, till lights are out and all asleep, and 
 then enter, eat, and be off before day. I have known depreda- 
 tions carried on in cornfields and elsewhere, with magic skill 
 far exceeding the success of our flibustering and hungry hogs 
 who have entered and aimed to rob others of their rights. I 
 have seen foxes run along logs, through fallen treetops, and 
 through tangled places to bewilder the dogs, but old and ex- 
 perienced hounds will not stop when they loose the track at 
 such places, but take a circle round and find where it again 
 comes out upon the ground. Every huntsman knows that when 
 the pack is bothered about a track, that the older dogs pay no 
 more attention to the cry of the young ones than old people do 
 to the idle prattle of young and unexperienced children, but 
 just let an old leader open, and the whole pack rallies to the 
 unerring trail. Let a dog once follow a rabbit through a gap 
 in a hedge, and if he start one after that and looses the track, 
 he with quick thought of his past experience will dash to the 
 gap and head him. Every huntsman is aware of the fact that 
 a young deer will run around the stands till shot, while an old 
 one will run directly out and continue their flight to a distance, 
 and into the most inaccessible places. An old stag, having 
 been much chased, will double his track, or in other words, 
 take a circuit, and falling in upon his back-track, follow it some 
 distance, and then bound off as far as possible in a lateral 
 direction. But an old pack is not to be fooled much by such 
 tricks, for they divide their forces, one half running on either 
 side of the track to detect the tangent. Experienced deer, when 
 hard pushed, will seek some water-course, and instead of cross- 
 ing directly over or going up stream, which would constantly 
 float the scent down to their pursuers, they invariably keep as 
 near the centre of the stream as they can, and invariably travel 
 
 i 
 
INSTINCT. 301 
 
 down it. Experienced hounds, however, reason well to the 
 point in such cases, so they, as quickly as could the general 
 of an army, divide their forces, a portion crossing the stream, 
 and thus guarding both shores, pursue downwards (never up), 
 and if, after running a distance, no track is found to come out, 
 knowing from time and speed that they must have got ahead, 
 they commence to search back, swimming or wading in, as the 
 case may be, amongst rocks, drift, or hiding nooks. 
 
 Deer will sink themselves so deep in the water that nothing 
 but the nose protrudes — sufficiently to breathe above it, and in 
 this position I have seen them under the rocks that have fallen 
 from th« cliffs and choked the beds both of Rockcastle and 
 Cumberland rivers, where I had many years enjoyed the chase 
 and the healthful sports of the forest. And long will I remem- 
 ber the sportful days and mirthful nights I have spent with my 
 friends of " Boone-Camp.'' 
 
 To show farther the sagacity of the horse, I will mention a 
 circumstance of my own horse, that just now occurs to my 
 mind. I rode him for some time through country-gates, till he 
 learned to open them as well as I could, by pressing his nose 
 through the slats and lifting the latch, then by shoving with 
 his head, carry the heaviest gate before him. If the staves 
 were too close for his nose, he used his tongue, and such became 
 his skill that it was hard to secure a gate against him, and not 
 five minutes since I found him in my garden, not only having 
 lifted the latch but pulled a peg out, which I had put over it, 
 with his teeth; and more than this, he can lay down "a pair of 
 bars as quickly with his mouth, as a man can with his hand. 
 If a horse itches in a part which he cannot scratch, he will 
 bite another horse in the same spot, when his companion quickly 
 reciprocates it, and relieves him of the itching. Even the goose 
 has its share of intellect and of reasoning power. A species 
 of goose, called the Cormorant, that inhabits the lakes of Mis- 
 sissippi and Louisiana, fishes with as much sagacity as could a 
 human. I have seen them collect in large flocks and spreading 
 
308 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 out like the wings of a net or sein, near the shore or some 
 shallow bar, and when properly marshalled, they of a sudden 
 commence beating the water with their wings and closing up 
 to the bar where the hemmed up fish splash the water as much 
 as the Cormorants, who now commence the busy feast. These 
 birds, if you come near them with a gun, will expell the air 
 from their bodies and sink so deep in the water that there is 
 nothing but the bill to be seen. Those facts, and many more 
 equally curious, in regard to the Cormorant, are daily wit- 
 nessed by Southern planters. 
 
 There are little birds in our Western forests that will, when 
 they see the robbers of their nests approaching, tumble at their 
 feet, as though they had been wounded, and fluttering over and 
 over, just a-head of their grasp, lead them to a distance, and 
 then take flight — ^no doubt — laughing at the credulity of the 
 cruel and disappointed thief. I have often, before I knew the 
 sacred rights of God's humble creatures, been lead off in this 
 way, from my barbarous designs, by this stratagem of the 
 tender and affectionate mother, whose prompt and efficient 
 reasoning thus saved her little brood from threatened destruc- 
 tion. The wood-duck, that hatches in the top's of trees, will 
 take one at a time of her young upon her back between her 
 wings, and fly to the water with them. I have often, when a 
 thoughtless little marauder, lay snugly hid on the bank of a 
 river, till the old duck would bring from a tree on the moun- 
 tain side her entire brood of ten or fifteen beautiful little crea- 
 tures, then plunging in, swim after them, producing great con- 
 sternation, and I now look back with wonder and admiration 
 at the quick-witted sagacity of the mother in protecting her 
 nimble little flock, sometimes taking to the land and hiding in 
 the brush, then down the bank and into the water again, as 
 best fitted the case. 
 
 In avoiding to make this article tedious, I will close it by 
 making a few remarks upon the philosophy of mind. It having 
 been amply shown that the spiritual thinker is one and the 
 
INSTINCT. 309 
 
 same in man and beast, and differing only in degree, as a dime 
 differs from a dollar, yet of the same substance, it only remains 
 to show wherein and to what extent they differ in power and 
 in modes of action. The body of the brute comes to maturity 
 much sooner than that of man, which cannot be a just objec- 
 tion, for his organic powers, his endurance of hardships, and 
 his exemption from disease, certainly make him physically 
 superior to man, nor can the quick development of his mind, 
 in the brute, degrade it in rank any more than it can the body. 
 The mind of the brute acts in accordance with the laws a,nd 
 requirements of his nature, and that of man can do no more. 
 All that can justly be said in contrast, is that though they 
 both have instincts and both have reason, that the mind of 
 man is governed more by reason and less by instinct than that 
 of the brute. It will be seen in the first part of this article 
 that everything is there proven to be instinct, but in respect to 
 antiquated and vulgar distinctions, I here without a difference 
 speak of reason in contradistinction to instinct, as, though quick 
 perception and infallible adaptation of means to ends, as seen 
 in the workings of the mind of the brute, were unreasonable. 
 
 The human infant, for instance, is governed by the same 
 organic laws that the young of the brute is. It is as natural 
 for the infant to suck as it is to be an infant, and it is just as 
 natural that some thirty pairs of muscles should be put in 
 synchronous and peristaltic motion by desire in the act of suck- 
 ing and deglutition, as that our legs, by numerous muscular 
 concatenations, should be put in motion by a more adult and 
 conscious desire. Inanition and plenitude, each produce their 
 appropriate feelings, and put in action their allotted train of 
 muscles. An empty stomach begets pain, and pain crying, 
 which exercises a set of muscles, that distorts the face, while a 
 desire to reheve this pain begets sucking, and now another set 
 of muscles are brought into harmonious concert, forming a 
 vacuum beyond all the powers of art, drawing the milk from 
 the mother's breast, when, as I said, the deglutitory muscles 
 
310 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 receive the nectared fluid, and by a vermicular movement con- 
 duct it to the gastric reservoir, the great chemical laboratory 
 of the human system, where it is prepared to be absorbed, cir- 
 culated, secreted, and avssimilated to the ten' thousand pur- 
 poses of fluids, and solids of the moving miracle. When the 
 stomach is filled and the cravings of nature satisfied, the 
 wearied sucking muscles relax into placidity, and the antagonal 
 muscles of the mouth gently drawing the corners back, produce 
 the appearance of a sweet smile of the infant's face, pleasing to 
 the feelings of the ever tender and watchful mother. These 
 marvellous and unconscious movements of the infant as clearly 
 evince the handi-work of God, his wisdom, and his might, as 
 if he were to appear in person to confirm the fact, and I record 
 it here not as properly belonging to the article on Instinct, but 
 as legitimately belonging to the history of our race, and to 
 show the existence of a Designer, who has, by preconceived 
 design and consummate skill adapted means to ends. The in- 
 fant was made to suck, and call it instinct or what you please, 
 its science is as perfect at birth as any after-experience could 
 make it. God in such cases being the instructor, for without 
 his unbounded wisdom and kindly will such miracles could not 
 exist. 
 
 Much wonder has been expressed, and interminable disputes 
 gotten up, how it is that a calf and a duck, for instance, com- 
 ing into the world upon the water's side, should act so differ- 
 ently, the calf remaining on land and sucking, while the duck 
 runs directly into the water and swims. The only answer to 
 such silly question is simply this : — the calf was made to suck 
 and live on land, and the duck to go into the water. God has 
 endowed the infant calf with odorific powers to smell the milk, 
 and with an appetite or propensity to suck it, while the duck 
 is made with a bill not to suck, but to seek its appropriate 
 food, and has given it a propensity for water in which it was 
 designed to live. These you may call instincts or ultimate de- 
 signs, which are the same, and we might as well ask why the 
 
INSTINCT. 311 
 
 duck has feathers and a webb foot, and the calf hair and a 
 cloven foot as to ask why the duck goes into water, and 
 the calf remains on land? both acting in accordance with their 
 unavoidable organism. Why should old and young dislike the 
 taste of gall, and be pleased with that of sugar, other than 
 that this is the order of nature, and just as simple is every 
 other sensation, desire and emotion of soul unencumbered by 
 mysticism, vulgar prejudices, and the quibbles of pretended 
 learning. The wonderful discovery of Galen that has figured 
 through many volumes of mental philosophy, is of this kind. 
 After placing milk, oil and hay and other temptations round a 
 room, he took a kidd from its dead mother, and setting it down 
 in the room it sme^: around at the various kinds of food, and 
 then selected the milk. Now, the great question based upon 
 this undoubted fact, is : Why did the kidd take the milk in pre- 
 ference to the hay ? Some contend that it was led by instinct, 
 and others that it was governed by a kind of human reason, 
 when common sense would decide it to be nothing more than 
 its natural taste and aptitude given it by its Creator, and this 
 taste is not a bit more wonderful than that the kidd should 
 come out a kidd instead of a colt. Nor is all this more mar- 
 vellous than that the human infant should have a propensity 
 to suck milk instead of eating meat. Galen's murder of the 
 poor mother was to prove that the offspring received no in- 
 struction from the parent, and that it had gained nothing from 
 observation or experience, showing as he and his disciples have 
 supposed, that there is nothing in the brute but instinct, which 
 facts, when justly applied, fit the young human just as well as 
 the young brute. It is equally marvellous that the needle 
 should turn to the pole, that vinegar should taste sour, and 
 sugar sweet, that fire should burn and cold freeze, the scent 
 of a rose agreeable, and that of a skunk disagreeable. The 
 dog will leave a bed of roses for a rotten carcass by the 
 same law of his nature that the kidd left the hay and the 
 oil for the milk. These are ultimate facts for which no reason 
 
312 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 can be given, further than that they are so, because they are 
 so. In other words, they are so, because God made them so, 
 and the only question left for dispute is why did God make 
 them so ? There is a conservative power or law of self-pre- 
 servation so interwoven into the very texture of our constitu- 
 tion, that it acts without either our knowledge or approbation. 
 If we stumble, or in any way lose our balance, it rights us 
 up before we could reason or will it so. If a blow be aimed at 
 us, though we know it to be in sport, and even will not to 
 flinch from it, this vis naturae, the sleepless life-guard that 
 watches disease at every pore and inlet of the body, causes the 
 eye to wink, and the body to shrink from it ; and the prick of 
 a pin, even when asleep, will cause the hanc4^to recoil from the 
 threatened danger. All this must be granted to be purely in- 
 stinctive, and yet it is not more so than the inborn capacity 
 that enables us from experience to act with deliberation under 
 anticipated results, for without such original or instinctive 
 power, the basis of every thought and emotion, we could not 
 thus act. 
 
 In short, I am wearied with arguing this question which 
 continually resolves itself into the one simple fact, that as there 
 is but one God, the Creator and Donor of all things, that all 
 things are instinct, or in other words dependent npon God, and 
 if so, why so many distinctions and so much controversy about 
 whence the many powers, properties and learned technicalities 
 spoken of by authors. There must either be a plurality of in- 
 termediate Gods, as of the Greeks and Romans, that work at 
 random and without a dependent connection with the immut- 
 able and eternal laws of causality, or these many distinctions 
 are brain-begotten and thingless things, independent of a cause, 
 and without an archetype in nature. The unobscured pheno- 
 mena of mind is just as plain as that of matter. The germ of 
 mind may be likened unto that of the varied phenomena of the 
 material world in regard to its dependence upon fixed and un- 
 alterable principles. There are no marks of reason to be seen 
 
INSTINCT. 313 
 
 in the new-born infant, nor is there any tree to be seen in the 
 acorn, yet there is an instinctive or congenital principle or 
 power there implanted by God himself, which will, under the 
 influence of preconceived and designated agencies, produce the 
 mighty oak with all its spreading branches, leaves and fruit. 
 Its roots are instinctively grounded in primogenial or first 
 causes, and its every stage of subsequent development is 
 equally dependent upon causes created and sustained by the 
 same power and not by the casualities or whims of nature. A 
 miracle, with a thousand complicated, harmonious, and inscrut- 
 able parts, is developed, by incubation, from the egg, whereby 
 with all the scrutiny of man, there can be nothing found. And 
 just so with the infant, both in mind and body — the body hav- 
 ing but a spark of instinctive vitality that would die out as 
 quickly without food and air from the external world, as a 
 spark of fire would without fuel. Nor is the mind less depend- 
 ent, for it comes to the world like the acorn, with an instinct- 
 ive capncity to develope the phenomena of mind by time, and 
 the objective influences through the senses. All things, then, 
 are equally dependent upon the fixed laws of the first great 
 cause, it follows that neither brute nor man has any self-control 
 or independent and fortuitous powers, but that they are both 
 governed by the instinctive laws of their nature which differs 
 nothing in quality, as the souls of the various grades of men 
 and beasts cannot be big and little, black or white, or of finer 
 or of grosser materials, but difi*er only in the organization and 
 the nervous distributions that afford the inlets to mind. If 
 there be a principle of immateriality and immortality that 
 feels, thinks and acts, it must be one and the same in every 
 creature that feels, thinks and acts, for soul must be soul, and 
 matter matter, wherever they may be found. There certainly 
 is a greater difference between the different powers of mind in 
 different men than there is between men and beasts, and it 
 cannot be that God will make any distinction in favoritism or 
 in the day of judgment, because of those differences. The dif- 
 
314 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ference, I have said, does not depend upon the essence of mind, 
 but upon our organization, and the inlets of mind ; and the 
 brute, being deprived of hands to feel, which is the corrective 
 of all our other senses, it is not supposed that he can obtain 
 the same amount of knowledge, though possessed of identically 
 the same amount of mind. A deaf man, for instance, 
 cannot speak, and a blind man is cut off from all that develop- 
 ment of mind that is created by the powers of vision. Memory 
 is frequently destroyed by the derangement of the nerves, or 
 by a stroke upon the head, while the entire mind is stupified or 
 crazed by disease. If then, the same mind that is wise to-day, 
 should become demented to-morrow by a change of physical 
 condition, may not the greatest mind be checked in its develop- 
 ment by an original organization or contingent condition of 
 system ? 
 
 In regard to a greater or less perfection in the different 
 modes of mental action in man or beast, the beast has the 
 advantage in some and man in others. Memory, for instance, 
 is the most wonderful power we have, and the beast notoriously 
 has it in a higher degree than man. Reason they have in a 
 less degree, but in quickness of perception and correctness of 
 judgment in all practical things, appertaining to, or necessary 
 for their self-preservation, health, and happiness, they are 
 assuredly our superiors. It has been objected, however, to the 
 brute, that though they are our superiors in practical wisdom, 
 they lack that quality of mind that fits them for abstract and 
 idle speculations, such as we possess. In proof of the position 
 I have assumed, that the essence of mind must be the same in 
 all grades of actions in minds, I ask the question whether it is 
 possible the mind can be enlarged by artificial means? "We 
 speak of the mind being enlarged by education, but is it, or not, 
 I further ask, really enlarged thereby? For if so, the soul of 
 the profligate wit and educated man must claim the merit of 
 a big soul over the more humble, uneducated, and pious 
 Christian. 
 
 1 
 
INSTINCT. 315 
 
 Though I have run hastily, and with many interruptions 
 through this article, I do not recollect of any thing more to be 
 noticed, except a few words upon the apparent prescience pos- 
 sessed by certain beasts — but more particularly by migrating 
 birds. The tendency of every animal is from their organization, 
 and hence it is that some animals more than others, exhibit 
 those tendencies from their birth, while others, like the veget- 
 able kingdom, are slower in the development of their nature. 
 Some are created with acute sensibilities to changes in the 
 elements, and that best befits them for the life they are designed 
 to live. For instance, a duck and a- fish seek the water, be- 
 cause best suited to their nature, while chickens remain on land, 
 and birds fly in the air. If blind and cold, we could tell by our 
 dull sensibilities which side of us a fire might be on, and feel an 
 instinctive propensity to approach it, and so I presume it to be 
 with migratory birds, whose exquisite sensibilities enable them 
 at certain seasons and under chilling changes of atmosphere, to 
 feel it more agreeable to go to the warm South than to go to the 
 cold North. God has so constituted birds — a hen for instance 
 — that after she lays her eggs she is taken with a feverish state 
 of body and greatly increased heat, so much so as to be detected 
 by the mercury. She now feels sick and torpid, as seen by her 
 pale gills and demure countenance, and doubtless feels more 
 pleasure in sitting in her nest, and upon her eggs, than off and 
 exercising. God, doubtless, implanted this principle in all birds 
 for the purpose of propagating their species, just as he has made 
 the brute female to be afflicted with inflammation to bring them 
 into season for the purposes of procreation, and these you may 
 call instincts, or what you please, but they are nothing more nor 
 less than the unavoidable nature of the animal. The exquisite 
 sensibilities of a dog will give some idea of those otherwise in- 
 scrutable and wonderful proclivities of brutes. The dog will 
 not only smell the difference of man and other animals through 
 the thickest soled shoe, but tell his master from all others, and 
 though he may be in company with thousands of persons, and 
 
316 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 leaves them, the dog will unerringly select him out, and follow 
 his track. Birds may have similar sensibilities; and as the sun 
 in a northern climate, being always south to the eye, as well 
 as by warmth of feehng, it is quite natural that both birds and 
 beasts, should, at certain seasons, journey in that direction. 
 The human is frequently so sensitive as to anticipate the weather 
 by their pains, or other indiscribable feelings. We thirst and 
 hunger we know not how, but find that water and food will 
 give us relief. Under certain conditions of system we itch in- 
 tolerably — the philosophy of which we are ignorant of — but find 
 that scratching soothes it, A woman in certain circumstances 
 will long for things unnatural to others, and unthought of by 
 herself under other conditions of system. All these are in- 
 stincts of our nature, and are as fatally governed by their ap- 
 propriate causes as the magnetic needle is when it turns to the 
 pole. I have but one more remark to make, and that is to 
 show how far our prejudices will go to degrade the highest 
 qualifications and most desirable gifts of God. 
 
 We first stigmatize the brute as a degraded animal by our 
 own arbitrary prejudices, as did Aristotle the poor African, and 
 next condemn every quality they possess as equally degraded, 
 when, if we possessed many of their wonderful faculties of in- 
 tuitive perfection, and prescience, we should boast of them. 
 Suppose, for instance, that any man on earth had the memory 
 of a horse— the shrewdness of the fox — the mathematical 
 knowledge of the bee — the supernatural wisdom and unerring 
 skill of navigation possessed by the carrier-dove to cross vast 
 continents and stormy seas back to its home, without a com- 
 pass, and an eye to see as well at night as in the day, and a 
 power to know all tracks, and to follow the rogue and murderer 
 to his covert places, I ask in common honesty and with Christ- 
 ian charity whether he would not be adored as the most God- 
 gifted man that the world has ever known. These are the 
 brightest gems of an immortal mind, and because God, our 
 common Father, has seen proper to bestow them upon others of 
 
INSTINCT. 311 
 
 his creatures, man with supercilious arrogance rebels against his 
 will and holds it in contempt. 
 
 This selfish and sacrilegious claim we make to mind, not 
 only over the brute, but against our fellow-man, is the lowest 
 and most degrading trait in our character, and never to be 
 found in the elevated, enlarged, and liberal soul, whose knowl- 
 edge is not from the contemptible and contracted prejudices of 
 man, but from the harmonious immutable and eternal laws of 
 God's vast universe. This is the source, and the only source of 
 disinterested, refined, and enobling knowledge, that can never 
 be gained from the debased and grovelling squabblings about 
 the isms and dogmatisms in our church conventionalities. This 
 vain and bigoted appropriation of God's favors to our poor 
 little selves is a hopeless delusion, that never has nor will be 
 realized in the winding up of all things, for all things of time 
 must have their end in the levelling and fated stroke of death. 
 The Jews professed to be a favored people, who claimed the 
 world under the plighted gifts of God, and with most irrever- 
 ent presumption did they, in the person of Moses, accuse the 
 Lord, face to face, of falsehood. 
 
 "And Moses returned to the Lord, and said. Lord where- 
 fore hast thou so evil entreated this people? Why is it that 
 thou hast sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in 
 thy name, he hath done evil unto this people, neither hast thou 
 delivered thy people at all. 
 
 *' And Jehovah said unto Moses, I have seen this people, 
 and behold, it is a stiff-necked people: Now, therefore, let me 
 alone, that my wrath my wax hot against them, that I may 
 consume them." — Exodus v, 22, 23. 
 
 Where now, I ask, were the favors of God to this vaunting 
 nation, who went forth lying, stealing, butchering men, women, 
 and infants, and even unhoofing and cruelly torturing the poor 
 horse, in the name of (rod. God did justly consume them, 
 and it would be well for our vain pretenders, and boastful heirs 
 
318 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRATE. 
 
 of heaven to read a moral in those past and crushing dispensa- 
 tions of Ahiiightj God. 
 
 There is no feeUng even among Christian professors for the 
 hmnble brute or his defender, and but little for the poor African 
 whose patient toil under a galling yoke ministers to their 
 wanton and pampered appetites and fancies. All past history 
 shows that those claims to partial and favored rights have been 
 but the braggart's boast, and that blind selfishness and bigoted 
 zeal make us the ready tools of injustice, cruelty and oppression. 
 Men, when seduced by those vain delusions, and debased by 
 superstition, lose all feeling even for their own race; a proof 
 of which is seen in the ruthless rapine and desolating sword of 
 Mahomet, nor is this more than a mere item in the melancholy 
 history of man, which should open the eyes of those usurpers 
 of heaven's rights and spoilers of earth, to their own blind 
 folly. 
 
 In closing this article, it comes to my recollection that I 
 might have quoted Dr. Adam Clarke, as well as other able Di- 
 vines, in support of my opinion, that the mind of the brute is not 
 matter, but a spirit, which feels, thinks and acts, and that it will 
 have alloted to it by its kind Creator a future and happy abode 
 in the realms of eternity, to compensate for its faithful toil and 
 patient afflictions in this life. And now, may God in his mercy, 
 forgive the oppressor, heal the afflicted, and save us all. 
 
 i 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 
 
 Having recently heard so much from the Clergy, in regard 
 to the general want of zeal in religious matters, and of the 
 evident decline of the cause, owing, as they suppose, to too 
 much liberty of thought, and of the too much exercise of '^ poor 
 human rmsonj'^ I feel it not only a moral obligation, but a 
 religious duty to give to the pubUc my views upon this all im- 
 portant subject. I am not a Divine, nor do I make any pre- 
 tentions to the prophetic and mystic learning of that privileged 
 body; but I trust I am a Christian, basing my hopes upon the 
 plain and common sense, nature and reason of things, as made 
 known by God, both in his natural and revealed will. I admit 
 the fact, that there is too little piety and show of good works, 
 for the amount of profession amongst us; for if you question 
 the masses: are you believers in the Christian religion, and do 
 you place your hopes for future happiness upon it ? and all may 
 answer yes; and yet how few pious Christians and strictly 
 honest or honorable men are to be found amongst them, and 
 why this state of things in an enlightened age and in a Chris- 
 tian land ? It is not for the want of clergy or of churches, nor 
 for the want of liberality in the support of them, for the pockets 
 of the people have been depleted to a sullen stupor and languid 
 indifference amongst the members themselves. We shall soon 
 vie with ancient and papal splendor in churches and in rival 
 paraphernalia. If the defect, then, is not in the want of the 
 profession of religion, nor in the willingness to support its insti- 
 tutions, where is it ? Some charge it to the counter-excitement 
 of self-interest, some to public amusements, and others to the 
 all-absorbiug interest of popular favor, in seeking public honors. 
 
 319 
 
320 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 Then, again, they all join in one hue, and cry against "_poor 
 human reason,^^ as the leader of evils, none of which opinions, in 
 the nafure of things, can be correct. For the only object of 
 man's existence in this world, and his whole pursuit through 
 life, being to obtain his happiness here and to secure an ever- 
 lasting blessing beyond the grave, his noblest efforts and highest 
 interest would be in living up to the precepts of religion, pro- 
 vided he had a full and unshaken conviction of what he out- 
 wardly professes. What, I ask, should be more honorable, 
 amongst a professing community, than the name of a Christian, 
 as obtained by a pious observance and humble submission to 
 the will of God, and a steady and marked regard for the well 
 being of mankind. And again, what more pleasing and profit- 
 able than the happiness arising from the bright scenes and 
 glorious prospects that stretch out before us, through the 
 lengthened vista of eternity ? I say, then, that the defect is 
 not in the constitution or nature of man, who ever turns with 
 as much certainty with the conviction of his mind to the largest 
 amount of interest or happiness, as does the needle to the pole. 
 Who, then, in possession of this world's first honors, (a true 
 disciple of Christ,) and in full view of the glories of heaven, 
 would, under this fixed and ruling law of our mind, barter them 
 for the puny and ephemeral rule amongst his dying fellow- 
 mortals. It is not, then, as I have said, possible, in our nature, 
 to be irreligious through obstinacy or an unwillingness to 
 receive the largest blessing or greatest amount of happiness 
 here and hereafter, but, because of the bad example of Chris- 
 tian membership, together with a lingering doubt of the whole 
 system, got up and kept up by the distracting opinions and 
 angry controversies of the clergy themselves. When an ungodly 
 man says, he believes in the truth of Christianity, it is a nominal, 
 a popular, and fashionable belief, for if his conviction were as 
 that of his natural senses, he would escape the burnings of hell 
 quicker, if possible, than he would a burning building in whose 
 flames he might be enveloped. There are many varieties and 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 321 
 
 shades of belief, that may be presented to the human mind, the 
 strongest and most pressing of which will always prevail. 
 Hence it is that we act upon the conviction of the old adage, 
 that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Let two 
 objects of trade or speculation be presented to our mind, and 
 other things being equal, or no counteracting consideration 
 intervening, we will as certainly make choice of the larger in- 
 terest, as that water, unobstructed, will tend downwards. I 
 have been a long and close observer of all the workings of the 
 human mind, which is, I affirm, as fully under the control of 
 fixed and immutable laws, as is the physical world. As in- 
 separable as cause and effect, is the motive and the will, and 
 as unavoidable as visual perception to the open eye, is the 
 result, the will following the motive, and the act obeying the 
 will. Just as certainly as that the miser will prefer the dollar 
 to its half, can we affirm that all men will have a preference 
 for, or make choice of the larger interest rather than the 
 smaller, and the greater blessing than the lesser. In other 
 words, that all men will prefer pleasure to pain, which the 
 largest amount of interest, if legal and just, will always give. 
 This is an axiom, as self-evident to my mind as that two and 
 two make four, or that the whole is greater than a part; and it 
 is as demonstrable throughout all its equivocal bearings and 
 apparent incompatibilities as any abstract problem in physical 
 science. All will grant, as a universal law of nature, that if a 
 stone, or other ponderous body be cast into the atmosphere, it 
 will return, yet should it be prevented by a lodgement or some 
 obstructing body, it makes ho exception to the rule or law of 
 gravitation. It is a philosophic maxim, that all bodies, pro- 
 jected in a straight line, will continue in that line, except ob- 
 structed or retarded by other powers, and this law, though 
 founded upon the fact, that no body has the power either to 
 start or stop itself without a cause, is just as equivocal and 
 insidious as the turning of the will to the various interposing 
 
 motives. A rifle-ball may leave the muzzle auned and projected 
 
 14* 
 
322 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 directly to the centre, and yet widely miss it. An experienced 
 marksman may, however, detect the numerous counteracting 
 powers upon his ball, as gravitation, friction, the countercur- 
 rents and shiftings of the winds, etc. In like manner may the 
 mind, by long experience and close observation of its own 
 actions, detect the various counteracting and shifting powers 
 or motives that control the will. If a man wills to walk and 
 see his neighbor, his locomotive muscles are put in motion in 
 that direction as a sequence of that desire, and he will as cer- 
 tainly continue in that direction as will a projected body, till 
 changed by a counteracting power. Should he hear the cry 
 of fire upon the right or left, he will, if the second excitement 
 or desire be stronger than the first, be turned to the right or 
 the left. In like manner, should a messenger overtake him 
 with the information of the sudden death of one of his family, 
 his anxiety will immediately give him a retrogressive motion. 
 In all this, there is no mystery, the effect always following its 
 sufficient cause or strongest motive. The science of mind is 
 like the pathological and therapeutic science of medicine or 
 body, governed by diversion, revulsion, metastasis, translation 
 or change of excitement, through the influence of medicine, 
 from one part of the body to another, or from the more vital 
 to the less vital organ. The observance of those laws, with a 
 familiar acquaintance with the vis mtdicatrix natura, or the 
 efforts of nature to remove disease and restore the body to 
 health, constitutes the whole philosophy or science of medicine. 
 Nor is the failure of prognosis, in certain cases, any proof that 
 the science is not perfect, or that every cause, either in sickness 
 or in health, is not equal to its effect, but that our vision is 
 unequal to its dark and winding ways. The science of mind is 
 as unerring and easily understood as that of body or matter, 
 if we confine our investigations to the how, and leave the why 
 to the province of God, who alone can know. From the non- 
 observance of this distinction, has the study of mind become 
 exceedingly complicated and obscure. The schoolmen with their 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERSION. 323 
 
 little niceties in abstractions, divisions, sub-divisions, technicali- 
 ties, useless particulars, and learned nonsense, have so incum- 
 bered the science of metaphysics as to be as little understood 
 by the writer as the reader. This same class of sapicnts or 
 schoolmen, so called from their great pretentions to learning 
 and ability to render God's word and the doctrines of his revela- 
 tion plainer and more rational than he himself could or did do, 
 have divided the Christian world into ten thousand different 
 sects, and distracted the subject of religion. This book stultifi- 
 cation and vain glory has ever been the bane of godly piety 
 and vital religion, as well as the opprobrium of science. It was 
 this sacrilegious pretention to prophetic wisdom and mystic 
 learning that God confounded by the humble and untaught, 
 and would to God that the humbler classes would now-a-days 
 think for themselves, and thus preserve the purity and unity of 
 divine revelation. Though sooth-saying and fortune-telling have 
 lost their rank, our modern biblical commentators and prophets 
 claim a prerogative and dignity over the learned expositors of 
 dreams, riddles and conundrums, and yet all will acknowledge 
 that they are not as apt to be correct. Hence it is, that I say 
 to you, my fellow-travelers to the bar of God, that it is a libel 
 upon his great and eternal name, to maintain the awful respon- 
 sibility, that God has given to his people a law beyond their 
 capacity, and that he will burn them in hell-fire for ever and 
 for ever, for not understanding* it. Is not, then, the humblest 
 layman in our land as well qualified and as fully authorized to 
 judge of the word of God, and to foresee the fulfilment of his 
 prophesies, as the learned Dr. Miller, who brought the world to 
 an end, some years since, and sent a number of his phrensied 
 followers, with their ascension-robes, to eternity. A little exer- 
 cise of God's best gift, common sense, and of that abused 
 faculty, "poor human reason," the world might have been saved 
 from conflagration, and those poor deluded fanatics from 
 destruction; so much for great learning, in mystic matters. 
 But more of this in another number, we will back to the estab- 
 
324 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 lishraent of certain facts, the ground work of all legitimate in- 
 vestigation. 
 
 We should look at existing facts as they are, and placing 
 our Jacob staif here as a starting point, inductively pursue the 
 laws of nature as God has ordained them. If we look back for 
 the reason of things, we are quickly led beyond first causes, 
 and lost in the regions of infinity and eternity. Sir Isaac 
 Newton satisfied himself with pursuing the laws of gravitation 
 from its infant exhibition in bringing the apple to the ground, 
 up to its gigantic grasp and mighty power in binding the 
 heavenly bodies to their bidden spheres through limitless space. 
 He recognized this power as an established law of nature, nor 
 spent idle time in the abstract question, why God thus ordained 
 it, and whether those laws are upheld by his immediate pres- 
 ence, or governed by secondary causes. I shall not here dis- 
 miss the question whether this law of the human mind that 
 governs men's actions, be voluntary or involuntary, a rule of 
 necessity or of liberty, as the result upon society in either case 
 will be the same. After premising what I have, then, as the 
 basis of future observation, and giving the examples I have, as 
 the only just mode of reasoning, we will go back to my first 
 proposition, that man, though endowed with many susceptibil- 
 ities and innate principles, as the recipients of knowledge and 
 passion, is yet the creature of circumstances. For example, it 
 is just as natural for a man to fall into the prejudices and habits 
 of the government and the people with whom he associates 
 from his birth up, as it is for him to speak his mother tongue ; 
 yet without this inborn principle of susceptibility, or the original 
 wax upon which the seal of his character is to be stamped, he 
 could not be shaped by circumstances. Again, our kind 
 Creator has implanted in us a conscience, the sequence or con- 
 viction of reason, to point out to us the right from the wrong. 
 Hence it is, that the Apostle Paul says, Rom., chap. 2: 14-15, 
 "For when the Gentiles which have not the law, do by nature 
 the things contained in the law, these having not the law, 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 325 
 
 are a law unto themselves, which shows the work of the 
 law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing 
 witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else 
 excusing one another ; yet this best gift and most infallible 
 guide of our veering nature is under this law of circumstances. 
 The same child that is reared in Turkey, and consequently 
 a conscientious Mussulman, would, if born in a Christian 
 land, if bad example did not deter him, be a Christian. 
 Then I again revert to this law of circumstances and induce- 
 ments, and affirm, that other things being equal, men will 
 always be governed by the largest amount of interest, or 
 the strongest motive that is presented to his choice. And 
 hence the necessity under this law of our nature, in addressing 
 men's judgments, and of convincing them of their true and last- 
 ing interest. This being done, he is at once made a Christian, 
 for, as we have shown from the constitution of our nature, it is 
 impossible to resist it ; for what man is there, I again ask, un- 
 der heaven, who in possession of his reason, will prefer pain to 
 pleasure, and misery to happiness ? Where we do not embrace 
 Christianity, I again and again affirm, say what we may about 
 a nominal profession, that it is for the want of a rational faith, 
 a deep and abiding conviction of all its attendant consequences, 
 of divine honors and transcendent glories, or unutterable misery 
 and woe, through all eternity. If men make choice of their 
 best interests in small matters, will they not, under an equal 
 conviction, do it in great ones? Do not abuse '^ poor human 
 reason," the divine gift of God, and only guide to his existence, 
 his attributes and his moral government, but address it with 
 argum-ents suited to its dignity and high prerogative, and you 
 will gain its respect, when by meekness, penitence, and un- 
 mistaken marks of piety in your own person, you will obtain 
 its unavoidable submission to your reasonable injunctions. 
 While at this point, we will dwell a moment to show what this 
 " poor human reason" has done for the world, and how far we 
 are under obligation to ''great clerical learning.''^ Look back 
 
6'Zb MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 at the first dawnings of the true system of astronomy, and 
 see how by the use of this "poor human reason" Galileo dis- 
 covered and calculated the movement of the heavenly bodies, 
 and for this valuable labor and honest pursuit of God's laws, 
 did the " learned clergy" burn his book and throw him in 
 prison I When Harvey discovered the circulation of the 
 blood, by "poor human reason,'' the "learned clergy" avoided 
 and vilified him as an infidel, because of their " learned'' 
 belief that the pulse was the bounding spirit, striving to escape 
 from its tenement of clay. When Roger Bacon, by the free- 
 dom and exercise of "poor human reason," discovered the mode 
 of making gunpowder, the *' learned clergy" excommunicated 
 him, as having dealings with the Devil, and threw him in 
 prison, where he died. All who read know that poor human rea- 
 son has long struggled against the persecutions of the learned 
 clergy, in establishing the true system of Geology. In each and 
 every one of those cases, the immutable laws of Go^ and his 
 Divine reason prevailed against the hootings of fanaticism, super- 
 stition and learned nonsense. And how disgusting to pious sensi- 
 bility and discouraging to rational religion, to see how those 
 professors of love and charity, of truth and honesty, can, after 
 condemning, persecuting and killing the author, come forward 
 with an air of tolerance and self-composure, and sacrilegiously 
 claim a portion in the author's honors, granting, when they 
 can no longer resist it, that those eternal and immutable laws 
 of Deity are in no wise incompatible with their self-constituted 
 isms. Those are a few cases of the contrast in poor human 
 reason and learned Divinity, that have this moment presented 
 themselves to my mind, more of which, however, may be ex- 
 pected in an after number. And before I discharge this sub- 
 ject, I ask the reader to look back upon the history of mankind, 
 and he will see that all reform has been the work of reason. 
 He will see that all the awakenings of the enslaved and benight- 
 ed mind to just and to" honorable principles, has been the slow 
 and steady work of reason, against ignorance, witchcraft, su- 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 32t 
 
 perstition and idolatry. Yes, and he will see that the improve- 
 ments in government, in religion, and in all the great concerns 
 of life and of human society, reason has had to bear with the 
 dominion and tyranny of prejudice and custom. 
 
 All others, as well as the clergy, will acknowledge that 
 what they complain of is true, to wit : that the Bible and 
 their preaching of it, has but little influence upon the morals 
 and religious habits of the community, and the reason why, is 
 in my opinion as follows : There is too much formality, sectar- 
 ianism, pride and pretension, and too little humility and piety 
 amongst the clergy themselves, to maintain a happy influence 
 over the minds of others. From the connection of pastor and 
 people, we may suppose that but few cases out of the number 
 that actually exist, would, when to the disgrace of both parties 
 be brought to light ; yet the public prints are filled with 
 charges, such as I would blush to record, against this holy 
 order, from Bishops down. Again, after all the vituperat- 
 ive utterings and anathemas hurled against the world, and 
 the many charges of crimes, ommissive and commissive against 
 their own churches, we can see no difference between the 
 pastor and the people, either natural or supernatural. And 
 not but that they may be very good men, but that they 
 preach and pretend to more than human nature can sustain ; 
 and hence it is, that from this apparent inconsistency in preach- 
 ing and practice, we so frequently hear the charge of hypo- 
 crisy against the members, and of the want of truth and 
 efficacy in the whole system. And again, there is too much 
 stress put upon church formalities, with its paraphernalia of 
 creeds and confessions of faith, of biblical dogmas and theolo- 
 gical enigmas, which the people can neither understand nor 
 subscribe to. It was this mystic mummery and black stain 
 upon the word of God, with the arrogant and haughty manner 
 of enforcing them upon the humble and untaught, who were 
 neither allowed to read nor think for themselves, that Martin 
 Luther strove to get rid of. The humblest member of society 
 
328 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 who believes in a God, adores him as a kind father who will 
 not hold him responsible for any communication from him, in 
 foreign languages or in figurative expressions, which he has not 
 given him capacity to understand, and consequently sees no ne- 
 cessity for employing others to quarrel about the mysteries of 
 his revelation. And though the tyranny of churches may pre- 
 scribe and .enjoin a certain faith, there is a secret feeling of re- 
 bellion at heart, got up by the spirit of liberty, and sustained 
 by the word of God. If we cannot recognize the Pope as the 
 great expounder and mouth-piece of God, in rendering his word 
 to man plainer or more intelligible than he himself could or 
 would do, as they tell us, why submit to the dictum of ten 
 thousand popes, all of whom differ from each other, and quar- 
 rel amongst themselves. All this mysticism and mutability, 
 as represented by the stickling wiseacres and learned disput- 
 ents, looks little like the word and will of a wise and benevolent 
 creator, who has so wisely and unerringly adapted and pro- 
 portioned means to ends in his physical universe. Speak of pa- 
 pistical ceremonies, and all Protestants cry out, slaves to re- 
 ligious usurpation, and yet we are beset with as many grievous 
 incumberances to the simple word of God and to the progress 
 of vital religion, as obtained in the darker ages. We frequently 
 hear doctrines from the pulpit self-contradictory, and wholly 
 incompatible with the wisdom, goodness, and distributive just- 
 ice of God, which necessarily begets a doubt whether the whole 
 book may not be a falsication unworthy the character of a 
 holy, just and beneficient Creator. And hence it is that all 
 instituted forms and ritual injunctions, calculated to bewilder 
 the mind or divert our attention from simple and fervent devo- 
 tion, together with the creeds, ites and isms, which in the esti- 
 mation of the world or of other sects, tend to impeach the 
 wisdom, goodness or veracity of God, should be excluded from 
 our churches. But man will be man in whatever condition of 
 life he may be found. Whether in secular or in sacred rela- 
 tions, the desire of rule, the pride of party and the comforts of 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 329 
 
 gain, is the nether passion and the main spring of action. No 
 single act of a man's life should be taken as a full and faithful 
 portrait of his character, nor should a single pursuit or an iso- 
 lated condition in society be recorded as more than an item 
 in writing out the history of mankind in general. Now, as 
 our position is that man is unerringly governed by the strongest 
 or ruling motive, and as we have set out to show what induce- 
 ments should be urged upon his mind, and by what manner 
 he is to be controlled in religious matters, it may not be amiss 
 to trace him beyond these limits, and show that he is as 
 certainly moved by the same principle as is the needle by the 
 magnet, throughout his various relations in life. 
 
 The principles upon which all clubs and associations of men, 
 as Masonry, Odd Fellowship, &c., &c., are got up, is the same, 
 and the band that binds them as a brotherhood is a unit. All 
 make fair outward pretentions, but selfish gain and pride of 
 fraternity has the mastery in all such associations. In Masonry, 
 for example, a very old and excellent institution, the profession 
 — yes, and indeed, the object, is charity; but what the induce- 
 ments for membership? Selfish gain of distinction, of popularity, 
 of individual claim upon the brotherhood, a policy of insurence 
 in times of trial and difficulty, fine dinners, fine aprons, and a 
 gaping and admiring public. Strip Masonry of all its para- 
 phernalia and mystic forms, and confine the members to the con- 
 templation of humanity and the gifts of charity, and they 
 would lose their ardor for the cause. If any member doubt 
 this, let him, in all conscience, and in the presence of his 
 God, ask himself whether he cannot be as charitable as 
 he wishes, and as good out of the Lodge as in it; and as an 
 honest and an honorable man he will join with me in saying that 
 in him I have given a true character of human nature. 
 
 The same principle rules in governmental affairs, and when 
 a politician professes the good of his country and his love for 
 the people to be his supreme object in seeking office, though we 
 have his word, we cannot grant him an exception to this law of 
 
330 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 human nature There has ever been a struggle between the 
 inns and the outs for office, and for no other object than that of 
 guarding the interests of their country, and yet the treasury 
 department has felt many defalcations. Should a learned and 
 eloquent statesman say that he had given party names and en- 
 joined confessions of faith, for the purposes of rallying a party 
 around him, their leader, with no other object than that of his 
 country's good, I will say that he is mistaken, and that he, 
 though in high station, is but a man. Thus having spent a few 
 moments in tracing the principles upon which we set out, 
 through its various relations in life, we will return with its ap- 
 plication to our rulers in Church. If the people were to disre- 
 gard all expounders of the Constitution, and judging of that 
 simple article for themselves, and unite as one man in their love 
 of country, which they would do, but for the intrigues of those 
 loving politicians, civil wars and bloodshed would be unknown. 
 And so I will say of the learned and partisan clergy, that if 
 the people would have less faith in their mummeries and preten- 
 tions to mystic learning, and read the simple word of God, and 
 worship for themselves, there would be but one God, one Church, 
 and one people. Then should we have a perfect brotherhood, 
 a heaven on earth, where the heart-burnings, bitter abuse, and 
 awful butcheries produced by Christian partisans and leaders 
 would be known no more for ever. But then, and in that case, 
 where would the great reverence for magic learning and the 
 high salaries come from; not that the clergy prefer good sal- 
 aries and the admiration usually conferred upon them by their 
 party, to the union of churches and the happiness of the peo- 
 ple, Not at all, for I am incapable of making any such invidi- 
 ous and oblique cuts at a class of men, most of whom, I know 
 to labor faithfully and conscientiously for the good of their flock. 
 But I do contend in good faith, that when those gentlemen 
 think that worldly gain and party honor and influence has no- 
 thing to do with their sectarian feelings and zeal to increase 
 their members, that they are mistaken, and do not recollect that 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 331 
 
 they are but men, fallible men, and just as liable to err as poli- 
 ticians and leaders in other relations of life. When the millen- 
 nium shall take place, the reformation must commence in the 
 Christian Church, where new sects are yearly rising, and the 
 Church divisions becoming greater. Being a Unionist, I look 
 with sincere regret and alarm at the present condition of the 
 Church and the low ebb of simple, unparadeful and primitive 
 devotion. All difference of opinion, and even the loss of con- 
 fidence in the goodness and distributive justice of God, is got up 
 by learned comment at or s^ whose blind zeal and gross ignorance 
 of God's true character, narrow him down to their own selfish 
 purposes. And thus are disputes got up in the Church of God, 
 and skeptics amongst the people. For instance, when we hear 
 it preached that God has determined from all eternity to send 
 nine hundred and ninty-nine in a thousand of his children, child- 
 ren of his own begetting, for we did not make ourselves, to hell, 
 and there to endure its torments for ever and for ever, we are 
 shocked with the declaration and feel that this is not our God, 
 who has created us after his own image and spread so many 
 blessings around us in this, his natural world. And though it 
 may be quoted, that the potter hath power over the clay to 
 make one vessel to honor and another to dishonor, &c., who that 
 will contemplate the infinity, the eternity, the wisdom, and the 
 goodness of the Almighty maker, or will gaze upon those rolling 
 orbs and burning hosts of heaven, can think that such a being 
 would condescend to be the creator of a favored party, much 
 less to send all others to hell without a crime ! I say without 
 a crime, for who that can alter the immutable decrees of the 
 Eternal, or escape by any act of theirs, the mandates of heaven ? 
 There is but a verbal difference between a law-maker and a 
 sovereign interpreter of laws to whose interpretations all are 
 bound to submit. And yet to this blasphemy and idolatry must 
 we submit, or bear the opprobium of impiety and unbelief. 
 
 Mr. Chillingworth says upon this subject, that '* this pre- 
 sumptuous imposing of the senses of men upon the words of 
 
332 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 God, the special senses of men upon the general words of God, 
 and laying them upon men's consciences together under the 
 equal penalty of death and damnation; this vain conceit that 
 we can speak of the things of God better than the words of 
 God; this defying our own interpretations, and tyrannous enforc- 
 ing them upon others; this restraining of the Word of God from 
 that latitude and generality, and the understanding of men from 
 that liberty, which Christ and his Apostles left them; is, and hath 
 been the only fountain of all the schisms of the Church; and 
 that which makes the immortal, the common incendiary of 
 Christendom; and that which tears in pieces, not the coat, but 
 the bowels and members of Christ." 
 
 This able Divine is severe, yet if we seriously consider the 
 liberty that Divines take with the Word of God, and their dic- 
 tatorial and imperious manner of imposing their creeds upon 
 the consciences of others, we will think it not too much so. They 
 take the word out of God's mouth, and make him the common 
 executioner of their will, and for our want of submission to this 
 gross sacrilege and criminal idolatory, we have the dreadful 
 anathemas of synods and councils, as against a wretch who de- 
 nies the Word of God. Every passage of Holy Writ bearing 
 the semblance of the grant of power, is seized upon and kindly 
 appropriated to themselves. As, " he that is spiritual judgeth 
 all things, (as the Pope,) yet he himself of no man." " Things 
 present and things to come, all are yours." "Whatsover thou 
 shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven," &c. This divine 
 power is granted by millions of benighted and enslaved laymen 
 to their abstruse and wily leaders. These doctrines, and the 
 destruction which they have engendered in the Christian Churches, 
 are well calculated to lessen our confidence in the goodness and 
 veracity of God, and to beget a universal scepticism. Men of 
 enlarged minds and liberal hearts are not misled by those slanders 
 upon the character of the Eternal, who if there were not ample 
 proof in his Holy word, would in the construction of the human 
 eye alone, convict them of falsehood. Let any one, whose mind 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 333 
 
 is not corrupted by false religion, but examine the construction 
 of this single atom of creation, and in it he will find a trans- 
 cendent beauty and perfection, with a self-evident conviction of 
 design in the adaptation of means to ends, revealing to man, 
 not only the existence of a God, but his supernatural wisdom 
 and loving kindness to his creatures. And thus it is, that men 
 of enlarged minds and liberal souls, can, by a knowledge of 
 God's natural and demonstrative revelation correct, the factiti- 
 ous and slanderous systems that have been got up in this world, 
 through design, ignorance and superstition. And though those 
 systems have rose and sunk, through revolving ages, time with 
 the precepts of morality and the efforts of philosophy, have done 
 but little in giving to man a correct knowledge of his Creator. 
 The ennui and monotony of simple, plain truth, the labor and 
 irksomness of a long life of honesty, with an almost universal 
 aversion to the use oi poor human reason, are too deeply rooted 
 to be easily overcome by the teachings of morality and philo- 
 sophy. Hence the quickness with which the masses catch at 
 all new revelations, made up of miracles and mysteries too deep 
 to be understood by poor human reason. Nor is this strange 
 when we see the convenience of a religion, that is to save us by 
 faith, by external signs, and by the instituted forms of Churches, 
 as counting beads, making crosses, &c. ; or mummeries equally 
 delusive to vulgar minds, and contemptible to reason, enjoined by 
 Protestant creeds and rituals. Were one of true piety and ra- 
 tional devotion to say to those devotees to man and to forms, 
 serve your God and save your money, he would be hooted out of 
 society by the howling mass, and persecuted as an infidel. It 
 is easier to have others to think for us and to pay them for in- 
 dulgencies, which God, who requires of us a more rigid morality 
 and upright life, might not grant ! Faith and formality then, 
 will always be the religion of the selfish and indolent, who are gov- 
 erned more by their outward senses and selfish passions, than 
 by a rational regard for God and the simplicity of his revelation. 
 A religion that acknowledges the universal love, equality, and 
 
334 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 equity of God's government, and that looks for salvation through 
 an honest he irt, an upright life, tolerance, kindness, and charity 
 towards our fellow man, and a loving obedience to our Heavenly 
 Father, the one, the mighty, and the eternal God; is known to 
 but few, and is condemned as the religion of poor human reason. 
 As above remarked, men of science and of enlightened 
 minds, who look into the mighty works of the eternal, are not 
 readily misled by the partial, the trashy and ephemeral relig- 
 ions of this world. And he will, by a knowledge of his 
 natural revelation, be able to detect the many defamatory and 
 degrading errors, which through mistranslations, transcrip- 
 tions, interpellations, etc., etc., have crept into his written or 
 book-revelation. When, by the exercise of that divine and 
 immortal reason, the gift and spark of Deity himself, we dis- 
 cover that the eye is made for light, the ear for sound, and 
 the lungs for the vital air, and that we are in our anatomical 
 form and in our physiological functions made for the world in 
 which we live, and that we are endowed with exquisit sensibi- 
 lities for the enjoyment of the many beauties and blessings 
 which he has spread around us, cannot believe that so loving 
 and so kind a father can delight in the arbitrary condemnation 
 and awful punishment of those his dependent and unoffending 
 creatures, through all eternity. Therefore it is, that those 
 who are blessed with a true appreciation of the divine attri- 
 butes, both from his transcendant might, majesty, and glory, 
 as shown by his rolling orbs and glowing heavens, and his 
 wise creations and beneficent bestowings of his temporal bless- 
 ings upon this little earth, have a well grounded faith and un- 
 shaken confidence in the continued love and immutable designs 
 of the great author of our being. Thus, amidst the conflicting 
 opinions of bigots and the bloody persecutions of religious par- 
 ties, have we an inward security and a peace of mind that 
 reconciles us with the dispensations of providence in this 
 world, and buoyes us on to the confines of eternity. Far diffe- 
 rent is it with those poor deluded beings who are under the 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 335 
 
 dominion and guidance of designing or ignorant and fallible 
 man. They have no correct knowledge of, or confidence in 
 God, but being worshippers of men and their isms, are cut up 
 into as many parties as there are blind and prejudiced leaders. 
 And though mutable, vague and insufficient as are many of 
 those creeds, and encumbered as they are by mystic mumme- 
 ries, known by men of enlightened minds to be the sanctuary 
 of ignorance, pass with those benighted zelots as deep learn- 
 ing and skill in the mysteries of revelation. The God of this 
 vast universe is too exalted for their demented conceptions, 
 nor could he, like their party God, condescend to minister to 
 their petty prejudices. As offensive to Deity, and degrading 
 to the name of Christianity, as are those party-creeds and 
 quarrels, they are weekly heard from our pulpits. Those 
 creeds, founded upon the party-prejudices of God, and his par- 
 tial dealings with man, is a profanation of his holy name, for 
 neither in our temporal or eternal relations is he any respector 
 of persons, nor does he delight in the death of any, but would 
 that all should be saved. We know that the minds of the 
 religious world were long long enslaved by an interested and 
 crafty priesthood, who well knew how to minister to the low 
 and selfish passions of man. Nor is the name of the great 
 Eternal more exalted by modern Divines, who, instead of in- 
 culcating an enlightened and settled regard for their creator, 
 strive to get up excitements through our slavish fears, by 
 threats of vengeance, destruction, and damnation, and not by 
 a kind father or impartial judge, but a God of jealousy, vin- 
 diction, and relentless cruelty. A God, who, like the potter, 
 shapes us for destruction, and then damns us eternally for 
 being thus shaped — see confession of faith. A God, w^ho has 
 authorized his elect and the high priests "to go out with 
 praises in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands, 
 to execute vengeance upon the heathen and punishment upon 
 the people; to bind their kings with chains and their nobles 
 with fetters of iron; to execute upon them the judgment 
 
836 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 written, this honor hath all his saints, praise ye the Lord." 
 Psalm 149. The construction put upon this passage, and 
 many others that might be named, by what the people call 
 learned Divines, has given a loose and a license to all the self- 
 ish, vile and cruel passions of man. 
 
 With those interpretations of deep learning, the admiration 
 of the vulgar and the living of thousands, did the most learned 
 Divines on earth send forth their saints with a libel in their 
 mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand, to rob, ravish, 
 and murder the humble and unoffending natives of the new 
 world. Thus, with a license from the Christian's God of re- 
 lentless and wanton cruelty, did they butcher thousands upon 
 thousands of their innocent and defenceless fellow-beings in 
 South America and Mexico. And to the horror and detesta- 
 tion of all mankind, and to the eternal shame and disgrace of 
 the Spanish name, did those elect of God, those self-styled 
 Christians cruelly mangle the bodies of those poor simple 
 children of nature, and feed them to the dogs. The relation 
 of those scenes remind me of what I recently heared from a 
 learned and zealous protestant Divine, who, in a public con- 
 troversy in the Bible support of slavery, not only quoted the 
 book in support of all his positions, but the word of God for 
 cutting our slaves up and feeding them to the dogs. The 
 support from the Bible for all such cruelties is not unusual for 
 Divines of deep learning. The doctrine is neither new nor 
 rare, that God has authorized his elect to enslave all heathens, 
 that is, such as they may see proper to call so, and that after 
 they shall have served them through this life, he will damn 
 them eternally, in part for his own glory, but more especially 
 to show forth his partiality and the elect's honor. Do not 
 suppose, reader, that this is a tirade upon assumptions, but be 
 assured that it is the record of facts, facts, too, of the most 
 serious and solemn character. This is only the relation of a 
 few points amongst the thousands and tens of thousands that 
 give a loose to men's consciences, and influence their acts 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 33t 
 
 through the various relations of life. If we were to take the 
 liberty with the word of God, that Divines do, there is no act 
 so base but that we could find Scripture to support it. If 
 Christians themselves can drag each other to the stake, there 
 to be consumed by fire, and find Scripture for it, what may not 
 others do, by authority from the same book, in which passages, 
 may be found to justify any act to which their passion or profit 
 may prompt them. The clergy themselves, leaders of the various 
 sects, have charged each other with sustaining of "hell-peop- 
 ling doctrines,'' yes, doctrines subversive both of religion and 
 of morality, and they have urged those charges both in lan- 
 guage and in spirit, such as no men of honor or tolerance should 
 condescend to. I cannot but believe, and that upon impartial 
 observation, that a large portion of secret acts and other evils 
 of society proceeds from the same misconstruction of divine 
 authority. This liberty that the clergy have taken, of con- 
 struing Scripture to answer their own ends, and the doctrine 
 that faith in their dictum will cover a multitude of sins, have 
 broken upon the morals of society. I heard a clergyman, a 
 short time since, when preaching upon the subject of faith, 
 speak most disparagingly of "a certain class of men, called hon- 
 est, high-minded, and honorable, who, in his estimation, were 
 the most dangerous examples to society." And his reason was 
 this, that those who did not belong to the church, (his church, 
 of course,) depended more upon good works than upon faith, 
 (I presumed, his faith); and as destructive to the well being 
 of society, as such sentiments are, and offensive to the ear of 
 propriety, he affirmed that there was more hope for, and more 
 promise in divine revelation, for the deist, the drunkard, liar, etc., 
 than for such man. He taught the prevailing doctrine, that 
 moral men are slow to come into the church, or to confess to 
 the creeds of men, while the outlaw may, by such confession, 
 atone for years of sin and pollution; or that he may, like the 
 thief upon the cross, be converted and saved in a moment. I 
 will here say to all such preaching, that I prefer the internal 
 
 15 
 
338 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE, 
 
 to the external marks of religion, and the fruit to the foliage 
 of the tree. Besides, I cannot see whose works we are to de- 
 pend on, if not upon our own. I know that a formal or pro- 
 fessional religion that will swallow a whole confession of faith, 
 without digesting an article in it, is easier to live up to, and 
 far more popular in this world, than a religion of piety and 
 good works. And I also know, that profession, the cloak of 
 deception, is the road to popularity, both in church and in 
 state. A devotion to the clergy, a blind submission to their 
 creeds, and^ a stickler for forms, constitutes a worldly and 
 popular Christian, while a flatterer of the powers that be, with 
 a great love for the people, makes a popular politician. But 
 I likewise know that a good man is a good man, in or out of 
 church, and that a bad man is a bad man, in or out of church. 
 It is proper that good men as well as bad men should join the 
 church, as an example to others, just as it is that sober men as 
 well as drunkards should join temperance societies; yet it is 
 known that it does not better the sober man, or improve the 
 good man. 
 
 We farther know that arrogant learning, superstition, and 
 the foul breath of popular prejudice, held the human mind in 
 captivity for ages, till from cruelty, oppression and persecution, 
 reason and common sense rebelled. And after all, what is now 
 the condition of the Protestant world ? Instead of one dicta- 
 torial and scowling master, the Pope, we have thousands ; and 
 instead of one church and one interpreter, we have scores 
 whose antagonal broils have led us into an inextricable laby- 
 rinth of perplexity. In this state of things, what is an honest 
 man and faithful Christian to do, but to think for himself and 
 worship for himself To read and obey the practical and un- 
 mistaken word of God, and doubting not but that they see as 
 far into the mill-stone, as those who pick it. The question 
 may arise what constitutes a Christian ? whether the practice 
 or profession of religion, the external or internal marks of it ? 
 
 I will here give the view of an Indian Chief upon this sub- 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 339( 
 
 ject, as related to me at Galena in 1833 by an official Indian 
 Agent of our government. A missionary clergyman made ap- 
 plication to a chief for the privilege of establishing a mission in 
 his nation. The chief asked the missionary what he expected 
 to do for his people, and whether he could make them any 
 better ? The answer was that they were to be greatly im- 
 proved, in many respects. They were to be civilized, Christ- 
 ianized, etc. If then, rejoined the chief, you can do so much for 
 my people who do not understand your language, and to whom 
 you are a stranger, you can certainly do much more amongst 
 your own people, who know both you and your language. 
 Your white Christians have introduced whiskey amongst us, 
 made my people drunk, robbed them of their skins, insulted 
 our wives and daughters, and murdered us. So go back to 
 to your own nation and preach to them, and when you can 
 make those Christians sober, honest and truthful men, I will 
 send for you to preach to my people." I have been much 
 amongst those children of nature, and know that they enter- 
 tain for the Christian name deep feelings of horror, and view 
 ns as faithless, avaricious and blood-thirsty conquerors. This 
 reproof by the chief was a just reproach upon us, as a civilized 
 and Christian nation. It speaks volumes upon the subject, 
 and again brings up the question upon which we set out : why 
 the reading and the preaching of the gospel through many 
 thousand years, has not made us a better people. It will not 
 do here to urge the hackneyed charge against our perverse and 
 poor human nature, as being unwilling to submit to our own in- 
 terest, since we have shown that to be impossible. Yes, it has 
 been shown, incontrovertibly shown, that man from his constitu- 
 tion and inherent nature, cannot do otherwise than prefer the 
 largest amount of interest or happiness, when honorable, and 
 authorized both by the laws of God and man. It is not, then, in 
 jpoor human naturt^ but in the false representation of the Gospel, 
 through jjoor /a//iWe men, whose passions and prejudices give a 
 version or transformation wholly repugnant to that divine reason, 
 
340 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 the best and only test of all things, which God has given his 
 creatures by which to know him and his kind dispensations, 
 through his unmistaken and mighty works. I will now propose a 
 reformation in the Christian world, by a change in the education 
 of the clergy. They should be prohibited from the study of dead 
 languages, and consequently from the ignorant and arrogant 
 search after the root of religion, which is not in Latin and 
 Greek, but in the soul, and the same in all languages, all na- 
 tions, in all time and throughout eternity. I am well acquaint- 
 ed with the habits of the Catholic clergy, and know them to be 
 the closest students in the world. They study dead languages 
 and memorize Scripture till they fritter their brains to a crisp, 
 and narrow their souls to a nut shell, and thus become wholly 
 disqualified for reasoning themselves, and consequently for ren- 
 dering the Scriptures acceptable to reason. They should, if 
 possible, travel, before their local and petty prejudices are 
 formed. By mixing with various nations and seeing their 
 various manners, habits and prejudices, their minds will become 
 liberalized and enlarged, till they will be ashamed of their own. 
 They will, moreover, find that this world is larger than they 
 had supposed, and that it does not end where the visible sky 
 goes down. Next they should study astronomy, by which they 
 will find, that as large as this world is, it is not the only work 
 of God, and that they are not the only and favored objects of 
 creation. They will see worlds beyond worlds, innumerable 
 and incomprehensible, and with thoughts far beyond this 
 sphere of action, will cry out, as I have been forced to do : 
 
 Eternal Father, whose power divine 
 
 Ten thousand worlds obey, 
 While fiery comets trackless blaze. 
 
 And vary not their way ; 
 Through endless space and ceaseless time 
 
 Those ponderous orbs are rolled. 
 By thy mighty arm upheld. 
 
 And by thy power controlled. 
 Still onward yet, and onward still. 
 
 Tin lightning^s speed shall tire. 
 Far distant worlds, dim twinkling stars, 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 341 
 
 Evince the end no nigher. 
 Vast are thy works, Jehovah great, 
 
 Thou one eternal cause, 
 Who spoke creation into being, 
 
 And stamped it with thy laws. 
 Let thoughts sublime of thee, Lord, 
 
 My immortal soul inflame, 
 To look to thee for every good, 
 
 And praise thy holy name. 
 
 Though not a poet; when in the contemplation of the vast- 
 ness and sublimity of creation, our hearts overflow with love 
 and gratitude to the author of our being ; we are authorized to 
 express our thoughts in any manner that the occasion may 
 suggest. If our little preachers, who may have had capacity, 
 before their book stultification, were put to the study of the 
 sciences, the condition of the churches as well as the state of 
 society would be greatly improved. Their minds would become 
 enlarged and their souls liberalized to a more exalted view of 
 God and of his benign attributes. They would no longer preach 
 a God that no one of clear head and correct heart Qan accept 
 of. 'Not would they denounce the science and the practice of mo- 
 rals, as a cold stoical philosophy, and as more dangerous to the 
 progress of religion than impiety and infidelity. No, no, this 
 could not be, and I pray to thee, o God, our heavenly father, 
 for thy honor, for the good of the church, and for the safety 
 and well being of society, that those slanders against thy holy 
 name and against the honest portion of thy children, may no 
 longer be found in the mouthes of those, thy professed ministers. 
 As before stated, Divines have ever been the heaviest clogs to 
 the progress of science, and what, if possible, is more reproach- 
 ful and humiliating to the name of Christianity, they have re- 
 sisted the advancement of morality ! Go back, reader, to the 
 days of the immortal Socrates, and learn how he was put to 
 death, because he would not degrade the great God of nature, 
 by submitting to the tricks and mummeries of a corrupt and 
 crafty heathen priesthood. And to make our narrative short, 
 we will come down to the moral writers of more modern times. 
 
342 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRATE. 
 
 ** No sooner did that admirable treatise of Grotius of the right of 
 war and peace, appear in the world, but the ecclesiastics, in- 
 stead of returning thanks to the author for it, everywhere de- 
 clared against hira, and his book was not only put into the ex- 
 purgatory index of the Roman Catholic inquisition, but many, 
 even Protestant Divines, labored to cry it down. And thus it 
 was, too, with Mr. Puffendorff's book of the Law of Nature and 
 of Nations. The Jesuits of "Vienna caused it to be prohibited, 
 and many Protestant Divines, both of Sweden and Germany, 
 did their best to make this excellent work share everywhere 
 else the same fate." Locke, who has done more for the science 
 of mind than all the other writers on earth put together, and 
 who lived and died a pious, upright man, was vilified and be- 
 set on all sides by a yelping pack of little Protestant clergy, 
 whose selfish and contracted views have ever thought it best to 
 keep the world in ignorance. Please look into the case of 
 Bishop Batler, author of the Analogy of Natural and Revealed 
 Rehgion, whose labors have done more for the honor of God, 
 the cause of religion, the firmness of faith and happiness of 
 man, by far than any other writer. Yet to the persecuted 
 and afflicted name of Christianity was this great and good 
 man snarled at while living, and barked at, when dead. Nor did 
 Dr. Paley, the devoted Divine and able philosopher, fare much 
 better. All his labors of a long life of ardent and faithful re- 
 search after the sound principles of truth in religion and moral- 
 ity would have been lost to the world, if left to the clergy. 
 His natural religion and moral philosophy they hold to be 
 dangerous, in other words, too rational for their selfish views 
 and salaried interests. 
 
 I find that a recent author, whose work I see is taking the 
 place of Paley's, as a text-book in our schools, gives as an ex- 
 cuse, that the work of Dr. Paley " abound in erroneous, defect- 
 ive and pernicious principles." I have had occasion to look into 
 this work, and find it as inferior to Paley as is the parasite to 
 the noble tree upon which it subsists. His whole knowledge, 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SRRMON. 343 
 
 and ground work, as far as it has any merit, is from the im- 
 mortal and invuhierable bulworks of the divine Paley. In 
 order, however, to differ from his benefactor, his inner fabric is 
 a labyrinth of trash and detailed nonsense, made up of techni- 
 calities, divisions and subdivisions, as learned as the vocabulary 
 or nomenclature of Alchemy; and no pupil, after his bewilder- 
 ment of brain, cao come out of such school with three consist- 
 ent ideas of science. The bigoted merit which he so exulting 
 claims, is the desertion of nature, and his substitution of the 
 Bible as his guide, which was given to instruct us in our duty 
 to God, and not as a system either of mental or of moral phi- 
 losophy. I would not have spent three whole sentences upon 
 so little a thing, but to hold it up to show which way the wind 
 blows; for as sad to science and startUng to morality and relig- 
 ion as may be the fact, the clergy will always enforce such 
 books upon our schools, instead of the great and expanded 
 principles of true and simple science ! This strange mixture of 
 error and absurdity, of truth and hypothesis, with a perplexed 
 and bewildering arrangement, will always keep the subject of 
 mind and of mOrals too deep and too dark for the penetration 
 of poor human reason. Hence it is, that as our Divines claim 
 the exclusive privilege of interpreting mysteries, they claim this 
 field for clerical investigation, and entertain a persecuting 
 jealousy towards all who may attempt to bring those subjects 
 to light and make them intelligible to the people. Let us here 
 read what Dugald Stewart, in his introduction to his book upon 
 the human mind, says upon this interesting subject. 
 
 In speaking of the influence that parent, priest, and primer 
 has, in impressing errors upon the youthful mind, he remarks, 
 that " such and so permanent, is the effect of first impressions, 
 on the character, that although a philosopher may succeed, by 
 perseverence, in freeing his reason from the prejudices with which 
 he was entangled, they will still retain some hold of his imagin- 
 ation and his affections; and, therefore, however enlightened 
 his understanding may be in his hours of speculation, his philo- 
 
344 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 sophical opinions will frequently lose their influence over his 
 mind, in those very situations in which their practical assistance 
 is most required: when his temper is soured by misfortune, or 
 when he engages in the pursuits of life, and exposes himself to 
 the contagion of popular errors. His opinions are supported 
 merely by speculative arguments; and instead of being connect- 
 ed with any of the active principles of his nature, are contracted 
 and thwarted by some of the most powerful of them. How 
 different would the case be, if education were conducted from 
 the beginning with attention and judgment ? Were the same 
 pains taken, to impress truth on the mind in early infancy, that 
 is often taken to inculcate error, the great principles of our con- 
 duct would not only be juster than they are; but in consequence of 
 the aid which they would receive from the imagination and the 
 heart, trained to conspire with them in the same direction, they 
 would render us happier in ourselves, and would influence our 
 practice more powerfully and more habitually. There is surely 
 nothing in error, which is more congenial to the mind than 
 truth. On the contrary, when exhibited separately, and alone, 
 to the understanding, it shakes our reason and provokes our 
 ridicule ; and it is only by an alliance with truths, which we find 
 it difiicult to renounce, that it can obtain our assent, or com- 
 mand our reverence. What advantages, then, might be derived 
 from a proper attention to early impressions and associations, in 
 giving support to those principles which are connected with hu- 
 man happiness. The long reign of error in the world, and the 
 influence it maintains even in an age of liberal enquiry, far from 
 being favorable to the supposition, that human reason is destined 
 to be for ever the sport of prejudice and absurdity, demonstrate 
 the tendency which there is to permanence in established opinions 
 and in established institutions, and promises an eternal stability 
 to true philosophy when it shall once have acquired the ascend- 
 ant, and when proper means shall be employed to support it, by 
 a more perfect system of education. 
 
 Let us suppose, for a moment, that this happy era were ar- 
 
 I 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 345 
 
 rived, and that all the prepossessions of childhood and youth 
 were directed to support the pure and sublime truths of an en- 
 lightened morality. With what ardor, and with what transport 
 would the understanding, when arrived at maturity, proceed in 
 the search of truth, when, instead of being obliged to struggle 
 at every step, with early prejudices, its office was merely to 
 add the force of philosophical coviction to impressions, which 
 are equally delightful to the imagination and dear to the heart." 
 
 Again : " If the first conceptions, for example, which an 
 infant formed of the Deity, and its first moral perceptions, were 
 associated with the early impressions produced on the heart by 
 the beauties of nature, or the charms of poetical description, 
 those serious thoughts which are resorted to, by most men, 
 merely as a source of consolation in adversity, and which, on 
 that very account, are frequently tinctured with some degree of 
 gloom, would recur spontaneously to the mind in its best and 
 happiest hours; and would insensibly blend themselves with all 
 its purest and most refined enjoyments. Although in all moral 
 and religious systems there is a great mixture of important truth, 
 and although it is in consequence of this alliance, that errors 
 and absurdities are enabled to preserve their hold of the belief, 
 yet it is commonly found, that in proportion as an established 
 creed is complicated in its dogmas and in its ceremonies, and 
 in proportion to the number of accessory ideas which it has 
 grafted upon the truth, the more difficult is it, for those who 
 have adopted it in childhood, to emancipate themselves completely 
 from its influence, and in those cases in which they at last suc- 
 ceed, the greater is their danger of abandoning, along with their 
 errors, all the truths which they had been taught to connect 
 with them." 
 
 Those few lines, from the well known Dugald Stewart, speaks 
 volumes of philosophy, in regard to the moral training and gov- 
 ernment of man. If, as he says, children in early life, were 
 given a taste for nature, and for the sublime, it would lead them 
 to an intunacy with the author of their being, and fill their souls 
 
 15* 
 
346 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 with gratitude and love for so kind and so exalted a father. A 
 knowledge of the might and majesty, the variety and benificence 
 of the great Eternal, as acquired by the study of his works, is 
 not to be shaken by all the pretended learning and conventional 
 dogmas of poor ignorant and erring man. God's infallible, im- 
 mutable, and eternal revelation as given in his great hook of 
 nature, is not liable to mistranslations, or interpretations of 
 designing or ignorant man ; consequently every intelligent man's 
 opinion of God's moral government, is just as immutable as the 
 laws by which they know him. It is far different with those 
 who know God only through fafer books, in the local and equivo- 
 cal languages of men. Hence it is, that I again and again 
 affirm, that there is but one infallible test of religion, and that 
 is the book of nature, or God ; for what is nature but God ? 
 All the little petty Gospel-gossip of neighborhoods and Churches, 
 together with the more extended and fiery indignation of parties 
 that has led to cruel persecutions and merciless butcheries, have 
 proceeded from a want of the true character of God, which 
 can never be had from clerical leaders, all of whom differ from 
 each other in regard to the will of God. There is no man on 
 earth, not even the Pope himself, who can reconcile or correct 
 those conflicting and distracting opinions; and, therefore, it is, 
 that God has revealed himself in so unmistaken a manner, as a 
 corrective to all those degrading wranglings. If those partisan 
 leaders, of deep dogmatic and contradictory lear7dng, who the 
 people worship and look to for all their knowledge of God, 
 would leave his book revelation, with its divine and practical 
 teachings to the people, there would be no need of a corrective 
 standard, by which to know the will of our Heavenly Father. 
 
 We hope that we have sufficiently shown why it is, that the 
 clergy cry aloud that there is little or no religion in the land, 
 and that the fault is in their representation of the subject in a 
 manner not acceptable to rational minds, for otherwise, as 
 proven by this essay, it could not, from our nature, be rejected. 
 By way of illustration, 1 will here give one of the characters 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 34 1 
 
 of our Christian God, as preached in a sermon which I but 
 recently heard from an able and a good man. He set out with 
 the assumption of everlasting punishment, and in order, as he 
 said, to prove its reasonableness, he took the position, that from 
 the inherent and unalterable nature of sin, as entailed upon us 
 by Adam, that time could not change it, and that no power, in 
 heaven, earth or hell, could conquer it. That God, from his 
 purity, could neither prevent nor forgive it, and that no sacri- 
 fice, even to the death of the whole human family, could atone 
 for it, otherwise Christ would never have died upon the cross. 
 That God had, through the lapse of ages, after millions upon 
 millions had passed to hell, determined in the wisdom of his 
 own counsel to sacrifice his son, as the only means under the 
 heavens by which a sinner could ever be saved. That so great 
 was this sacrifice, that God's hatred had, if possible, grown 
 more inveterate and lasting against sin. Another position was, 
 that sin required punishment from God, and that as punishment 
 unavoidably begets hatred against the object that inflicts the 
 punishment, we must, in the nature of things, forever hate God, 
 because of the load of sin and its consequent punishment, en- 
 tailed upon us through Adam. For example, said he, you can 
 never whip any one, who has done you an injury, into a love 
 for you, and the more you punish them, the more will they hate 
 you. Just so it is with the sinner, and as we are all sinful by 
 nature, we cannot, from our nature, avoid hating God, and as 
 the hatred to God is an undying sin, God must as unavoidably 
 punish us through all eternity. This to some, said he, may 
 seem hard, but as there is a God in heaven, it is true, and the 
 sinner, who will not believe it, is storing up wrath against 
 wrath. Moreover, said he, some persons, and amongst them 
 the TJniversalists, think it hard that for a very small crime or 
 shade of difference only, one shall be called to heaven, and the 
 other condemned to eternal damnation ; but that this he had 
 shown to be reasonable, yea, a necessary result from the im- 
 mutable nature of sin. Now, he remarked, it is plain to every 
 
348 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 common capacity, that if one be condemned to hell at all, 
 though for the smallest possible sin, that as God lays the stripes 
 upon him, his hatred against the iuflictor of his punishment 
 must rise, so it will be seen that through all eternity will that 
 hatred and consequent punishment grow greater and greater. 
 Then it is self-evident, and must be acknowledged by all, that 
 a soul, once doomed to hell, can never escape. Should a mem- 
 ber of this Church, or a person in the house, want the case 
 made plainer, I will give them an illustration. If any one 
 wantonly punishes a brute, he has the indignation of all feeling 
 persons; the same mistreatment of a human increases that 
 indignation, in proportion to the elevation of the man above 
 the brute. Now, as God is greatly above man, and unlimited 
 in his nature, an offence against him must be unlimited, and as 
 God is eternal, it follows that the indignation and punishment 
 must be not only unlimited, but eternal. He admitted that his 
 discourse was somewhat abstract and metaphysical, but added, 
 that should there be a person in the house who did not under- 
 stand the subject, that they had his veracity for it, that every 
 word was true. In conclusion, he applied his doctrines with 
 the vengeance of damnation and destruction to his poor tremb- 
 ling and vacant audience. Trembling under the sin that so 
 awful a God had incorporated in their nature, and for which 
 they were to be eternally damned, and vacant in thought, 
 being wholly lost in the amazing depth of his divine learning. 
 He, with great solemnity, called their attention to this vile and 
 detestable world in which we live, affirming that God, as a 
 revenge upon Adam's race, had damned it from pole to pole; 
 that he had cursed it with briar and bramble, with clouds and 
 storms, and with pestilence and famine, and that they had been 
 thrust into this world as a preparatory punishment to the ever- 
 lasting torments of hell. Thus, said he, has God, in his in- 
 finite wisdom and goodness, ordained things from all eternity, 
 and in his wrath will he execute them. And fartherj that who 
 by their poor human reason could suspend the power of God's 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 349 
 
 holy will, who claims the right that the potter has over the 
 clay, to frame us for destruction, as he in his infinite wisdom 
 and mercy may deem proper. 
 
 I should not have dwelt so long upon this sermon, nor been 
 so particular in relating it as it was delivered, but it is a volume 
 upon the subject on hand, and a fair specimen of the preaching 
 in our day. In this case, as usual, there is a mixture of truth 
 and falsehood, as Stewart says, and of eulogy and slander, 
 which, I presume, but few of the audience either detected or 
 understood. This man, if not ruined in early life by creeds, 
 could never have libelled God as he did, nor sacrified him as he 
 did to the abstract and metaphysical doctrines of a party. I 
 would ask this gentleman, who by nature was a good man, and 
 is yet as good as his religion will let him be, for what purpose 
 God created man, and whether to be happy or miserable ? 
 And farther, whether God could, consistently with his own 
 attributes, act arbitrarily or wantonly with his creatures ? I 
 would say, that as God is the author and parent of the human 
 race, and has implanted in us a desire for happiness, that it 
 was not to taunt, revile or sport with us by disappointments, 
 but to grant us all rational desires, that we may thereby be- 
 come happy in common with himself. If this, then, be a just 
 position, and no one who grants the veracity and goodness or 
 common justice of God, can deny it; he must have given to 
 man some rule or standard of moral conduct, by which he is to 
 secure and maintain that happiness. Now, God having given 
 to man a law or rule of conduct, must also have given him a 
 capacity, power or faculty to understand that law, and this 
 faculty we call reason, which enables us to distinguish truth 
 from falsehood, and right from wrong. Hence, by acting up 
 to the dictates of our nature and of right reason, we are led to 
 a knowledge of our great creator, the obligation we bear to 
 him and to our fellow-man, and the immutable and eternal 
 relation and reason of all things, as written in bold rehef, and 
 stereotyped in his book of nature. If then, by our rational 
 
350 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE, 
 
 nature, we can know our obligation to God, (which power he 
 could not justly withhold,) and see that religion is nothing but 
 a reasonable service, why submit to the dictates, petty passions 
 and arbitrary rules of man ? This divine gift of reason by the 
 eternal father to his children, with the light he has thrown 
 upon his book of nature, the same in all ages, languages and 
 nations, leaves no excuse for a dependence upon puny, erring 
 man for translations, creeds or dictations. It now follows, 
 upon the premises, that God cannot tolerate the devotee who 
 knows him alone through ignorance and a blind faith in the 
 fluctuating and conflicting opinions of others. The Hindoo may 
 crush himself under the wheels of Juggernaut, the Mussulman 
 may make his pilgrimage to Mecca, the Catholic may look to 
 his priest, and the Protestant to his preacher for salvation, but 
 the man of enlightened mind, freed from those clogs of super- 
 stition, will worship his creator in a more rational and accept- 
 able manner. It is through our senses, so exquisitely formed 
 and so admirably adapted to the world in which we live, and 
 by the use of that divine reason that our kind father has be- 
 stowed upon us, that we are able to detect the slander upon 
 this, his people's world, which he has given them in good faith. 
 If the preacher, as above named, instead of heaping his un- 
 authorized curses upon this world, (which he, by the by, would 
 be as loth to leave as any,) had spoken of it in truth, as it is, 
 it would have been more grateful and pleasing to its maker and 
 donor, and by far more acceptable to the thinking portion of 
 his audience. His self-stultification did not enable him to see 
 that the sun ever shone through that sable cloud which he 
 spread over this earth. His deep and biblical learning did not 
 tell him that those vicissitudes of which he so disparagingly 
 spoke, break the monotony and ennui of life, and give renewed 
 energy and buoyancy to the grateful soul. Our heavens are 
 replete with beauty, sublimity and shining glories, that by day 
 and by night show forth the handiwork of their great creator. 
 The forked lightnings that thwart the welkin and glare the 
 
STRICTUEES UPON A SERMON. 351 
 
 startling eye, and the bellowing thunders that rent the vault 
 of heaven and shake the solid earth, are God's appointed 
 guards to our health and plenty. It purifies the atmosphere, 
 and sends down refreshing showers upon the tender verdure, 
 and upon the parched and thirsty earth. The momentary gloom 
 of winter, with its chilling frosts, its howling winds, and whirl- 
 ing snow-storms, but prepares the earth for a more abundant 
 crop, and affords a striking illustration to man of how the 
 reverses and storms of this life, may, by contrast, the better 
 prepare us for the enjoyment of those eternal abodes of perennial 
 bliss, to which we are bound. Soon, and the joyous outburst 
 of spring, with its leafy forests, verdant plains, and balmy air 
 will break upon our raptured vision, and transport the soul to 
 the celestial regions, to hold converse with our heavenly father, 
 the author of all. Now comes the cloudless sun, the mellow 
 moon, and through the deep blue vault of heaven, we gaze 
 upon those glittering worlds, clustering beyond worlds, through 
 immeasurable space, till exalted .and carried through all the 
 transports of thought, we are lost in the regions of immensity 
 and eternity. Our summers have their refreshing breezes, purl- 
 ing brooks and shady groves, where the air is fragrant with 
 flowers and vocal with the voice of the forest songsters. Then 
 we have our gorgeous autumn, of solemn thought and golden 
 serenity. The deep azure sky, the sun-guilt clouds, and the 
 leveried forest with its hectic flush and parting glories, are all 
 pleasing to our senses and profitable to our untrammelled 
 thoughts. Those, however, of grovelling thoughts, and who, 
 like the mole, have from early life, delved in nether darkness, 
 can neither see those beauties of nature, nor grant a God, who 
 has either loved or done anything for us. Such men preach a 
 withering curse and unceasing hatred against this, God's goodly 
 world, and all that dwelleth therein. 
 
 Now, if the principle be correct, and no one can deny it, 
 that God's claim upon us for gratitude and devotion be founded 
 upon the good he has done us, would not such preaching, as 
 
352 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 before recited, absolve us from all obligation to so arbitrary a 
 tyrant who reaps where he has not sown, and demands that for 
 which he has no right ? I know that it is acknowledged doc- 
 trine and maxim of some sects, that God can and will do, like 
 the potter, as he may please. Now take particular notice, 
 reader, that this point I grant, but do at the same time 
 most solemnly affirm, in defence of God's great and good name, 
 that he will not, nor cannot please thus to act. I repeat it 
 in shorter terms. It might seem that God can do as he may 
 please ; yet it is utterly impossible from his nature, and with- 
 out the loss of his best attribute, for him to please to do wrong. 
 Then I again call the attention of the reader to this point, for 
 upon it rests the whole obligation of God to man, and man to 
 God. A father who brings his children into this world, is held 
 under obligation to nurture them, and to treat them kindly. 
 Much greater, then, is the obligation and responsibility of our 
 heavenly father, who has brought us into this world, over 
 which he has more control, and consequently can do us more 
 good than can our earthly father. I ask those defamers of 
 God, upon what does all obligation rest, if not upon mutual 
 favor and reciprocal gratitude? God claims no exemption 
 from this rule, and to give him any other, would be to charge 
 him with arbitrary and tyrannical power. The father has power 
 to put his children to death or cruelly mistreat them, but has 
 no right thus to do, No more does God claim a right because 
 of his power to neglect or cruelly mistreat us helpless children 
 of his own creation. God would more quickly, than an honor- 
 able man, scorn the idea of demanding something for nothing, 
 or more than he granted. Now, according to the usual preach- 
 ing, what can God expect from us ? He has, they say, placed 
 us in this world without our knowledge or consent, and that he 
 has cursed us and cursed the earth for our sake, and will more- 
 over punish us with the torments of hell. Then, I ask with 
 all the sincerity of truth, whether this would not be doing us 
 more harm than he has done us good, and if so, it is a libel 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 353 
 
 upon the great and good name of our beneficent father. The 
 eternal punishment of all mankind in hell, for the transgression 
 of the one man Adam, would be no adjustment of the offence. 
 Adam himself received no disapprobation farther than to be 
 turned from the garden, after which he was suffered to live 
 unmolested. Having shown that God has done much for us^ 
 and that his continued kindness is manifest in the daily bless- 
 ings we enjoy, it follows, from the light of nature and foor 
 human reason, that to serve him with all the powers he has 
 given us, is nothing more than a reasonable service. Were 
 our clergy thus to represent God as our kind friend, which he 
 is, instead of an arbitrary and unfeeling tyrant, we should 
 worship him in the true spirit of love, and not in slavish fear. 
 Would to God that those gentlemen of deep learning would 
 study his true character, and represent him to the world in a 
 more acceptable manner, when they would have less reason to 
 complain of sceptical hearers and cold members. While at 
 this point, I repeat it, that the right which God holds in his 
 creatures, is founded in the benefits he has conferred on them, 
 and the obligation they are under to him on that account. 
 That God has been self-sufficient and infinitely happy from all 
 eternity, and that he did not, therefore, create man for any 
 selfish purpose, but for man's own good ; that as the love of God 
 for his creatures far exceeds that of a mortal parent for his 
 children, it follows that in his justice and mercy, that he will 
 proportion the chastisement to the transgression. That all 
 punishment for punishments sake is mere cruelty and malice, 
 which does not belong to the beneficent nature of God, who 
 for slight and temporary offences will not wantonly torment us 
 forever and forever I There is the grossest and most absurd 
 doctrine taught, such as was maintained in the foregoing ser- 
 mon, that we poor creatures can reach the great eternal, and 
 disturb and destroy his equanimity and immutability. Hence 
 the benighted and ludicrous simile, that as our punishment 
 of the brute requires the punishment of ourselves, and just so 
 
354 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 far as God is greater than the brute, will be our punishment 
 for injuries inflicted upon him, and that as God is eternal, 
 oar punishment is bound to be eternal. Were I disposed to 
 reason, as did this gentleman, from analogy, I would say that 
 if God be subject to all the passions and afflictions of man, as 
 they make him, and that he is sorely wounded by the smallest 
 sin of man, it is certain that he could not have survived the 
 accumulated and protracted suffering through six thousand 
 years. I would, however,, say from analogy, that as man is no 
 rival of, or competitor with God, that God can have no jealousy, 
 envy or malice towards him, and that as God is placed so far 
 above the reach of man as not to be afflicted like the brute or 
 his fellow-man, by any effort of his, that no such retaliation or 
 reciprocal punishment can be expected. That is : as we have 
 no power to punish God, we cannot, or should not, be punished 
 by him. Again, as we are mortal or temporary beings, and all 
 that we can do must be equally so, it follows, as a matter of 
 necessity, that our punishment must be temporary or mortal ; 
 that is : that the effect will not exceed the cause. Thus we 
 see the application of his reasoning. By a mere legitimate 
 parity of reason, I could prove to this gentleman that he is a 
 goose. A goose is an animal, yes ; he is an animal, yes — there- 
 fore he is a goose. This is certainly a stronger proof than 
 that, because God is unlimited, our punishment must be un- 
 limited, and that as God is eternal, it necessarily follows, that 
 our torments will be eternal. 
 
 Again, that because men lash each other and hate each 
 other, that God is bound to lash us, and we to hate him. And 
 farther, that as man's hatred against tlieir fellow-man, increase 
 with the punishment and protracted pain inflicted by them, that 
 we must, from our nature, in like manner, hate God. So that, 
 once in hell, for ever in hell ! And worse than this, nature, 
 which God has given us, to unavoidably lead us to hell, he 
 has implanted in us an unconquerable spirit, which from its 
 inherent nature is forced to hate its Maker more and more; so 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON". 355 
 
 that that Maker, who designed all things from eternity, and 
 made them for that special purpose, will increase the punish- 
 ment upon those fated souls, throughout all eternity. Thus, by 
 comparing the mighty and everlasting Father with the tempo- 
 rary doings of his earthbound and powerless creatures, and by 
 preaching an abstract and apparent similitude, have they made 
 the father a bloody tyrant, and sent all his children to hell for 
 ever and for ever! Just as reasonable an argument would 
 have been, to affirm that a whale is a large fish, and therefore 
 man is to be punished for ever. Here is an undeniable fact, 
 and a falsehood grafted upon it; just as in the assumption, that 
 God is eternal, which no one denies, yet all deny that we are 
 therefore to be eternally damned. In this mode of exposing the 
 argument, I mean no offence whatever, but to show to the 
 reader the fallacy of such reasoning in general, and how it is 
 that Divines may compare God to the meanest of men, with 
 the full approbation of a good-meaning audience. It is done 
 by connecting things that have no connection — comparing things 
 that have no resemblance — by making distinctions without a 
 difference — and by grafting gross errors upon undeniable and 
 reverenced facts! Their introduction of falsehood to their 
 audience in connection with divine truths, is like the introduction 
 of a doubtful character in company with a reverend friend, where 
 we entertain one on account of the other. And thus it is, that 
 a weak-minded and credulous audience, will swallow the most 
 slanderous and ruinous doctrines, conjoined with things that 
 their souls desire; just as children swallow poisons sweetened 
 with sugar. I should not have dwelt so long upon this sermon, 
 but to exhibit it as a fair specimen of preaching in our day, 
 and to show how a man of superior mind and pure heart can 
 become so stupified by abstract and metaphysical doctrines as 
 to preach nonsense — yes, and highly mischievous nonsense. 
 
 Is it any wonder that such preaching should make sceptics, 
 both in and out of church ? For, be assured reader, that though 
 the force of circumstances may induce men to submit to the 
 
356 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 dictum of creeds, that their more kindly feelings towards their 
 Heavenly Father, and their better judgments throw it all in 
 doubt. My God, my God, is there no truth in thy holy book, 
 that can be understood by thy children, and that will unite ihem 
 in one brotherhood, to acknowledge and adore thee, as their com- 
 mon father and kind friend ? And 0, Almighty Father, we, thy 
 humble children in search of truth, would that thy Ministers, 
 claiming authority from thee, should better understand thy 
 character, and preach thee as thou art, an object of love and 
 adoration, and not of fear and hatred. And 0, my Father, my 
 Father, my kind and constant friend, can it be, can it be, that 
 thou in thy might and beneficence, hast said to the little lambs, to 
 the birds of the forest, and to the beasts of the field, sport in my 
 sunshine, and enjoy this my world, created for thee — and then pro- 
 claim to man, made after thine own image, that their innocent guilt- 
 less babes shall be torn from their mother's breast and cast into the 
 burning torments of hell, and that thou shalt drag out a life of 
 mourning sadness and gloom, and then to be doomed to the ever- 
 lasting flames, prepared for thee from all eternity! thou, great 
 fountain of love and father of all, I cannot dwell longer upon 
 this horrible and revolting theme, which would shock the sense 
 of justice in devils themselves, and excite that sympathy in the 
 brute, which thou hast given them for the preservation of their 
 young. Surely then, it must be, kind Father, as thou hast pro- 
 claimed it to the world, that more tolerable will it be, in the 
 day of judgment, with the infidel who denies thee, than he who 
 in thy blessed name, vilifies and traduces thy character and 
 drives thy children from thee. There is but little danger, as 
 before observed, of one who has become familiar with God 
 through his book of nature, being alienated by paper books, and 
 by the schisms and isms of man. Were a thousand men to come 
 to me in succession, in the name of God, and in the character 
 of ministers, prophets, soothsayers, or augurers, and say to me 
 that God had given his children a law without capacity to un- 
 derstand it, and that he winked at our bewildered efforts to 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 351 
 
 know his will, I would spurn them as black defamers of the 
 great Eternal, who loves his children, and would that all should 
 know him, from the greatest to the least. A God who would 
 give to his subjects a law without the capacity to understand it, 
 and make hell the penalty of not understanding it, would be 
 worse than the heathen Gods spoken of by Rousseau, and quoted 
 by Dr. Brown, Lecture 75. He says : — 
 
 " Cast your e^es over all the nations of the world, and all 
 the histories of nations. Amid so many inhuman and absurd 
 superstitions, amid that prodigious diversity of manners and 
 characters, you will find everywhere the same principles and dis- 
 tinctions of moral, good and evil. The paganism of the ancient 
 world produced, indeed, abominable gods, who on earth would 
 have been shunned or punished as monsters ; and who offered, 
 as a picture of supreme happiness, only crimes to commit, or 
 passions to satiate. But vice, armed with this sacred authority, 
 descended in vain from the eternal abode. She found in the 
 heart of man a moral instinct to repel her. The continence of 
 Xenocrates was admired by those who celebrated the debauch- 
 eries of Jupiter. The chaste Lucretia adored unchaste Yenus. 
 The most intrepid Romans sacrificed to fear. He invoked the 
 God who dethroned his father, and died without a murmur by 
 the hand of his own. The most contemptible divinities were 
 served by the greatest of men. The holy voice of nature, how- 
 ever, stronger than that of the gods, made itself heard, and re- 
 spected, and obeyed on earth, and seemed to banish to the con- 
 fines of heaven, guilt and the guilty." 
 
 The Gods that are preached to us in modern times, are 
 surely as dreadful and repulsive as those exhibited in the heathen 
 mythology; and that same holy voice of nature (God) rises ui 
 the human heart against them. It is by the preaching of those 
 bloody, terrific, fiery, and wrathful Gods, that a terror and 
 sudden fright seizes upon the masses, and a stampede is got up, 
 and many are driven into the church to go through the outward 
 formalities of membership. This panic, called a revival, is iden- 
 
358 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 tically the same revival that takes place on a burning boat, 
 where all will join a church, or go through any formality to 
 escape the flames. Nor would they do this, for any love or 
 obligation to the boat, but to escape its burnings. And just so 
 with those who are driven into the church, by preaching the 
 wrath and fiery indignation of a jealous and vindictive God, for 
 whom they can neither have love or respect, aside from the 
 terror and slavish fear which his name excites. A convert, 
 obtained in this way, is in no manner whatever improved; if a 
 good man before, he is now no better, and if a bad man before, 
 his heart is still unchanged. 
 
 Here is, where the preacher, who made our torments eternal, 
 because God cannot lash us into a love for him, might have 
 applied this principle with more propriety, by informing the 
 people, that they can never be brought to a sincere love for 
 God, by threatening them with that punishment, which he af- 
 firmed, as before named, will make the sinner hate him more 
 and more, through endless time. For better would it be, both 
 for the church and for society, were members brought in by a 
 deliberate and rational examination of the subject; and by a 
 full and firm conviction of the truth and justice of all God's 
 demands upon us. It should be shown that God is loving, 
 kind and just, that he is our universal and impartial father, 
 whose watchful kindness and daily blessings have placed us 
 under the most loving and grateful obligations to him. And 
 thus we would not only have a kindly feeling for our benificent 
 creator, but be forced to adore and serve him, not through 
 fear, but love. lie has framed us as unerringly as the magnetic 
 needle, in attraction and repulsion to be drawn by the cords 
 of love, and to be repulsed by objects and acts of hatred. 
 Having shown in the early part of this essay, that it is im- 
 possible to hate an object that our heart sincerely believes to 
 be worthy of love, it follows, as an axiom, that those who have 
 a correct knowledge of our heavenly father, does not nor can- 
 not, in the nature of things, hate hkn. It is just as natural 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 359 
 
 for ns to love God as to love ourselves, or to love pleasure in- 
 stead of pain, and gain rather than loss. It is usual to bring 
 up, as an argument against this unerring and immutable law 
 of our nature, that we often do things that bring pain and loss 
 upon us, instead of pleasure and gain. This is all true, yet it 
 is no exception to the law. A stone, when cast into the atmo- 
 sphere, may meet with some obstruction and not return, which, 
 by superficial observers, might seem to render doubtful the 
 universal law of gravitation, yet it stands as immutable as God 
 himself. We do things that bring pain upon us, and we make 
 contracts, by which we lose, and are even ruined; but if we 
 could foresee those results we would not thus act. The mur- 
 derer knows that hanging is the result, and the rogue is not 
 ignorant of the penalties of the law, and yet they run the risk. 
 And why other than that they expect either to avoid the proof 
 of the act, or the execution of the law. None of those acts 
 would be willingly done, with the certain knowledge of detec- 
 tion and of immediate death. It is an every day's remark, upon 
 a misfortune or blind calculation, if the thing was to do over 
 again, how differently I would act, showing that when ever 
 we desert our own interests and happiness, that it is from want 
 of knowledge. Hence, if we hate God, which certainly is not 
 our interest, it is through ignorance, an ignorance produced by 
 a false representation of our creator by his ministers, I never 
 yet heard one of those ranting revivalists, who raves and stamps 
 like a master at a crouching dog, or a boatswain in a storm, 
 and who rudely and irreverently beats and maltreats God's 
 holy book, by thumps of his fist, but what represents the 
 author as an object of terror and hatred. Yes, as a being with- 
 out reason or justice; one who from his wrath and in his 
 might will do as seemeth him best, and that jpoor hum.an reason 
 cannot call the justice in question or stay his acts. I wish, my 
 dear reader, that you, who, like myself, are hastening to the 
 bar of judgment, would here pause and seriously reflect, before 
 you face that God, who has been so grossly slandered. And if 
 
360 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 a routine and man-worshipping Christian, turn, o turn with 
 loathings from such degrading representations of our common 
 father, and read his great pictorial book of nature, in which 
 you will find a beauty and sublimity that lifts its author far 
 above the vulgar efforts of man. This book is not subject to 
 false translations or misinterpretations, but is written in lan- 
 guage understood by all nations, and filled with illustrations 
 and demonstrations of its mighty and merciful author The 
 same set of defamers, not satisfied with the defilement of God's 
 book revelation, have strove to depreciate his natural revela- 
 tion, by deforming every charm of this, his goodly earth, and 
 making of it a preparatory hell. And strange to tell, that not 
 one of those divine denouncers have ever been willing to leave 
 this hell, so unworthy of such saints as they profess to be. 
 Here is a point, dear reader, that shows the evil of an extreme 
 and false position in religion, which will always expose its ad- 
 vocates to gross inconsistency in the preaching and the practice 
 of it. The constant abuse of this world, which God has as- 
 signed us as our residence, and the accusations against him, as 
 a cruel and unfeeling landlord, who exacts from us more than 
 he has given us ability to pay, is well calculated to produce 
 enmity instead of love. Yes, I repeat it, and beg of the reader 
 never to forget it: — That the pulpit-representation of God, as a 
 being who has thrust us into this cursed world of his; that he 
 has framed us with a constitution, and given us passions that 
 constantly tend to destruction; that he has revealed to us a 
 law so dark and mysterious, as not to be understood by the 
 ^oor human reason he has given us for that purpose, and above 
 all, that the want of ability to penetrate this mystery is to seal 
 our eternal damnation; — is an unjust and offensive accusation 
 against the great author of our being, and highly pernicious to 
 the happiness of man. This, as all know, is the doctrine daily 
 thundered in our ears, and this is what I, again, affirm, makes 
 sceptics out of the church, and desponding and unhappy pro- 
 fessors in it. Why not honestly speak of God's works as they 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 361 
 
 deserve, and thereby excite in his creatures an admiration and 
 love for the kind creator and donor of so much good. I ask 
 the reader of common honesty to follow me, from the towering 
 Alps to the mighty cataract of Niagara, where invited on by 
 the environing beauties and the smiling charmes of nature, and 
 humbled and chastened by the awful sublimity of the scene 
 before us, we are led to the feet of our God, there to hold sweet 
 converse with him who will suffer no evil nor harm us not. Yes, 
 follow me on over rugged steeps and down gentle slopes, midst 
 lofty forests and through fragrant groves, into the deep dark 
 and shaded dell where songs of birds, bubbling rills, and the 
 cascade's roar fills the raptured soul with a devotional gratitude 
 and love for our kind creator, far beyond all church-formalities 
 and powers of man. Then, winding on by purling brooks, 
 through flowers, meads, and over verdant plains, and where, o 
 where is that deformity of earth and curse of all things found ? 
 Thus travel the wide world over, and all I ask, is to give 
 to our heavenly father what his numerous and pleasing gifts de- 
 maud. The soul that thus appreciates God by the perusal of 
 his works, will rise like the towering mountain that battles high 
 through the thunder's cloud, and rears its head into regions of 
 eternal sunshine, thence to look down with pity and compassion 
 through the gloom and mists that envelope the struggling and 
 bloody parties that are lighted only by the fires that consume 
 each other. I here again and again say to you, my reader, 
 whether a brother in the church or one of God's nobility out 
 of it, to think for yourself, and taking the great God of nature 
 for your faith, and Jesus Christ, our blessed redeemer, as your 
 guide for action, and you will stand as firm and unshaken as 
 the surge repelling rock, amidst the turmoil and assaults of 
 vulgar isms. If the travel we have taken amidst the poetic 
 beauties and charms of this little world be insufficient to lead 
 your immortal soul to the kindred spirit of its father above, I 
 ask you to look into the deep azure sky, and read those records 
 in bold relief, that stud the mighty dome of heaven. Pass out 
 
 16 
 
362 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 as a lonely and flitting ghost, which thou art, at midnight's 
 solemn hush, and under natures deep and soft repose, and then 
 and there, gazing upon those glittering diadems as they glance 
 their rays through the solitary vast, thiuk, o think, who and 
 what, and where thou art ! And if under the solemnity of the 
 occasion you are not humbled down to a sense of your condition 
 and obligation to the mighty maker and governor of this vast 
 universe, go to the little partisan who teaches his local and in- 
 ferior Gods, and his petty isms. Oft and oft in the " stilly 
 night," when the moon with her limpid radiance had sheeted 
 the sleeping world, have I stolen unseen and unheard to some 
 solitary spot, there to contemplate in silence and alone the vast 
 extent and wonderous works of creation ; to feel that I was an 
 atom upon this globe that was whirling with fearful velocity 
 upon its own axis, and passing its bidden round through im- 
 measurable space ; to feel that I was a poor, humble and dying 
 creature of a day, unknown to myself, and a stranger to all 
 around. Yes, and to know, and unavoidably know, that though 
 my perishing body would soon lie down with its brother em- 
 mets in the dust, that I possessed a spark of deity himself, that 
 soared from earth to suns, and thence to stars, and through 
 regions far, far beyond our solar spheres, and that will defy the 
 ravages of death and the destinies of time. 
 
 I have indulged in some apparent digressions, to convince 
 my reader of the false position taken by many of the clergy, that 
 but for the revelation, handed down to us by our fellow-men, we 
 never could have had the knowledge of a God, or of any thing 
 superior to man. I will say, in discharging this subject, that 
 if there be any set of men on earth, who deny the existence of 
 a God as shown by his work, that it is these gentlemen with 
 blistered feet and bruised fists, from thumping God's holy book, 
 who recognize no gods but such, as can be made to serve their 
 party and fill their purse. If such men would enlarge and 
 liberalize their minds by the study of God's works, instead of 
 devoting all their time to dead languages and the creeds of men, 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 363 
 
 they would cease to vilify the God of their existence, and to 
 preach against " moral and honorable men as bad examples in 
 society." Nor would they object so much to the use of poor 
 human reason, in ascertaining the relation in which we stand 
 to our creator and to our fellow-man, and the duties and con- 
 sequent happiness arising therefrom. 
 
 I hold, that as God has made us superior to the brute, by 
 giving us a power, called reason, by the exercise of which we 
 are, as Christ and the Apostles command, to " test all things." 
 The use of this test is not only sanctioned, but commanded by 
 God, particularly in cases, where our soul's salvation is at stake 
 In what other way, I ask, are we to distinguish the true from the 
 false religions that fill the world with contending parties ? 
 Though it is manifest that we cannot maintain a rational relig- 
 ion without the exercise of reason, we are forbid its use under 
 the penalty and charge of heresy and scepticism. On return- 
 ing from church, after hearing the sermon which we have just 
 reviewed, I observed to a member, how unreasonable it was to 
 punish a soul through all eternity, and to increase that punish- 
 ment daily, as we had just been told from the pulpit, for the 
 smallest possible crime, when I was rebuked by the hackneyed 
 reply : " Ah, you are bringing up your jpoor human reason 
 against the power and will of God ;" as though we could 
 know what the power and will of God is, without reason. 
 This objection to the light of reason, first instigated by the 
 Devil to keep Christians in darkness and from a knowledge of 
 God's goodness and justice, was used upon this occasion to 
 libel our heavenly father, and to alienate his children from him. 
 In order to show this well meaning but benighted brother his 
 inconsistency, I led him on, by apparently forgetting the sub- 
 ject, and then speaking of doctrines that I knew he would ob- 
 ject to. I asked him whether he did not think that our clergy 
 indulged in too much levity, ridicule and abuse of the Catholics, 
 for their belief in transubstantiation, which quickly showed, 
 that but for his degraded prostitution to the idolatrous wor- 
 
364 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 ship of his leader, man, he would have used the divine reason 
 which God in his beneficence gave to man for the investigation 
 of his truth. He at once exclaimed that the doctrine was 
 too absurd, even for children and idiots to believe, and that 
 everybody knew that there was neither flesh nor blood in bread 
 and wine. When upon my quoting the plain and positive de- 
 clarations of Christ, that " this is my body, this my blood," 
 etc., he again with feeling of independence and of momentary 
 emancipation, affirmed that to understand it literally, would 
 be too unreasonable for the belief of any rational Christian. 
 I then asked him how we were to understand what was literal 
 and what figurative ; which he promptly replied that reason 
 and common sense must be our guide. Thus we see how big- 
 otry, which is always inseparable from ignorance, may be used 
 to the condemnation of truth and justice, and in support of sec- 
 tarianism and selfish views. 
 
 And thus we also see how the use of reason can be tolerated 
 when it answers party purposes, but otherwise condemned as 
 illegitimate and unequal to the mysteries of godliness. And 
 here again we come to the doctrine, a vile relic of the dark ages, 
 that a God of infinite mercy has given us a revelation or law 
 which he forbids us to understand, that we may thereby be led 
 into darkness, doubts, and fiery divisions, even to the burning 
 of each other, that he for his own glory and the gratification of 
 the elect, may lead the burners and the burnt into hell, there to 
 be burnt for ever and for ever ! Just here I will ask a single 
 question, for the serious reflection of the reader. AVhat is a 
 revelation, if not the disclosure of that which was before un- 
 known, and whether it is not the bringing of God's truth to 
 light and demonstration, instead of involving them in impenetrable 
 darkness and inscrutable mystery. All know those to be the 
 doctrines of many of the churches, and startling and hideous as 
 they may be, when plainly and honestly summed up and brought 
 to view, we daily hear them uttered from the pulpit. Yes, I 
 repeat it, that as defamatory and reproachful as these doctrines 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SRRMON. 365 
 
 may be, to a wise, just, and kind creator and law-giver, they are 
 unblushingly and openly maintained. There certainly can be no- 
 thing more pleasing to Grod, and favorable to the progress of 
 religion, than a free and rational investigation of those laws by 
 which we are to live or die. Nor can there be a more heinous 
 slander uttered agamst the Almighty maker and ruler of the 
 universe, than the affirmation common from the pulpit that 
 he has given to his subjects a revelation or code of 
 mysteries, too deep and dark for their poor understandings. And, 
 O Father, for this, they say, we are to be damned through an 
 endless future ! Untrue, untrue, our ever blessed and kind 
 parent, untrue. The Roman tyrant, who by way of pretext to 
 punish his innocent subjects, wrote his laws in letters so small, 
 and hung his tablets so high as not to be read, was not so cruel 
 a monster as he whose terrors are preached to his trembling 
 subjects. He whose inflexible injustice and wanton cruelty, will 
 spare not even the sucking infant, but cast it into the burning 
 lake because of Adam's fondness for apples I 
 
 It is a political and moral axiom, that the good of the people 
 is the supreme law, and the object and end of all human govern- 
 ment. And this is equally true with God and his dear children, 
 who he brought into the world for no other purpose than to 
 be happy. Read what Archbishop Tillotson says upon this 
 subject: — 
 
 " That it is the goodness of God that induces him to accept 
 of our imperfect praises and ignorant admiration of him. And 
 were it not for our advantage and happiness to own and acknowl- 
 edge his benefits, for any real happiness and glory, that comes 
 to him by it, he would well enough be without it, and dispense 
 with us for ever, entertaining one thought of him, and were it 
 not for his goodness, might dispense the praises of his creatures 
 with infinitely more reason than wise men do the applause of 
 fools." 
 
 Again, Dr. Scott says: — "That to imagine that God needs 
 our services and requires them to serve his own interests, is to 
 
366 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 blaspheme his all-sufficiency, and suppose him a poor indigent 
 being, who, for want of perfect satisfaction within himself, is 
 forced to roam abroad and raise taxes on his creatures, to en- 
 rich and supply himself. So that, whatsoever some high flown 
 enthusiasts may pretend, that it is sordid and mercenary to serve 
 God for our good, I am sure to serve him for his good, is pro- 
 fane and blasphemous." 
 
 So thus we see, that Tillotson and Scott, as well as all others 
 of pious and considerate minds, confirm what I have said, that 
 God is perfect and happy within himself, and wants nothing but 
 gratitude from his children, a gratitude equivalent to the good 
 he has done us, as to demand more would be arbitrary and un- 
 just, a thing impossible with God. In accordance then, with 
 this golden rule, never to demand something for nothing, a 
 thing that no honorable man ever did, what is to be the result 
 of such doctrines as are generally taught — that God has made 
 us poor, frail, blind, and temporary creatures, and that he has 
 demanded of us under the penalty of death, more than poor human 
 nature is able to give. I answer that such teachings make God 
 not a kind and indulgent father, but a tyrannical and hard task- 
 master, who demands of his servants more than they are able 
 to perform. But I ask, whence this poor dying human nature, 
 and this miserable shabby world in which we live, if not from 
 God ? To deny that God made man, and made him subject to 
 the destinies of his nature, and that he made this world, and that 
 he made it subject to the eternal and immutable laws by which 
 it is governed, is to deny the existence of a God, and declare 
 yourself an Atheist. God, then, is our author, and cannot de- 
 mand more of us than a kind parent would of a frail and dying 
 child. That he has created us in malice, prepense, or through 
 his own short-sighted and vain glory, as we are taught, is im- 
 possible. I hold then, that God made us for ur own glory and 
 our own good, and for no other purpose. 
 
 Let us hear what the great Divine, Le Clerk, says upon this 
 subject. He observes that: — "Nothing can be more false, or 
 
STRICTURES UPON A. SERMON. 36t 
 
 contrary to the nature of the Gospel, than to fancy God in part 
 designed to show he was master, by enjoining some commands 
 which have no relation to the good of mankind; religion was 
 revealed for us, and not for God, who, absolutely speaking, 
 neither wants what we think of him, nor the worship we pay 
 him, but has manifested himself to us, only to make us happy." 
 Hence it is said, ''the Sabbath was made for man, and not man 
 for the Sabbath." 
 
 God, I say, has created all things, and created them just as 
 they are, hence if we make things and their fixed laws, give 
 way to words and the assertions of men, we have no standard of 
 truth or guide for action in any case. We cannot open our 
 eyes in mid-day and resist the operation of light, nor can we 
 avoid seeing and feeling things just as they exist around us. 
 No man can thrust his hand into the fire, and by any effort of 
 his will or desire suppose it agreeable or without pain, and just 
 as impossible is it with a rational Christian to beheve in a mis- 
 taken and degrading religion. To ask of us to give up the wit- 
 ness of our senses, and to prostitute that divine reason which 
 our Heavenly Father has so kindly bestowed upon us to know 
 his will aright, would be to demand impossibilities. And worse 
 than this, to rob us of that only gift of heaven, by the free 
 exercise of which, we are commanded to " test all things," 
 would be an impious sacrilege. Let us read what Charron says 
 of the consequences of a blind zeal and want of reason^ upon 
 the subjects of religion : — 
 
 " Superstition, and most other errors and defects in religion, 
 are, generally speaking, owing chiefly to want of becoming and 
 right apprehensions of God; we debase and bring him down 
 to us — we compare, and judge him by ourselves— we clothe 
 him with our infirmities, and then proportion and fit our 
 fancy accordingly ; what horrid profanation and blasphemy is 
 this." 
 
 I presume that I have said enough to convince the reader 
 that man did not make himself, and that he had no agency in 
 
368 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 the bestowment of th^t poor human reason, so objectionable to 
 those high, deep learned gentlemen, who defame the character 
 and condemn the works of their indulgent Creator, and thereby 
 obtain the admiration and idolatry of their uninformed and 
 gaping devotees. I have also strove to show that this world 
 did not create itself, and that it is just as it is, and that it is 
 exactly as God intended it to be. And farther, that any abuse 
 of this world or of its daily government, is a direct and odious 
 abuse of its great maker and preserver. I know that men who 
 are stupified by the inscrutable depths of mystic learning, can- 
 not understand this question, but I appeal to every man of in- 
 dependence and of common sense, to say W'hether, if man had 
 the making of himself, he would not live forever on this earth, 
 and whether he would not also make himself supreme and per- 
 fect in all things. Then any accusation against our fellow-man, 
 because of his misfortunes or unavoidable nature, is unfounded 
 and unfeeling, and a direct censure of his maker. To know 
 that there is a God, and that fact, all nature as well as sacred 
 record attests, that we are his creatures, and that he has done 
 much for us, should seal our mouths against all censure, and 
 additional and unreasonable demands. Nor is it more becom- 
 ing in us to call in question the dispensations of God, than to 
 revile his creatures because of the nature he has given them. 
 That God who made us, best knows how to adapt this law to 
 our capacity, and to proportion the punishment to our crime. 
 And here I must affirm that to make a small crime equal to a 
 great one, and the punishment alike unlimited and eternal, is 
 to believe a part equal to the whole, a thing in philosophy im- 
 possible, even with God himself. I say impossible with God him- 
 self, for God cannot, without the annihilation of his own kind, 
 just and holy nature, do a wrong In short and plain terms, 
 it is as impossible for God to be false or unjust, as to be and 
 not to be at the same time, or to make a part equal to the 
 whole. God can no more be just and unjust at the same time, 
 than a man can be wicked and pious at the same time. And as 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 369 
 
 God is immutable and all time the same with him, once kind 
 and just, he is always so. Then how can he, with his attri- 
 butes of beneficence and equal justice, make small crimes equal 
 to large ones (parts equal to wholes), and make no adaptation 
 of punishment to the guilt. Now, though we see that God 
 himself has not, nor cannot, without a violation of his inviolable 
 laws, make small crimes equal to great ones, his professed 
 ministers make them identically one and the same, both in fact 
 and in punishment. Then I must again say, and say without fear 
 of contradiction, that it is this making of our heavenly father un- 
 true to his own veracity and long pledged justice, in order to in- 
 dulge in an arbitrary and wanton punishment of his children, 
 that alienates them from him. And this, I again, again and 
 again say, is in accordance with the nature that God has 
 given us, to love those who love us, and contribute to our hap- 
 piness, and to hate those who hate us, and who make us un- 
 happy. And in tracing this law of our nature, or sense of re- 
 ciprocal gratitude and distributive justice, will we see the im- 
 possibility of a reconciliation to arbitrary, unequal and unjust 
 laws. For instance, should even the constituted authorities, 
 to enact a law to punish a slight and single offence with death, 
 say a burning at the stake, only for a few moments, we might 
 be threatened into a trembling fear of such tyrants, as we now 
 are, in regard to our Divine law-giver, but we can have no re- 
 spect for such authority ; nor will a jury of feeling and honor- 
 able men execute such a law. Therefore, it follows, that as 
 God disdains to act the bully, in consequence of his superior 
 power, and as he claims no exemption from the laws of honor 
 and of common justice, the assertions from the pulpit that God 
 is not governed by reason or rules of justice, and that in his 
 power and wrath he will do as seemeth him best, must be held 
 as slanderously false. In the maintenance of this absurd and 
 forbidding doctrine, the question is exultingly asked : Has not 
 God, who made man, power to do as he may deem fit with him ; 
 and who has a right to call in question his holy will ? This 
 
 16* 
 
370 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 triumphant argument held by the clergy, and first in the mouth 
 of almost every trembling devotee, is the opprobrium of God 
 and the bane of religion. I can ask with equal propriety, 
 whether God has not the power to commit suicide or annihilate 
 himself; yet he never has done it, and we presume he never 
 will. If, however, he had undergone as many changes of mind, 
 and been as versatile and whimsical as his ministers make him, 
 the universe might be in danger of being left without a gover- 
 nor. I grant that God could be false, cruel and unjust as man is 
 prone to make him, provided he had a will so to be, but it is 
 impossible for a just God to have an unjust will or desire to dp a 
 wrong. Saying that God has the power to do a thing, is no 
 reason that he will do it. One who is kind and without 
 variableness, or shadow of change, and who made us, not from 
 any selfish motive, but for the love he bore us, and for our own 
 special- happiness, cannot now prove false to his own designs, 
 and cruel to his creatures. Now, though reason, common 
 sense, and the Scriptures prove throughout, that God is able, 
 kind and just, we hear it thundered into the ears of poor 
 credulous and trembling wretches, who for want of correct mo- 
 ral instruction, and a just appreciation of their creator, have 
 been brought under the clerical lash, that God makes no 
 distinction between "the murderer and he who commits the 
 smallest possible crime. I ask my reader, then, to seriously 
 reflect, and like a man, to speak out from the inward convic- 
 tion of his soul ; whether he can reconcile this with justice, and 
 if not, whether any man or set of men, should be permitted to 
 so construe God's holy, kind and just promises, as to bring 
 such horrible and hateful charges against him. It is shocking 
 to every sincere follower of our Lord Jesus, who forgave his 
 own murderers, and took the thief to heaven by his side, to 
 have him charged with unjust and wanton cruelty, a cruelty 
 that has no regard to the claims of justice ; yes, a cruelty 
 that neither rewards nor punishes according to the merit or 
 demerit of the subject. 0, Saviour of infinite mercy, forgive 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 3tl 
 
 those unfeeling and blasphemous teachers who crucify thee 
 anew, for they know not what they do. I will here ask those 
 kind and mystic expounders, who consign all but the elect to 
 hell, what they have to expect from the declaration that there 
 are none perfect, righteous, holy, good or just; no, not one ? 
 
 It is to be presumed that as those gentlemen make small 
 crimes equal to great ones, and the Bible says, there is none 
 without crime, no, not one; that not only a part, but the whole 
 of the human family was designed or foreordained from all 
 eternity for the torments of hell. This is unquestionably the 
 result of their own preaching. My effort, in this essay, is to 
 prove the reverse of this gloomy and desponding doctrine, that 
 causes many to become melancholy, and then deranged upon 
 the subject of religion, while others, of stronger minds, yet 
 credulous enough to believe the doctrines of the day, that God 
 is not governed by the eternal rule of reason, of equity or of 
 justice, but by self-interest, passion and prejudice, having 
 nothing to expect from such a tyrant, defy him openly, and 
 thus have many died cursing their creator. I hold that love 
 and mercy are the most distinguishing attributes of God, and 
 that he has imparted the same lovely quality to his children. 
 We find that the natural affections of the youthful mind are: 
 love to its protector, and reverence for parental authority. Nor 
 is it ignorant of what is to be expected from the loving kind- 
 ness of their protector. In proof of this, I here relate a con- 
 versation I held with a child not eight years old. 
 
 Upon hearing it lisp a ghost-story, so common to children, 
 I remarked that the bad man frequently set such bait for little 
 boys, to entrap and punish them, when he promptly and with 
 an air of confidence replied: " Why, ma says, God made every 
 thing, and I reckon he made the devil, did'nt he ? '^ Yes, my 
 son, he made the devil. " Then he can whip him, ca'nt he ? " 
 Yes, I presume, he can. " Well then, ma says, we are God's 
 children, and he loves us, and if so, he will not let the devil 
 have his children." 
 
312 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 Thus we see that children commence the exercise of reason 
 in early life, and that a confidence in the love and justice of 
 God inclines, even the child, with a noble and manly reliance 
 upon him. I contend, then, that in accordance with our nature, 
 that we should be early instructed in the principles of a rational 
 religion. The child should be taught that God is our universal 
 father, and that he loves us dearly. That he is all powerful, 
 and that, if we love and obey him, he will not suffer any power 
 on earth or in hell to afflict us. A child, thus growing up under 
 a full and firm conviction of God's loving kindness and pro- 
 tective power, will never offend' so good a friend, and will be 
 prompt, like the little boy above named,, to defend his character, 
 as a dutiful child will an adored parent. He would not sorrow 
 as those who are without hope, nor would he feel gloomy, de- 
 pressed and dispirited like those under a slavish and degrading 
 religion. He should be taught to stand erect, in the image of 
 his God, and to feel the awful responsibility that attaches to 
 his high and immortal destiny. He should feel that he is a 
 child of supreme and infinite beneficence, and if unoffending, an 
 heir of eternal felicity. Yes, and he should know that God has 
 . created him a rational and accountable agent, and that he will 
 demand nothing of him beyond his capacity to understand and 
 ability to perform, that he does not sport with his children, by 
 giving them mysteries as their guide, and by placing stumbling 
 blocks, such as our expounders are, before them, that he is not 
 responsible to man, nor to any of his conventional creeds, but 
 is accountable to God, and to God alone. Thus panoplied with 
 love and inspired by the moral dignity of his nature, he would 
 stand equally invulnerable to the tricks of the devil, and the 
 ungrounded threats of God's vengeance; nor would he craven 
 to the cavils of infidelity and the sneers of the world. That 
 dark and gloomy compound of ignorance, fanaticism and hypo- 
 crisy would vanish before the fight of reason, and the soothing 
 blandishments of nature's holy truths would soften the harsh 
 and destorted features of that puritanical piety, so reuulsive to 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 313 
 
 the simplicity, buoyancy and natural promptings of the youth- 
 ful and innocent heart — yes, innocent as it is fresh from the 
 hand of God, and as pure as the mind of its great designer and 
 kind protector, having yet been uncorrupted by prejudiced and 
 false teachers. We should no longer abuse God and all his 
 works. We should not vilify this God's world, as badly made 
 and ignorantly governed, nor would we degrade his people to 
 the level of 'ill-shapen pottery. ^N'o, nor would we teach the 
 most dangerous of doctrines, that man is wholly unable to do 
 either good or evil, but as God or the devil may whimsically 
 prompt him, but we would hold him responsible for his own 
 acts, as a rational, moral and accountable agent. I say, it is 
 taught, that man of himself can neither do good nor evil, but 
 as God shall aid and approbate, for the rule, if just, should 
 work both ways, and surely, surely, there can be none so 
 hideously daring as to reproach God with giving us a natural 
 proneness for, and ability to sin, and withholding all power to 
 do good. None will dare deny that this is a doctrine daily 
 heralded from the pulpit, and it is one that has sent millions upon 
 millions to hell. Men are satisfied to go on in sin, saying that 
 they have no power to do good, but as sights shall appear, and 
 the holy spirit prompt them to it. And to fix this doctrine 
 upon the young and credulous mind, the examples of David, 
 Solomon, and Paul himself, who was suddenly forced, when 
 upon a mission of wickedness, to become a Christian, are 
 brought up as examples. 
 
 Yes, and worse than this, we hear it preached, as before 
 related, that there is more hope for the blasphemer and mur- 
 derer, than for the rational, thoughtful and moral man. And 
 why ? The simple and legitimate answer, in accordance with 
 such hell-peopling doctrine, is this: — That the conscientious 
 and moral man depends too much upon his own poor human 
 reason and power to do good, while wicked men wait patiently 
 for the holy spirit to do it for them. And what the result ? — 
 many go on sinning to their grave, and cursing their creator 
 
3T4 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 for his partiality in eleciting or forcing some to be good, while 
 he designed them for hell, and forced them on to destruction. 
 
 But to go back to the teachings of this essay. The sons 
 of clergymen, who are notoriously refractory and dissolute, 
 would be rationally reared to the love and obedience, both of 
 their heavenly and earthly fathers. That which they feel as a 
 brutal and unnatural restraint to the innate and innocent crav- 
 ings of the youthful heart, they, for some time, bear with silent 
 and sullen hatred to the authors of their oppressed and afflicted 
 souls ; but soon and they break through all restraints, and ever 
 after abhor religion as a system of unjust and cruel oppression. 
 Those are undeniable facts and speak volumes upon the subject 
 of early training. We should recollect that children are child- 
 ren, and that they are fresh from the hands of their Creator, 
 just as he made them — that he has given them sensibiHty and 
 reason — and that he has imbued them with a spark of his own 
 Divinity, called conscience, which leads them to a knowledge 
 of his existence and of his protective power. Yes, and which 
 enables them to feel and know when the laws that their Creator 
 has given them, for their preservation and happiness, have been 
 outraged or violated by a despotic and arbitrary power. Know- 
 ing, as we do, that nature is nothing more nor less than the crea- 
 tion and will of God, we should be cautious how far we go in 
 our prejudices against and opposition to them. We might with 
 no less impious imbicihty, condemn the laws of the vegetable 
 and mineral kingdoms, as that of the animal — yes, and with 
 equal propriety oppose the laws that govern the heavenly bodies, 
 as those that govern mind. God, as before maintained, made 
 man, not with any side view or selfish motive, but that he might 
 be happy, and hence the wise and beautiful design and perfect 
 adaptation of all our senses and bodily susceptibilities for enjoy- 
 ment from the appropriate objects around us — as the eye for 
 light, the ear for sound, &c., &c. Then, as our enjoyments are 
 indicated by the laws of nature (God), and founded upon the 
 eternal reason and order of things, we should not be so ungrate- 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON". 3t5 
 
 ful and puritanical in our abuse of youthful and innocent amuse- 
 ments. In as much, however, as the world is governed more by 
 the mystic authority and arbitrary assertion of man, than by the 
 simple laws of God, and the wisest arguments that can be 
 urged, we will cease to reason, and give some authority that 
 now occurs upon this subject. As man was made for his own 
 happiness, and as benevolence is a distinguishing attribute of 
 his Creator, every effort we can make to increase the amuse- 
 ments and add to the happiness of our fellow-man, is an act of 
 benevolence, and will meet with the approbation of God, as a 
 legitimate and virtuous act. 
 
 Pope, in his " Universal Prayer," says that: — 
 
 *' God is paid when Toaii receives : 
 To enjoy is to obey J' 
 
 Young, author of " Night Thoughts," says: — 
 
 •' The love of pleasure is man's eldest bom, 
 Born in his cradle, living to his tomb, 
 Wisdom her younger sister, though more grave. 
 Was meant to minister, and not to mar. 
 Imperial pleasure, queen of human hearts. ^' 
 
 Again, Dr. Young says: — 
 
 *' Not to turn human brutal, but to build 
 Divine on human, pleasure came from heaven. 
 In aid to reason was the goddess sent, 
 To call up all its strength by such a charm. 
 Pleasure first succors virtue; in return. 
 Virtue gives pleasure an eternal reign." 
 
 " Is there no play. 
 To ease the anguish of a torturing hour. " 
 
 Finally, (for we might greatly extend those quotations,) 
 Pope says, upon this subject: — 
 
 " To wake the soul by tender strokes of art. 
 To raise the genius, and to mend the heart; 
 To make mankind in conscious virtue bold. 
 Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold; 
 
8TG MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 For this the tragic muse first trod the stage, 
 Commanding tears to stream thro' every age; 
 Tyrants no more their savage nature kept, 
 And foes to virtue wonder how they wept. " 
 
 Then it does appear, by reason and by authority, both hu- 
 man and divine, that as God has made us for enjoyment, it is 
 as sinful to suppress or murdet rational pleasure, as to punish 
 ourselves or to commit suicide. And thus we see that those 
 puritanical and misanthropic doctrines, which I have strove to 
 expose, are offensive to justice, subversive of reason and of hu- 
 man happiness, incompatible with the universal and eternal re- 
 lation of things, contrary to the laws of our nature, and conse- 
 quently to the will of our Creator. Hence we see, that those 
 who preach such doctrines, neither live up to their precepts them- 
 selves, nor so change the nature of others, as to enable them to 
 do so. And, therefore, it is, that those who preach more than 
 they practice, bring the charge of inconsistency and hypocrisy 
 upon the Church, greatly to the injury both of religion and of 
 the well-being of society. We should take things then, as God 
 has made them, and not as we in our imaginations, would have 
 them. The Clergy are as false to truth, as the writers of novels 
 and the authors of romance, in creating an imaginary and arti- 
 ficial standard of perfection, not to be found in the lives of the 
 most perfect of men, and which, consequently, has not been 
 given by our Creator to man. Yes, they sternly proclaim an 
 ordeal test, that neither they as rational and human beings, nor 
 even the suicidal Hindoo, or most phrensied and fanatical 
 Christian can perform. And thus it is, that the Clergy run 
 counter to the will of God, do injustice to themselves, make 
 sceptics of the world, and bring disgrace upon the Church. 
 Hence it follows, as an axiom, founded upon the universal, im- 
 mutable and unavoidable structure of man, that he was designed 
 by his Creator, more for happiness, and for the enjoyment of 
 this Satanic world, than for sadness, sorrow, and suicide. And, 
 further, that God has not cursed us without as much as an 
 alleged crime, and cursed all creation on our account. The 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 3*1 T 
 
 good book tells us, that, " God saw every thing that he had 
 made, and behold it was very good." — Genesis, chap, i, ver. 31. 
 Is it probable, then, or even possible, that a consistent and 
 immutable God, once pleased with his works, as above seen, 
 should so quickly prove inconsistent and mutable, as to fall 
 out with them, and to maim or destroy them ! And equally 
 unreasonably is it, that an infinitely wise God, who foreknows 
 all things, and who consequently knew Adam as well before his 
 creation as after it, should be so short-sighted and unwise, as 
 to be disappointed and fretted at the defect of this his first 
 man, and to damn all creation on his account ! And above all, 
 that a just God should be so unjust as to doom us to misery in 
 this world, and to consign us to ultimate perdition, because of 
 his man, Adam's, fondness for apples ! Adam could not have 
 been corrupted by education, for he associated with none but 
 his Creator. Why, then, attribute all our defects to poor old 
 Adam, as he, when fresh from the hands of his maker, was 
 equally defective, or like ourselves subject to temptation ? 
 This condemnation by Adam is greatly harped on by those 
 whose selfish vanities (instigated by Satan), induce them to 
 believe that they are favorites of an impartial God, and con- 
 sequently exempt from such sin. This is said to be a deep- 
 grounded and grievous sin to all but the elect, who teach that 
 God, in consequence of the apple transgression, under which 
 he suffered Adam to live and propagate this sin to his posterity, 
 swept the whole human family into hell, from the days of Adam 
 up to the coming of Christ, say a period of four thousand years ; 
 and from that time up to the present not less than nine hundred 
 and ninety-nine in a thousand have gone to the burning lake ! 
 Such, in sooth, has been the perplexing and incurable nature 
 of this case, that the learned clergy have been put to their 
 wits ends for a remedy ! Teaching, as is still taught, that God, 
 having no sympathy for his millions of suffering infants, nor 
 any power to save them from hell, those very kind guardians 
 of God's bereaved and orphan children determined to take 
 
378 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 the matter into tlieir own hands, and save them from eternal 
 destruction. Holding, as is yet held, that being conceived in 
 this wool-died and indellible sin, which nothing but dipping, a 
 doubtful sprinkling, or some preparation of holy water, could 
 possibly wash out, I say that the great prelates of this little 
 world set their wits to work. This learned and grave body of 
 God's sovereign interpreters of a language which he himself 
 could not make intelligible, met at a place on this speck of the 
 universe, called Sorbonne, in the year of our Lord 1253, then 
 and there to determine upon a remedy for God's want of fore- 
 sight, wisdom and goodness in the management of his own af- 
 fairs. And then it was, that the celebrated enama edict was 
 instituted. This solemn body, in the wisdom of their council 
 resolved, that the mother should be injected, per vaginam, 
 with holy water, for the awakening of the soul and the conver- 
 sion of the cmhryo-s'pirit. This was to be done at the period 
 of quickening, when it was supposed that the sinful soul of the 
 infant entered the body ; bat with what instrument this inject- 
 ing was done, is yet a secret. Those high, deep learned Divines, 
 being satisfied with their effectual remedy, did not determine 
 whether God hourly creates those sinful souls as they may 
 be called for, or has kept them from creation, ready made ; or 
 perchance, whether they have not been independently and re- 
 belliously wandering through space, amidst the warring ele- 
 ments, waiting for the sinful body to be ready for their recep- 
 tion. Their mystic learning did not enable them to elucidate 
 this theological enigma to the satisfaction even of our most 
 matured and thoughtful souls, which have no consciousness or 
 recollection of any prior or separate existence from the body. 
 
 I have somewhat digressed to show to my readers, what I 
 proposed in this essay to do, convince them of the uncertainty 
 and even danger of biblical learning, and great men so called, 
 who serve only by their ridiculous disputes, to render the word 
 of God doubtful, and by getting up parties and self-worshippers, 
 to distract the church. la returning from this learned com- 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 319 
 
 mentary or rather sortie of the clergy upon Adam and his 
 creator, too sacrilegious and degradingly ludicrous, either for 
 the credence or tolerance of a pious and well-balanced mind, 
 we again affirm that God has not cursed us and all his works, 
 on Adam's account, and consigned us to sadness, to sorrow 
 and to suicide. We should not, then, ungratefully reject the 
 rational pleasures and amusements of life, for which he has 
 created us, but cheerfully accept of his goodness, and like his 
 inferior, but more grateful creatures, bask in his sunshine and 
 enjoy the many blessings which he has so bountifully spread 
 around us. Parents should be cautious not to contract their 
 children's minds, by taxing their memories with useless partic- 
 ulars and learned nonsense. Nor should they render them mi- 
 santhropic and forever averse to the expanded and noble prin- 
 ciples of true religion, revealed by our common father for the 
 benefit of all his children, by teaching a partial and unmerciful 
 God, who has given to his creatures a law far beyond their 
 capacity to understand, and who winks at their ignorance and 
 glories in their destruction. On the contrary, the youthful 
 mind should be liberalized, enobled and elevated to God him- 
 self, by an early instruction in the gloriously sublime and un- 
 mistaken works of his vast universe. This would subdue our 
 vain glorious pretensions to mystic power, humble our pride in 
 petty primer learning, and bring us with a sense of our little- 
 ness to the feet of the merciful, the mighty and eternal God, 
 who neither works as a botch in the potter's trade, nor condes- 
 cends to serve a party. The cultivation of the mind by the 
 study of nature and the sublime wprks of our creator will assist 
 its creative powers, multiply its images and correct and refine 
 its conceptions. It will tend to produce that refinement of 
 sentiment, dehcacy of taste, elevation of soul and glow of af- 
 fection which form the polish of the heart, the finish of mental 
 character, and the best elements of personal and social happi- 
 ness. One, thus trained up with chaste and sublime conceptions 
 of his creator, and consequeutlv disgusted with the conventional 
 
380 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 dogmas and vain and silly parade of man, with his liable 
 churches, rich robes, and all the satanic paraphernalia of 
 human pride and man-worship, feels no privation in retiring 
 from such a scene of rival and envy to the silent and solemn 
 shades of some unfrequented and sacred forest, there to com- 
 mune alone with the author of his being. 
 
 Thus have I endeavored to show what I set out to do, why 
 it is that the clergy so constantly complain, that there are so 
 few of the community professors of religion, and that those 
 who are, fail to live up to the standard of their profession. 
 I have said that it was mainly owing to the subject being so 
 presented that no thinking mind, without a violation of those 
 sacred and adored principles upon which his salvation depends, 
 could embrace it. Who, T ask, after robbing God of his lovely 
 attributes, rejecting his kindly gifts, and slandering the great 
 author of nature, by the abuse of his works, can face him in 
 the day of judgment, with the plea of justification ? How, then, 
 I farther ask, can any man of sound principles and a just 
 appreciation of our creator, subscribe to such doctrines ? I 
 repeat it, that there is no man of sane mind and sound prin- 
 ciples, freed from an education in party-dogmas, and who has 
 been brought into the presence of, and rendered familiar with 
 the infinite beneficence, creative might and eternal majesty of 
 the one supreme, can ever submit to the interpretations of the 
 day. The clergy themselves have left the -inexhaustible foun- 
 tain of pure and living waters, and hewn out to themselves 
 fountains, yes, broken fountains that will hold no water. In- 
 stead of devoting their time to science, and pursuing the laws 
 of Jehovah, the author of our being and great law-giver of the 
 universe, they constringe, epitomize and stultify their minds by 
 the study of dead languages, and abstract and destracting 
 alchemic creeds, in which no two Divines agree, to find out the 
 root of religion, which is simply in the heart, and the same in 
 all ages, nations, and languages, to the utmost bounds of God's 
 vast domain. And worse than this, having deserted and con- 
 
STRICTURES UPON A SERMON. 881 
 
 demned science, (the laws of God,) the great fountain of knowl- 
 edge and wisdom, to dabble in theological enigmas and conven- 
 tional dogmas, they become demented and demonized, till hav- 
 ing lost all charity and kind feeling for others, are now pre- 
 pared with the most vindictive and fiendish feelings of human 
 depravity, to drag each other to the tortures of the stake. 
 This, with all its minor grades of enjoined faiths and intolerant 
 isms, is called religion, and if it be so, God forbid that I should 
 ever be possessed of such religion, I would prefer murder and 
 highway-robbery, as less cruel to my fellow-man^ and more ac- 
 ceptable to my creator. 0, thou great fountain of love, of law, 
 and of order, if those who sacrilegiously take upon themselves 
 thy holy name, were to study thy laws and know thy will, in- 
 stead of devoting their lives to words without meanings, and 
 distinctions without a difference, to distract the mind and 
 alienate thy children from thee; they would have no occasion 
 to slander thee and condemn thy laws, as many of them do. 
 Were those leaders of parties and disturbers of society, those 
 defamers of nature and false interpretors of God's will, to study 
 the laws and see the order of his material universe, they would 
 be unerringly and irresistibly lead to him, as the wise designer, 
 kind creator and supreme governor of all. And were they to 
 study the laws of mind, they would know that God has never 
 made two minds to be one and the same, or any more alike 
 than faces and physical forms. Then seeing all this as clearly 
 as we do, and sincerely wishing for the well being of society, 
 and the happiness of our fellow-mortals, we ask, yes, ask and 
 again ask, by the authority of human reason, and in the name 
 of divine truth, how it is to be expected that all minds can be 
 moulded into one, any more than the features and bodily struc- 
 ture can be transmuted from the form that God has given them. 
 how rebeUious, then, to the will of God, and how cruel to 
 man to murder him for an unavoidable and honest difference 
 of opinion. God, then, free us from an early and fatal educa- 
 tion in party-dogmas, and lead us by the study of nature, and 
 
382 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 the grandeur and sublimity of her laws, to see thee as thou art, 
 the creator of all, and the common father and steady friend of 
 man, and to know that thou hast designed us for happiness 
 here, and for immortal bliss, when we shall have passed from 
 this world, and for ever bid adieu to the scenes of time. 
 
 Great father of life and of every good, 
 
 Thy name will I defend, 
 
 And pleased with this world that gave me birth, 
 
 I'll praise it to the end. 
 
 And when to earth these eyes I close, 
 
 In dark and endless night, 
 
 Lord, wilt thou my vision fit, 
 
 For world celestial bright. 
 
 And when this throbbing heart shall cease, 
 
 And soul and body part, 
 
 Then vrill I see thee face to face, 
 
 And know thee as thou art. 
 
REVIEW. 
 
 [This Keview was intended as a preliminary article, but has 
 since been written out as a Review.] 
 
 I MUST here say to the reader, that though I have written 
 a book, I have not intended, till very recently, ever to publish it 
 to the world, fearing it might give offence to many of my best 
 friends — persons for whom I have a sincere regard, as men of 
 enlarged minds, kind hearts, and of true piety, and, above all, 
 faithful laborers in the cause of religion. To avoid such re- 
 sults, I commenced my essays by circumlocutory and hypocritical 
 evasions, thinking that my kind feelings and pure intentions 
 might excuse me in the eyes of my Creator, but feeling the 
 criminality of my deception, and seeing the ambiguity of my 
 style, I resolved to speak out as my feelings might prompt me, 
 not designing in any instance to be either sectarian or personal, 
 for that is far, yes, very far, from my kind intentions; aiming 
 only to show the fatal tendency of the doctrines taught by the 
 Clergy, without accusing them of any personal or conscious 
 guilt. I am willing to say that every man who professes a 
 separate code of morals, or a party creed in religion, is honest, 
 even to the creed of Brigham Young, and yet I feel at liberty 
 to strike with all the force of language I can command, against 
 the various party creeds and confessions of faith in religion, as 
 destructive to religion itself, and destracting to the harmony and 
 well being of society. That the Hindoo, who crushes himself 
 under the wheels of a man-created God, is sincere, there can be no 
 doubt; and that the Mussulman, «rho dies with religious heroism 
 and exaltation at the canon's mouth, is equally sincere, there 
 
 383 
 
884 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 can be as little doubt; but it is very certain that neither honesty 
 nor martyrdom constitutes any part of true and rational religion, 
 for that would be to put all religions upon an equal footing, 
 there being no religion without its martyrs and honest members, 
 which devotees, by the by, will doubtless receive, from the 
 searcher of all hearts the reward of their honest exertions in 
 the cause of religion. It is not the simple hearted sincerity in 
 religion that I condemn, but the chimeras of presumptuous learn- 
 ing and the crushing despotism of party creeds and theological 
 formulas. I should feel just as safe under the hierarchy of 
 Olympius, or the Pontifity of Kome, as within the pale of Pro- 
 testant dogmatism, with its imperial sway of bigotry, arrogance, 
 contradictory hypotheses and bitter enmities. 
 
 I shall show in the following essays, that the very term of a 
 separate doctrine in religion expresses a doubt of the truth of 
 religion itself; for how can there be divisions and opposing 
 doctrines about a matter so plain and self-evident as to admit of 
 no doubt. That two and two make four, and that the whole 
 is greater than a part, admit of no doubts, or divisions of creeds, 
 or separate doctrines upon the subject; much less can such 
 obvious facts harrow up those foul and fiendish passions that 
 cause the professors of religion themselves, to torment and 
 even destroy each other. My position is, that the Bible is what 
 it purports to be, the Word of God, and as such, can give no 
 countinuance to the ten thousand opposing, impossible, irrecon- 
 cilable, dividing, and destracting creeds and confessions of a 
 false faith. For all religions on earth, of whatsoever kind, 
 must be equally true and safe, or there must be some one which 
 is true and genuine, making all others false and counterfeits. 
 The clergy have fought with fire and fagot over these distract- 
 ing creeds, till like the Killkenny cats, there is nothing but the 
 dislocated and lacerated remains and tail end of religion to be 
 found amongst their dead symbols and arbitrary formalisms. 
 My teachings will be, that God has not intended to sport with 
 the salvation of man, and consequently, that he has in good 
 
REVIEW. 385 
 
 faith and in full accordance with the meaning of the Word, re- 
 vealed to us his law, which law, as it binds his subjects eternally in 
 hell or heaven, must have been suited to the capacity of the most 
 humble and uneducated on earth — as to be poor, humble, and 
 uneducated is no crime. Besides, we are all the children of 
 God, over which, as an impartial and just God, he must have 
 constant care and equal love. To say that God has given us a 
 mysterious law, not to be understood by those who are hgld re- 
 sponsible to that law, is to make God a greater tyrant than 
 the bloody monster of Rome, who published a law not to be 
 understood that he might put his unoffending subjects to death. 
 It must then be, that God has made his law plain, and it is only 
 by the pretended learning in mysteries, and the bigoted arro- 
 gance of the pigmy, man, who comes to his craven and credul- 
 ous fellow, which makes that law doubtful and of non-effect. 
 
 If things amongst men can be made plain, how much more 
 simple and plain should God make his law, which binds, as I 
 have said, the eternal destiny of man. My object, as I shall 
 often repeat, is to show that God has revealed himself in a 
 manner so simple, as to be understood by every creature on 
 earth, and when not understood, the fault is not in God, but in 
 man, who has always strove to make the people believe that 
 they can explain things, which God himself could not; I say, 
 which God himself could not, for otherwise, he would be culp- 
 able of an obvious neglect, just as much, and even more so, 
 than an earthly law-giver, who could, but would not make his 
 laws plain and intelHgible to his people, that a set of expound- 
 ers and impostors might rise up and live upon their honest la- 
 bor. In answer to this solemn and startling question, I have 
 heard it most slanderously and shamelessly heralded from the 
 pulpit, that as God had power, he had a right to reveal his 
 laws intelligibly or mysteriously, as might suit him best. This 
 doctrine, most abhorrent, both to reason and justice, is every day 
 taunted against poor human reason. The parent has power 
 over his child, therefore a right to maltreat or put it to death 
 
 n 
 
386 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 at pleasure, and just so with all power, or might, making right. 
 The idea of the Clergy in this case, is precisely that of an Irish- 
 man who was brought before the Court, in my presence, for 
 beating his wife to death ; who pleaded, in justification of the 
 act, that a man in this free country had a right to do as he 
 pleased with his own property, and, for sooth, the man appeared 
 to act with conscientious sincerity, in believing that might gave 
 right,, so much so, indeed, that he evinced an indignant surprise 
 at the Court's interference with his domestic and private rights. 
 Were God, as repesented by his ministers, devoid, like our 
 earthly tyrants, of all just principles, he might make just or un- 
 just laws, as best suited. his vile passions and sordid purposes, 
 but as a God, with the attributes constituting a God, it is im- 
 possible, in the nature of things, for him to pass an unjust law, 
 or act in any way but in accordance with the pure and holy 
 principles of the eternal Godhead. To act with duplicity, he 
 would not be an honest God, and to act unjustly he would not 
 be a just God, so that to act because of a physical ability, is a 
 gross idea, and morally impossible, as for God to do so, would 
 be to annihilate his own attributes, and, consequently, be no 
 God. It will be shown in many parts of this work, that all 
 God's purposes are under the fixed and eternal law of moral 
 necessity, and in this position I am sustained, not only by the 
 sacred and immutable principles of truth and justice, but by the 
 authority of Clark, Dick, Chalmers, and many other able 
 Divines. 
 
 To speak of a revelation from God, which is a mystery, is 
 a gross and mischievous solicism, the very word revelation 
 meaning the disclosure and explana,tion of mysteries or things 
 before unknown, so that if there be any mysteries in the Bible 
 essential to the salvation of man, it is not from God, the foun- 
 tain of love, of mercy, of truth and justice, but the fabrication 
 of blind and selfish men, who have quarreled and fought like 
 demons over what is and what is not a revelation. Strange 
 and startling, indeed, are these melancholy and momentous 
 
REVIEW. 38 Y 
 
 facts, which should make every man of mind to think for him- 
 self Those Divines, who profess to explain mysteries to the 
 demented masses, are the very men who take issue with each 
 other, and have caused nine tenths of all the vile bigotry and 
 cruel persecutions in the church of God, where instead of lov- 
 ing each other as themselves, they hate each other as they do 
 the devil himself Yes, such has been the fiendish feelings of 
 those expounders of mysteries and leaders of duped and de- 
 graded parties, that they have broiled each other alive. Ab- 
 horrent and infamous, indeed, must be such pretenders in the 
 sight of a just and holy God, whose loving kindness and simple 
 word is thus perverted to the most basely, cruel and selfish 
 purposes. 
 
 That there is truth and divinity in the Bible, no man can 
 doubt, but that every upstart and leader in opposing creeds, 
 are the teachers of that truth or in the line of their duty, is 
 impossible. Truth is a unit, and consequently not the subject 
 of contradictory creeds and party theology; and if the Bible 
 be the word of God, it should not, with impunity, be subjected 
 to the vile prejudices, and to the ambitious and sordid pur- 
 poses of men. 
 
 Knowing that men's morals are formed by education, and 
 reading nightly, as I do, in our daily news columns of the 
 alarming increase of fraud and crime in our land, I have felt it 
 my religious duty to use my feeble effoi'ts to bring about some 
 reform in the systems of education, and knowing farther that 
 our moral sense of duty, and religious views of right and wrong 
 are the main springs of human action, I have spoken largely, 
 pointedly, independently and, I think, justly upon that subject. 
 Yes, and knowing, moreover, as every intelligent man must 
 know, that Islamism makes an honest community, while 
 Christianity makes it dishonest, and being well assured that 
 the great amount of corruption in this Christian community 
 cannot be from the practice of Christianity or the precepts of 
 the Bible, but from their false teachings and formal professions, 
 
388 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 I have strove, even by hard, and, they may think, rude shak- 
 ing, to awake the ministers of the gospel to their grievous 
 errors. They are the privileged and exclusive teachers who 
 give tone, both through our schools and from the pulpits, to the 
 moral sentiments of the people, and more particularly to the 
 rulers of our country, and hence it is that I have felt at liberty 
 to address the clergy, more especially, upon the subject of 
 education, and in so doing, I wish it understood that 1 have 
 not designed to accuse any one of crime or intentional wrong, 
 but am willing to say, God forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do. We know that whole nations may run greatly 
 astray, from long habits of error, without being conscious of it, 
 and all past history shows this fact, for an illustration of which 
 we have but to go a step back to Greece and Rome, where 
 wiser heads than ours worshipped at the shrine of the most 
 corrupt and despicable Gods that ever disgraced the name of 
 religion, and the Protestant world will readily grant that 
 Christianity under the Papal hierarchy, was a bhght upon the 
 soul, and a curse to the moral government and well being of 
 society. Luther, it is said, has greatly bettered the condition 
 of the Christian world, but I am sorry to say that the question 
 whether Christian unity, piety, and morality has gained any- 
 thing from the efforts of Luther, must be left to the tribunals 
 of justice to decide. In tracing the history of man in all his 
 varied conditions, physical and mental, through the melancholy 
 and mouldering ages of the past, I have not had time to dwell 
 or space for details, in consequence of which, my style may 
 appear both erratic and deficient in its relations, and in fact, I 
 have attempted no artistic or studied style, pursuing rapidly 
 my own reflections, and aiming only to make myself understood; 
 and if the reader will impartially compare my teachings with 
 his own experience, he will find much that is valuable and true 
 in my meditations, both of the past and the present condition 
 of man ; and in regard to my arguments, particularly under the 
 head of volition, he will find them unanswerable, and not that 
 
REVIEW. 389 
 
 I claim to be superior to all other men, but that I follow 
 nature, and have the author of nature and of truth upon my 
 side. It may seem inconsistent in a Christian to speak with as 
 much ironical levity, as I have done in many parts, but it is 
 done to render the ridiculous ideas of men, if possible, more 
 ridiculous. 
 
 It is well known from long experience, that superstition and 
 the love of the fashions and customs of a country can never be 
 cured by reason, and that ridicule is the only remedy. Cer- 
 vantes might have gravely reasoned through a thousand 
 volumes, without affecting the deeply rooted and chivalrous 
 habits of knight-errantry, whereas, by a single little volume of 
 satire he reformed the world, and rid it of such follies. It 
 must be understood, however, that when I speak of such like 
 things as Adam's fondness for apples, giving to the Bishop of 
 London alone half a million of dollars annually, and to the ag- 
 gregated clergy of the wide world countless millions of the 
 people's hard earnings, that I neither blame these great magii 
 or medicine men, as our Indians would call them, for accepting 
 of their salaries, as it furnishes them with good wines, nor the 
 people for paying them, as it is easier to buy religion from the 
 Pope and the vicegerents of God, than to obtain it from God 
 himself by an arduous and unprofitable life of honesty. These 
 are human taints and tendencies of which the world is full, 
 and whether it be of a deeply grounded and incurable nature, 
 or an adventitious trait from corrupt examples of pretented 
 high and holy sources, is not yet known, some authors contend- 
 ing for a total and incorrigible depravity through God's blind- 
 ness and Adam's sin, and others for a fortuitous and more 
 hopeful prospect for human nature. Knowing as I do, that it 
 is detrimental to the honesty and well-being of society to shift 
 all the blame from ourselves and putting it upon God and his 
 first man Adam, whom the sinful and selfish world has made 
 the scape-goat of all their crimes, it will be found that I con- 
 tend throughout for the wisdom, power, and purity of God ; 
 
390 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and farther, that his perfect pre-science has never permitted 
 him to bring any thing into existence which he did not purpose 
 so to dO; and consequently, that he has never been disappoint- 
 ed in any of his works, and whined and pined and fretted, 
 like a child or a botch mechanic, as many high and holy digni- 
 taries of earth would make the mighty God of this vast and 
 harmonious universe do. But go on, to read my book 
 through, and you will find that there is no defect in God, and 
 that man has only been made defective by superstition and the 
 worship of men, who pretend to a divine and mystic knowledge 
 far beyond the allotted capacity of ephemeral man, who has 
 ever been dissatisfied with God and with God's appointments. 
 And hence it is that I aim to show that our creator has given 
 us ample capacity to understand everything appertaining to 
 our health and happiness, and that is only by transcending 
 these limits in search of supernatural and forbidden things, 
 that we have made ourselves unhappy, and attribute it all to 
 Adam and to Adam's Maker, who, our mystic leaders say, got 
 mad at his own Wind mishaps, and cursed us, and cursed all he 
 had made beyond his own power to redeem us. This gross 
 solecism and libelous personality against our Creator, I also 
 show to be the result of the false teachings of men, who strip 
 God of his best attributes, such as wisdom, goodness, and im- 
 mutability, and invest him with their own vile blindness, malice 
 and petty passions. To make the preachings of the day con- 
 sistent, it would be equally as just to hang a man for his form 
 of person or the color of his hair and eyes as to hang him for 
 murder, as they are both alike entailed upon us through our 
 forefathers, and consequently- unavoidable. If neither God or 
 Adam made us sinful by nature, we can no more help sinning 
 than we can help having two legs instead of four. 
 
 The greatest possible evil to society is the idea entertained 
 through the pulpit, that God has left man free to sin, but has 
 deprived him by Adam's sin of all possibility of doing any good, 
 but as the spirit which seems to have deserted our country, 
 
REVIEW. 391 
 
 may whimsically fancy to force him. And thus do men under 
 this belief go on sinning to their very graves, and often in de- 
 spair have they been known to curse their maker for his 
 partiality in forcing others to heaven, while they were fated to 
 hell Tliat there is more crime in the world at this time than 
 there has been at any other period in the history of man, I 
 cannot doubt, and that the divisions and distractions in the 
 church of God are daily becoming greater, no reading and ob- 
 serving man will deny, which shows the necessity of some re- 
 form, and with a view to which reform I have bestowed the 
 exertions of what few hours I have had to spare from the most 
 onerous and incessant out-door labors, which fact may excuse 
 my incoherent and hasty style. 
 
 Knowing that most of persons view every attempt to a re- 
 formation or improvement in the established customs of relig- 
 ion, as an opposition to religion itself, I have thought it well 
 to say, that as modern religion had become so incumbered, like 
 modern music, with arbitrary variations, as to be in danger of 
 losing both body and soul, that my aim and only aim is to 
 restore it to its apostolic simplicity. The formal and fashion- 
 able religion of the day may bloom, but can never bear ; nor 
 is it possible that the vain glorious pomp and glare, so pleasing 
 to the eye of artistic taste, can ever satisfy a sincere and pious 
 soul. The study of psychology has forced upon me the con- 
 viction that the human mind, if free from the fetters of super- 
 stition, and the local and petty trash of our modern schools, is 
 capable of that vast expansion and elevation which would 
 quickly lead it to the very throne of God, its author, and the 
 great fountain of all power and wisdom. The mind's soaring 
 into the nebular regions of immensity on the wings of gravita- 
 tion and the curbing of the lightning from heaven, and sending 
 it across vast oceans, at its bidding, are but small items withiu 
 the sphere of its mighty powers. Yes, and with a conviction 
 as clear as that of my own existence, do I affirm that God has 
 given to the human soul a capacity to ascend from effect to 
 
392 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 cause on and on through an endless series of gradation and 
 perfection. But alas, alas, how this spark of divinity, this 
 light of the world and heir of heaven, has been stifled and per- 
 verted to the vile and sordid purposes of ambitious and mono- 
 polizing parties. To know this melancholy fact, we have but 
 to look back at the degraded condition of mankind through all 
 ages of the world. 
 
 The march of time brings up in review before us, even at 
 this late epoch of the world, nine tenths of the human family 
 manacled by the debasing power of superstition. Two thirds 
 of our race are now kneeling to the worship of thirty-two mil- 
 lions of God's, manufactured by the single man Confucius. 
 Passing by the millions of deluded beings, whose brains have 
 been addled and whose eyes are turned to the machinations 
 of Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Mahomet, and the Pope; we may 
 gaze with sad reflection upon our own distracted and warring 
 parties, each blind and ambitious leader crying aloud to the 
 silly and divided flock, this is the way and that the road to 
 destruction. My object is to break the bonds of this idolatrous 
 and degrading man-worship, rouse the soul from its mystic 
 lethargy, and point out to it the road to its high and immortal 
 destiny. I have rebelled against" the supreme command of 
 vulgar prejudice, and solemnly rebuked those aggregated and 
 guilty forms of human creeds and craft, abhorrent to reason 
 and loathsome to the taste of an unperverted, free and elevated 
 soul that has become refined and assimilated to its maker b;^ 
 the study of his noble works. I have also ventured to cdndemn 
 the arts of refinement, and the pomp and pride of wealth, as 
 calculated to lead to an extravagant and criminal waste of 
 God's gifts, and to harden the heart against the wants of 
 others and the acts of charity. Vanity and self-gratification, 
 by long habit, blunts our sensibilities, and debases the soul to 
 the lowest and grossest sensuality. The corrupting influence 
 of vanity has become contagious, even in the Church of Christ, 
 where instead of that warm-hearted, brotherly love and sincere 
 
REVIEW. 393 
 
 piety, we find a heartless formality and despotic sanctimony 
 which spurns the old-fashioned and simple-hearted devotion as 
 weak-minded and of low degree. We no longer find amongst 
 professors that tender and generous soul, ever responsive to the 
 woes and wants of others, but in its stead we see the cold and 
 disingenuous heart which loves not its neighbor as itself, but 
 envies his prosperity. The unholy desire of praise, and the 
 eager clutch of venality concentrates every feeling in the me, 
 the adorable self, while humility, meekness, charity, disinterested 
 love and the other Christian virtues are wholly forgotten. A 
 lordly style, it matters not how obtained, commands respect 
 under our present and degenerate forms of society, while the 
 story of Lazarus and Dives, in the book of our faith, is looked 
 upon as the idle stories of Miinchhausen. And thus it is that 
 vanity and lawless ambition have ever been the greatest enemies 
 both to morality and religion, for the exposure and condemna- 
 tion of which, if formidable enough to be noticed, I shall doubt- 
 less be harshly dealt with by the corrupt and paradeful age in 
 which I live. Holding, as I do, that we have no more right 
 to abuse the blessings God has given us, by arrogantly assum- 
 ing his holy name, than we have to come in the name of the 
 Devil himself, and this fact it is that I aim to make plain to 
 the reader who may have been lead unconsciously astray by 
 false teachers, who come in the name of God to divide and dis- 
 tract his people. The blackest crimes ever committed on earth 
 have been done in the name of God, and the most licentious 
 and debasing systems of religion have also been got up and 
 sustained by the use of his holy name. Let the public, then, 
 be aware to trust no pretended learning and mystic mummery, 
 but to rely upon theu* own common sense and that divine reason 
 which God has given them as their only safe guide amidst the 
 turmoil and contradictory disputations of the blind and pre- 
 sumptuous leaders. They who cry Lord, Lord! and pray aloud 
 upon the street-corners and house-tops, are not the Lord's, but 
 they who sincerely and humbly doe their master's will, and 
 
 17* 
 
394 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE 
 
 not in the fashionable and velvet-cushioned churches alone, but 
 in the closet, the open fields, or in the silent and meditative 
 forest, where God in his own sacred fanes and peaceful solitudes 
 holds sweet converse with every sincere soul, that will spurn the 
 ostentatious arrogance and artistic dogmas of erring man, and 
 seek him where he may always be found, amidst his own unmis- 
 taken and glorious works. 
 
 That God is the author of nature, that God is our author, 
 and that he is our only dependance for temporal good and 
 eternal salvation, no honest man will deny, and why, then, look 
 to man, who is here but a day, for anything beyond his dying 
 good will. Thirty millions of our fellow-mortals pass from this 
 stage of action annually, while nations rise and sink, like bil- 
 lows of the troubled ocean, and are lost through endless ages, 
 while the earth " abideth forever." We should not, then, look 
 to dying man for the greatness and goodness of God, but to 
 his own mighty and imperishable works. If the reader whose 
 soul has not been contracted to a nut-shell, by the petty isms 
 of theology and the dry and drivelling details of our schools, 
 will contemplate those solemn and majestic piles, as the Andes, 
 the Alps, and the Apennines, that tower to heaven and repose 
 their hoary heads in regions of eternal sunshine, he will feel the 
 might and awful majesty of that God, who is not the tool of 
 -a party, nor the meagre and gossipping God of our little creed- 
 makers, but the great and august Jehovah, the maker and the 
 manager of the mighty universe. Thus elevated, chastened, and 
 prepared to enjoy nature, the works of almighty God, let him 
 cast off the pulpit slanders against the God of nature, and fol- 
 low me to the mighty cataract of Niagara, where the congre- 
 gated waters of ten thousand streams rush like mountain-waves 
 down the rocky declivity, with maddening fury, and plunge from 
 an awful hight headlong down into a deep, dark, fathomless, 
 and foaming abyss, over which is ever seen suspended in the 
 trembling sun-beams the unbroken and everlasting covenant 
 of God, and where in the deep and solemn tones of thunder 
 
REVIEW. 
 
 395 
 
 that shake the solid earth, his voice is ever and anon heard, 
 and he will look with compassionate contempt npon the be- 
 nighted and degraded condition of man, blinded as he is to the 
 light of reason and the God of nature, by the teachings of his 
 fellow-mortals, and debased below the dignity of an immortal 
 soul, by their mystic mummeries and man-worship. The pupil, 
 thus initiated into the beauties of nature, and the powers of 
 God, may pass on from this sublime scene of solemn meditation 
 into the softer and more placid retreats of this God's goodly 
 garden. His footsteps may stray from rugged steeps to gentle 
 slopes, by gushing fountains, through warbling wood-lands, and 
 over flowery meads and pearling brooks, and where, o where is 
 that blighting curse which God, on account of the apple, has 
 put upon all his works ! 
 
 Tiie soul, now freshly emancipated from the atrocious and 
 oppressive dogmas of party, may, like the noble eagle, sit free 
 from his dirty cage, breathe the pure and untainted air, and 
 luxuriate amidst the calm and soft delights of kind and gentle 
 liiature. Invited on through cooling and sequestered vales, 
 where whispering pines spread their fragrance upon the passing 
 breeze, and murmuring rills wind slowly on with a lullaby, 
 sweet as angel whispers, to the meditative and pensive soul, he 
 cannot but feel the presence of an all wise and superintending 
 providence, where no vulgar brawl of party with the fiery malice, 
 of devils, and passions foul as hell are allowed to mar the 
 sacred harmony of these hallowed retreats. Here, in the full 
 fruition of God's glorious works, far removed from the sweating 
 toil, vain glorious ambition and vengeful passions of men are 
 lulled in profound silence and soothed by the placid hand of 
 Tiature, is the soul left free to commune with its God. No fiery 
 feuds or distracting creeds here disturb the anxious mind, but 
 soft as infant's breathings come the wooing zephyrs freighted 
 with incense from Flora's enchanted bowers, where the muses 
 tune their lyres, and the sylvan deities their vigils keep. 
 The student of nature, after having cast off all ma^^-cyeated 
 
396 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 gods with their vindictive malice and contemptible jealousies, 
 brawls and disgraceful bickerings, and communed with the 
 kind, adorable and eternal God of nature in his own sacred 
 temple and peaceful solitudes, as related above, may now take 
 his second lesson, which will farther convince him of the blind 
 and bigoted folly of man, and lift his soul far above the sordid 
 strife and petty party dogmas of this world. Let his emanci- 
 pated and immortal soul gaze through the telescopic eye which 
 God has aflSxed to his marvelous frame work, upon that glori- 
 ous orb of day, the radiant crown of creation, as he dispenses 
 light, warmth, and life to every living creature on earth, and 
 with a power far beyond all human conception, holds a firm 
 and eternal grasp upon those mighty worlds that whirl with 
 lightning speed around him, and he will with rapturous adora- 
 tion cry out with the inspired writer, " Thine, O Lord, is the 
 greatness, and the glory, and the majesty ; for all that is in 
 Heaven and earth is thine. Lift up your eyes on high and be- 
 hold who hath created these things, who bringeth forth their 
 host by numbers : — I, the Lord, who maketh all things." And 
 again, " We know God," says the Apostle, " by the things that 
 are made." 
 
 Yes, and far, far beyond the region of our solar spheres lies 
 open before us the resplendent and boundless empire of God, 
 where we may gaze through the blue depths of immensity upon 
 a mass of globes in the canopy of heaven, that will equal thir- 
 teen hundred and twenty millions of worlds of the size of our 
 earth. Yes, yet and again, far, far beyond the utmost stretch 
 of mortal vision, the enraptured soul, though winged with di- 
 vine meditation, is lost in the stellar and nebular regions of 
 immensity, and left to contemplate the might and majesty of 
 the great Jehovah, and the inconceivable extent and the efful- 
 gent splendor and unspeakable glory of his vast universe. 
 Lessons like these will give to the man pufifed up with petty 
 party-creeds and technical dogmatisms a crushing consciousness 
 of his own exceeding littleness and contemptible imbecility 
 
REVIEW. 39t 
 
 The contemplative soul may return from the interminable 
 regions of space to view our own globe in its ceaseless rounds, 
 presenting alternately every portion of its surface to the great 
 central luminary, and rushing through trackless space with a 
 velocity two hundred times greater than that of a cannon ball, 
 freighted with seas, rivers, mountains and forests, and spilling 
 not a drop of water, nor disturbing a tender shrub. Thus 
 that God has done all things well, and that he has intended us 
 to be happy, instead of miserable, as is preached, by vain glori- 
 ous little demi-gods, all nature cries aloud. The blessings he 
 has so profusely spread around us are too numerous for denial, 
 except by a soul perverted by man worship, and stultified by 
 the dry and drivelling details of our modern institutions. 
 
 The pupil, in order to farther enjoy God's natural blessing, 
 may gaze upon our glorious luminary as he slowly and majesti- 
 cally sinks beneath the western horizon, and spreads his parting 
 and gorgeous rays upon the quiet sky, and turning to the east, 
 behold the queen of night in full orbid glory mount up the blue 
 and spangled arch high into the celestial spheres, there to meet 
 the starry hosts and illume the mighty dome of heaven. And 
 now it is, that under the legendary power of the scene and the 
 solemn hush of the sleeping world, when the moon has shot 
 forth her beams to the uttermost parts of earth, and sheeted 
 the silent forest with her liquid radiance, the man who has a 
 soul to feel must recognize an all pervading and ever present 
 superhuman power, that lifts his thoughts far above the grovel- 
 ling machinations of man. It is under such circumstances, and 
 in the home of the fabled deities, as wood-nymphs, fairies, and 
 light-heeled specters, which are seen to dance upon the tremb- 
 ling moonbeams, and sport through the leafy forest, that the 
 poet seeks his inspiration, and the man of sentiment enjoys his 
 purest thoughts. 
 
 Space has not admitted of but a faint and imperfect view 
 of the rich and inexhaustible fields of nature, and I have given 
 it simply to show that the condemnation of God's dispensations 
 
398 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and the representation of nature as unworthy of our respect, is 
 false in fact, and an unpardonable slander against the God of 
 nature, under whose kind protection we live, move and have 
 our being. The vast array of resplendant glories seen in the 
 celestial realms of infinity, have not yet been scanned, nor have 
 the recondite and unfathomable depths of nature been revealed 
 to view. Yet the human mind, if freed from the dwarfing in- 
 fluence of modern education, and put to early training in the 
 laws cf nature, it would prove ample for the development of 
 her every phenomena, which the myS'tic recluse and technical 
 pedagugue can never know. The guileless and guiltless soul, 
 if kept as pure and unsullied as it comes fresh from the hands 
 of its creator, would turn as naturally to him as the needle 
 turns to the pole. But alas ! alas ! how soon does the cere- 
 monial and arbitrary teachings of selfish and bigoted man pol- 
 lute and pervert that soul to the basest of purposes — the pro- 
 fitable and imperious sway of party. 
 
 That men have put their own words into the mouth of God, 
 is too obvious for denial, and that they have claimed to be, not 
 only the interpreters but the executors of those words, is equally 
 obvious. My position is, that God has not left the stupendous 
 issue of man's eternal destiny to the hypotheses ' of schools and 
 the formulses of bigoted and narrow minded sects, but that re- 
 ligion consists in a tie between the soul and the God who made 
 it, which no mummery of man can improve, and no power on 
 earth or in hell can sever. The Bible abounds in a language 
 so figurative, as to allow every upstart in religion to select such 
 parts as may best suit his blinded bigotry or sordid interests, 
 and thus it is that religion becomes polluted, not by the word 
 of God, but by the arbitrary words and despotic rule of men. 
 My neighbor Shakers have a Bible of their own, equal in size 
 to the old, and almost forgotten Bible, out of which ten thou- 
 sand more recent and admired revelations have been manufactur- 
 ed, called creeds, confessions of faith, &c., &c. The great book 
 of the Shaker creed, is called the Divine Manifesto, in which it 
 
REVIEW 399 
 
 is satisfactorily proven to those honest people, that the sin of 
 Adam was not in eating an apple, which they think ridiculous, 
 but that his crime was in his sexual commerce with Eve. They 
 hold that no one but God has a right to make people, and 
 hence it is, that they strictly and conscientiously prohibit every 
 effort of the kind. Brigham Young's, or the great and Rever- 
 end Joe Smith s creed, also taken from the old Bible, holds to 
 doctrines exactly the reverse, and enjoin it upon the Latter-day 
 Saints, as a religious duty to manufacture as many bodies as 
 possible for the habitation of those surplus spirits that God has 
 made and set afloat in search of tenements of clay, which they 
 fancy to seek as a shelter for the time being. This Mormon 
 doctrine, or creed, is certainly more rational, kind, and humane 
 than that of Mother Ann Lee, in as much as the latter permits 
 those naked and shivering souls to howl and shriek in the 
 winter's blast without a feeling of sympathy, or the slightest 
 act of pleasing and easy labor, which would give them a home 
 and a shelter from the warring elements. 
 
 I have just finished reading a new and celebrated book 
 equally as learned and large as Joe Smith's creed, or the Shaker 
 Manifesto, entitled " The only Creed to Salvation," which also 
 professes to be taken from the old Bible, to prove the Calvinistic 
 Church to be the only authorized church of God, and, moreover, 
 that God has, all for his own glory, destined nine-tenths Df his 
 own offspring, those created by himself, to the endless torments of 
 hell. I have said that this book or these books, for there are 
 many of them, are as learned as the Shaker Bible, and, indeed, if 
 possible, more so; in as much as they go back beyond the date 
 of time, and long, long before Adam's pollution with Eve. Yes, 
 for sooth, if dates can be found in the realms of eternity, those 
 learned Divines have got them, by patiently searching the re- 
 cords of countless millions of ages, and penetrating along the 
 lengthened vista of time into the dark, silent, and solemn 
 abodes of past eternity, there to find upon the tablets of the 
 eternal Godhead the fixed and unalterable destiny of man. 
 
400 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 From the dates, beyond which no creed can claim, and from an 
 authority that none can gainsay, does the doctrine of election 
 claim its unquestionable superiority. The works, as I have said, 
 upon this creed, are very learned, but had they annexed to them 
 Holy Willie's prayer, as recorded by Robert Burns, their mean- 
 ing would be more fully understood. Holy Willie praises the 
 Lord for making of him an exalted example, and thanks him 
 for sending one to heaven and ten to hell, all for his own glory, 
 and not for any evil they had done him, &c. 
 
 But we will go on to few more creeds, out of the countless 
 numbers that hang upon the poor old Bible, like morbid excres- 
 cences, till they have well nigh destroyed its vitals. The Epis- 
 copal Church claims through a long and illustrious array of 
 bishops, an exclusive supremacy, while the Pope proves, de- 
 monstratively, by the most learned Divines on earth, that he 
 holds the keys both of heaven and of hell. The Baptist's creed, 
 it is well known, condemns all sprinkling and pouring as a crim- 
 inal evasion of the Bible command, as a mark of Church mem- 
 bership. And thus it is that, as a distinguished Divine says, 
 those warring and vindictive creed-makers, spit hell-fire and 
 damnation at each other. These learned works, so falsely called, 
 are not the works of God, but the little tricks of little men, to 
 no one of which a great or good man can subscribe, without 
 condemning all others, or granting all others to be equal to his 
 own, and in that alternative there could be no rational choice of 
 any man creed, so that when we come to investigate the creed- 
 making system fully, we are disgusted with all human creeds, 
 and forced to fall back upon the plain and simple commands 
 of God himself. 
 
 Now in this wild confusion and Bedlam of babblings, I think 
 that the Catholic Church has decidedly the advantage, both in 
 Divine learning and in canonical authority. But my ground- 
 right and eternal stand-point is, that they are all wrong, and 
 that the simple and unmistaken precepts of Christ, and his pure 
 example, if strictly followed, are ample for the salvation of every 
 
REVIEW. 401 
 
 creature on earth. And farther, that the vanity of man and 
 the pride and ambition of party have been the bane of disin- 
 terested and humble piety, and the opprobrium of religion. 
 Could I have my will, and God knows, my sincere wish, it would 
 be to give the clergy less labor and more religion. But alas ! 
 alas ! this I fear cannot be, for what sort of figure would a 
 preacher cut before a fashionable city audience, with the simple 
 sincerity of the Apostles, and with pretensions no greater than 
 that of Christ. And, above all, who, with the paradeful pre- 
 tentions and artictic taste of modern times, would pay a salary 
 for a service that every sincere and pious Christian could perform. 
 It is lamentably true, that in order to obtain an admired name 
 for deep learning and mystic powers, we are forced to vail our- 
 selves in sophistic and degrading ambiguities, and to put on a 
 studied dignity, galling and humiliating to the inner soul which 
 is concious of its own hypocrisy. And from this ignorant, arti- 
 ficial and corrupt state of modern society, it is, that Doctors of 
 Divinity as well as Doctors of Medicine are, from the necessity 
 of a living, compelled to dissemble, or in vulgar terms, humbug 
 the people. 
 
 A friend of mine, very recently, told me a good anecdote 
 in full illustration of this grievous fact. The first physician in a 
 certain case, was discharged by his patient, because he was 
 honest and plain enough to tell the patient that he had a sore 
 throat, and the second doctor having some hint of the fact, 
 answered the sick man, when questioned, .that his case was 
 highly abnormal and had degenerated into Synanche Tonselaris. 
 
 " Doctor !" cried the patient, " do say that word 
 again." 
 
 ** Why, sir, I said, that you were at present laboring under 
 Synanche Tonselaris." 
 
 " Why, think Doctor, that fool told me that I had nothing 
 but a sore throat, and I told him I had no use for such a dunce. 
 Doctor, what did you call it ?" 
 
 " I told you sir, in plam terms, that the morbid condition of 
 
402 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 your system was obvious, and that it had terminated into Sy- 
 nanche Tonselaris." 
 
 " doctor, it must be a monstrous bad complaint, think you 
 can cure me, doctor." 
 
 " Now, though your diagnosis is clear, your prognosis is 
 doubtful, yet I think that by prudent care, and skillful treat- 
 ment you may recover." 
 
 " O, well, doctor, do stay all night, and I will pay you any- 
 thing you ask me." 
 
 Thus was the honest doctor sent away without compensation, 
 when the other by a pious fraud got a fat fee. The vis medi- 
 catrix naturae, with a dexterous use of such high sounding and 
 charming words have made many a quack rich. 
 
 If asked why or how calomel purges and tartar pukes, no 
 honest answer can be given, other than that God has made 
 them so to do, but this would be too honest, and, consequently, 
 unsatisfactory; therefore, we answer with some semblance of 
 wisdom, that one acts by its cathartic and the other by its emetic 
 powers. Opium produces sleep by its soporific quality, and grass 
 green by its vegetative power. Flat truisms can never obtain 
 cast, or collect tythes from the masses, and hence the necessity 
 of mystery, by the aid of which elaborate arguments as well as 
 splendid sermons are made up. This peiitio prindpii, or begging 
 the question, is just as common amongst Divines, as amongst doc- 
 tors and canting demagogues, each making the most of their capi- 
 tal in their own way. The Divine proves God to be eternal, by 
 assuming the position that he is without beginning and without 
 end, and, therefore, eternal. These are contemptible sophisms 
 and shallow shifts, by the aid of which many a man is worship- 
 ped, and many a living obtained from the labor of the silfy and 
 servile community. If asked why we have two legs instead of 
 four, common sense would answer, simply because God made us 
 so, when the people's learned expounders would say, because we 
 are bipeds and not quadrupeds, that is, we are what we are, be- 
 cause we are what we are. 
 
REVIEW. 403 
 
 Now, though the examples of deep learning, as above given, 
 may seem ridiculous, thej constitute almost the sum total of the 
 mystic and farcical learning of the day, called polemic or con- 
 troversal theology. Modern theology is made up of words 
 without meaning, and of learned distinctions without a differ- 
 ence. Thus, I hope, it may be seen that my object in rendering 
 the vain pretentions of man to mystic learning, as ludicrous as 
 it really is, is to open the eyes of the reader to what constitutes 
 unsophisticated morality and simple and sincere piety in religion. 
 
 Party creeds and controversal theology are certainly stumbl- 
 ing-blocks in the Church of God, for it is very obvious that 
 except unity and plurality, discord and harmony can be recon- 
 ciled as one and the same, this affectation of learning in Divinity, 
 which produces all the party creeds and discord in the Church, 
 must be condemned, and if, on the contrary, they can be recon- 
 ciled as one and the same, and of equal efficiency in the sight 
 of God, it follows, as a matter of necessity, that the clergy are 
 criminally in fault in pretending any superiority of creed, and in 
 their shameless abuse of each other in maintaining false creeds 
 and misleading souls. 
 
 It is usual for leaders of parties, when charged with enter- 
 taining an unkind and persecuting spirit, to affirm that there is 
 no difference amongst Christians, when the fact is so plain that 
 none but fools or knaves, would spend their whole lives in hot 
 disputes about nothing, or in support of a mere verbal difference. 
 And now, as we cannot charge the clergy with being either 
 knaves or fools, their only escape from this dilemma is for them to 
 grant the fact, when they say that there is no difference in the 
 warring creeds of Christians, that they do not mean what they 
 say. It is also common, yes, too common, for superstitious and 
 idolatrous professors to arrogantly lecture their neighbors for 
 not joining the Church, when no honest man, of enlarged and 
 elevated soul, could, without violating every sound principle of 
 Christianity, subscribe to the articles of any one creed, those 
 creeds being not the word of God, but the fabrication of erring 
 
404 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 and ambitious men, who in different ages, in different countries, 
 and even in the same little neighborhood, have their own little 
 and contracted views of what constitutes religion. 
 
 Now I will grant that the professor, who aims to proselyte 
 all around him, is honest, yet it is more than probable, that the 
 man he solicits is a better Christian than himself, in as much 
 as he eschews all human authority and worships God in true 
 spu'it and in truth, not according to the Gospel by Calvin or 
 any other man, but according to the Gospel of Christ. Re- 
 ligion, in my opinion, is the simplest thing in the world, re- 
 quiring no ostentatious displays or artistic formalities, but a 
 mere sincerity of heart, for the precepts of Christ and his meek 
 and humble life are such as to ask for no creed makers, or learned 
 and rhetorical flourishes, or vain and fruitless disputations. A 
 man may be just as good as he wants to be, without joining 
 any party of men, just as a man may be as sober as he wishes 
 to be, without joining a temperance society. Yes, and in like 
 manner may a man be a charitable and kind-hearted man, with- 
 out joining either the Masons or Odd-Fellows; yet I do not 
 object to church or to any other human fellowship, as it does, 
 by vanity and worldly pride, induce many a man to act up- 
 rightly and honestly, whose defective heart would otherwise 
 prove delinquent. 
 
 But it may be, and, indeed, often is said, that though all 
 creeds may be in error and an evil, that there is a choice of 
 evils, and that we should, therefore, join some one church-party, 
 which position I would hold to be legitimate, were all the 
 foundations of piety based upon factitious and false creeds, but 
 as we have the plain and unmistaken words of Christ, and his 
 pure and unaffected example before us, I hold it to be a direct 
 insult to God to ask man for his adverse and distracting inter- 
 pretations, or submit to his sectarian vanity and despotic rule, 
 and hence it is, that men of enlightened and enlarged souls, 
 who know God through his mighty works and unmistaken 
 
REVIEW. 405 
 
 words, feel it a degradation to submit to the arbitrary and 
 vascillating follies of man. 
 
 And now I ask in all sincerity, what virtue there is in the 
 mere formality of joining a church, and whether a good man 
 out of the church is not a good man, and a bad man in the 
 church a bad man, and whether rehgion consists in human 
 formalities, or in a secret and unostentatious tie between the 
 heart and its God. And again, whether there is any more 
 meekness, moderation, charity, honesty and true piety in the 
 church than out of it, and in truth, whether there is not more 
 worldly pride and vanity in a modern church than out of it. 
 Our village churches are substitutes for the theatre and opera 
 of cities, where the apeing community go to catch the fashions, 
 and the members of churches being as much infected by the 
 contagion as any, crowd the front ranks. Enter a modern 
 fashionable church, and there you see the fine preacher, not in 
 sack-cloth and ashes, but in costly linen and fine broad-cloth, 
 nor does he deign to speak in that simple and unsophisticated 
 style of Christ and his apostles, but divides and subdivides his 
 subject, and enters so deeply into abstract and metaphysical 
 refinings as to make himself mysteriously unintelligible to his 
 audience, and thus obtains the reputation of deep and mystic 
 learning, which never fails t( secure the largest salary. This 
 man's members are hke himself, (to be pitied, for they mean no 
 harm,) as fully puffed up as Satan himself could desire, with all 
 the vain glorious parade and show of this world. Were rail- 
 roads to fail in their useful purposes, not a hoop could be spared 
 from the church, nor is there a fashionable professor, from the 
 prelate's wife or daughter down, who would shed one out of 
 the many cumbrous skirts to cover a poor and shivering fellow- 
 mortal. Christians, in their chase after the pampered harlots 
 of Paris, who give tone to fashions, and in their worship of 
 Count Dorsay, the paragon of folly, seem to have forgotten the 
 Bible account of creation, which makes Adam the common 
 father of the human family, and that we are all, whether poor 
 
406 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 or rich, brothers and sisters, who have a rightful claim to our 
 kind sympathies and a j^ortion of the blessings which God has 
 bestowed upon us. If the means used in costly corsets to choak 
 God's vitals and degenerate the human family, and the pon- 
 derous skirts that weigh down many a poor wretch to the 
 grave, and I fear to perdition, was used in charity, to elevate 
 the poor orphan and afflicted of our race, to a high standard 
 of intellectual and moral perfection, O what brotherly love, 
 harmony and happiness might prevail in the human family to 
 the frowning down of all vice and unchristian fashions and 
 customs of our country. Then, indeed, should we truly live 
 under a republic, instead of a frowning aristocrasy, then, too, 
 would the enlightened and emancipated soul commune freely 
 with its God, instead of being proscribed by the formulary 
 edicts of a pompous and oppressive hierarchy. 
 
 We have but to read the past history of the world to see 
 how the clergy, when they once get firm hold upon the people's 
 purse, are prone to indulge in all manner of worldly extra- 
 vagances, and though the people in this country exercise more 
 freedom and independence, both in thought and action, than 
 the more priest-ridden countries, they are gradually being 
 wound up, thread by thread, as the spider binds his prey, and 
 to this there should be no objection, were there any religion in 
 it, but as it leads both to the destruction of religion and the 
 damnation of souls, every sincere and pious Christian should 
 guard against its insidious and baneful influence. I know a 
 prelate, who but recently left his flock unprovided for in New- 
 Orleans, because he could sell them the Gospel for no more 
 than ten thousand dollars a year, when Christ and his Apostles, 
 doubtless equal to this preacher, though not esteemed as such 
 bj^the people, gave the Gospel free of charge. Yes, but Christ 
 making no great display in the world, could claim no great 
 salary, besides which he used the Gospel for the good of souls, 
 when now-a-days it is claimed as a monopoly of the clergy, sold 
 to the highest bidder, and appropriated to the secular benefit 
 
REVIEW. 407 
 
 of their divine and adorable selves. This same great Divine 
 strove to get up a literary institution in New- York, the fee for 
 session to be six hundred dollars, thus excluding the poor, and 
 thereby establishing an aristocracy, which our country, as he 
 maintained, was old enough and rich enough to support, and 
 that we had just as good a right to such noble distinctions as 
 other countries. 
 
 These are startling facts that should sink deep into the 
 heart of every man who wishes his country well, for though 
 they may seem but trifles unworthy of notice, they are like the 
 infection of a fatal disease, or the little sparks that consume 
 whole cities. But then, there is no cure for the slavish masses, 
 who with credulous heads and craving hearts have ever sub- 
 mitted with implicit obedience to the despotic rule of their fel- 
 low-mortals, instead of looking to God with a firm faith and 
 Cliristian heroism, as the only high and holy object obedience. 
 Fortitude to resist the corruptions introduced by high digni- 
 taries into the church of God, is the brightest jewel in the 
 Christian's crown, and 0, how many for the want of it fall into 
 the degrading and sinful habit of man-worship ; for what is 
 man but man, and what man who is worshipped, is better or 
 wiser in matters of true piety and devotion, than the wretch 
 who worships him ? Schisms and contentions in the church of 
 God we know to be the Devil's rich harvest, and yet do 
 the clergy sow all the seeds of this contention, and thus unin- 
 tentionally become Satan's most efficient servants, and God's 
 great enemies. 
 
 Love, the source of our redemption, and the golden girdle 
 that should bind the church of God and world of mankind into 
 one harmonious whole, is broken into ten thousand pieces by 
 vain-glorious creed-makers and the leaders of faction, who have 
 been the authors of more infidelity and vice, than all other Sa- 
 tanic influences on earth besides. The blackest crimes and 
 most cruel and damning deeds of men, have been committed by 
 devils in human form, who have come as agents of God and 
 
408 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 rulers of the people. The hearts of such fiendish monsters have 
 been steeled against the sad lament of the widow and the or- 
 phans piteous cries, nor could the pious prayers and humble 
 supplication of the poor and unoffending victims save them 
 from the broiling coals. I do not refer the reader to the 
 butcheries of Mohamet, and other religious leaders of the world 
 in general, but to those foul, fiendish and fearful monsters who 
 come in the name of our meek, lowly and loving Jesus, to di- 
 vide, distract, and cruelly mistreat the church of God. Heart- 
 burnings, bickerings, and sectarian hatred has ever been the 
 result of our learned and controversal divinity, and yet strange 
 to tell, the unthinking and credulous masses in trembling doubt 
 and in misery and despair, hug those very chains that bind 
 them to their eternal doom. The firm and unflinching Christ- 
 ian will hold in contempt the shallow and ever shifting opinions 
 of men, and taking the unraistaken and granted words of 
 Christ as their faith, and his pure life as their unerring example, 
 fear nothing from the combined powers of earth and hell. 
 This doctrine I know to be odious, inasmuch as it depends 
 upon God instead of man, but be it so, as I have but little to 
 expect from men here, and nothing whatever through the end- 
 less ages of eternity. If there be a God, that God will surely 
 reward those who defend his church from foul and fatal infec- 
 tion, and himself from gross slander, by those who take the 
 words from his sacred records, and garble them to suit their 
 own base and ambitious purposes. Subterfuge is the only 
 refuge for sectarian Christianity, and it can no more flow from 
 a sincere soul, than hatred can flow from the fountain of love. 
 Double dealing, though the fashionable religion of the day, is 
 the invariable index to a base spirit, which seeks the honors 
 of the world and the plaudits of man more than the secret ap- 
 probation of its creator ; and though the spirit of truth is 
 known to dwell in meekness and unaflfected piety, it can never 
 gain cast in what is falsely called the higher and better circles 
 of fashionable life, where a hollow-hearted and formal profession 
 
REVIEW. 409 
 
 constitutes the summura bonum of religion. Though Christ 
 was born and reared in poverty, religion in low and uncultivat- 
 ed life now-a-days is worth nothing, yet when tested by the all- 
 seeing eye, is found to be as pure as the fountains that gush 
 from the wild and uncultivated mountains, while the stagnant 
 and boasted pools of the cultivated fields are filled with filth 
 and sedimental impurities. One is of nature, and the other of 
 art ; one of God, and the other of man. To preach the simple 
 and good old fashioned gospel of Christ before a modern con- 
 gregation, would be to throw pearls before swine, as in such 
 circles the pampered and sensual soul has lost all relish for 
 heavenly food, and seeks nothing beyond the smiles of the 
 pastor and the formalities of the church. The pugilistic who 
 comes fresh from his thorough training in party creeds, and 
 prepared to meet and batter down all opposing creeds, is the 
 preacher for the people, and they will neglect all other duties, 
 and go hundreds of miles to listen to their billingsgate abuse of 
 each other. If all Christians agree, as it is very common for 
 professors to falsely assert, why should those unbrotherly, un- 
 christian, yes, and I may add unhallowed controversies have 
 taken place between Campbell, Rice, Percel and others of our 
 own vicinity, to the disgrace of the peaceful church of Christ, 
 and the disturbance of good order in society. And now, this 
 is the reason I insist that Satan, the grand adversary of 
 Christ, was the first author of the creeds of Christendom, for 
 the purpose of dividing his flock, and to make enemies and 
 persecutors of each other, and that in order to carry out his 
 wily purposes, he next established theological institutions, 
 where his troops were to be trained to fight in the name of 
 Christ against each other, nor does he care how much they 
 abuse him in the mean time, so that he reaps his harvest from 
 their dissensions. To illustrate the unquestionable fact, as here 
 maintahied, let a sceptic attend and take down the testimony 
 in those theological debates, and he will prove from their own 
 assertions that every word in the Bible is false, as forsooth, 
 
 18 
 
410 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 each creed proves every other to be false, and in turn is proven 
 by every other to be itself false. Hence it will be seen by the 
 observing and honest reader, why it is that I suppose the 
 Devil to be at the head of all these bickerings, heart burnings, 
 revengeful feelings and persecutions in the church of God, for 
 it is very certain that God himself can neither instigate nor 
 approbate it, thus leaving no alternative authority as I have 
 said, but the Devil himself for such fiery feuds and hellish 
 agencies. And I am here charitable enough to admit, that 
 when the preacher asks from the pulpit why it is that the 
 world is daily growing more wicked, amidst our churches and 
 literary institutions, he is ignorantly innocent of the insidious 
 and unconscious influences exercised by himself, through the in- 
 strumentality of the wily old serpent, who seduced God's first- 
 born, and has held firm hold of those who have appeared in his 
 name, from that day to this, thus securing to himself, accord- 
 ing to the theological and learned hypotheses of the day, at 
 least one million of God's beloved children, for one, whom God 
 has been able to save for himself. 
 
 And now, it is not the Bible itself that leads to all these 
 ludicrous and disgraceful disputes, but the misinterpretation of 
 it, by pretended learning in divinity, and I would not expose 
 such pretentions to the public, mischievous as they are, were 
 they not heard in the pulpits and daily seen upon the streets, 
 and hence, 
 
 It cannot be faulty to repeat 
 
 A dialogue that walks the street, 
 
 Or can my gravest friends forbear 
 
 To laugh when such disputes they hear.'*' 
 
 Feeling as I do, the criminality of every evasion in thought, 
 word or deed, in the teachings of morality, I have spoken in 
 plain terms of those bloody and fiendish sectarian leaders, who 
 have made man the greatest enemy of man, destroyed the unity 
 of God's holy church, and brought religion into doubt and dis- 
 repute. The name of devils certainly cannot be too harsh a 
 term to aoply to them when in their hideous and heart-sicken- 
 
REVIEW. 411 
 
 ing deeds, they have broiled each other alive, and devils could 
 certainly do no more. All history, both sacred and profane, 
 testify to the most vindictive and horrid butcheries being com- 
 mitted in the name of God ; and what is shocking to the sensi- 
 tive soul, and degrading to the honor of man, is tliat those san- 
 guinary monsters have become the demi gods of party. 
 
 Now, though every sentence in the following work is intend- 
 ed to support religion, morality, law and order, and to contri- 
 bute to the happiness of man, I have had to attack vulgar 
 prejudice in its stronghold, and consequently may expect much 
 stir among the yellow jackets and ant's nests around me ; but 
 I cannot more than be put to death, as was Christ in his efforts 
 to improve religion — suffer the fate of his Apostles ; swallow 
 the poison with Socrates, in defending the honor of God, and the 
 dignity and the rights of man ; or to be anathematized by an 
 earthly and despotic hierarchy, and degraded before the delud- 
 ed masses as a heathenish infidel and enemy of religion, as 
 was Luther for his god-like fortitude and noble efforts in eman- 
 cipating and elevating the enslaved and degraded soul of man. 
 
 It might appear vain and ridiculous in me to bring up these 
 parallels in connection with my little book ; but as the great 
 Amazon, the sire of rivers, is made up by the aggregate con- 
 tribution of small streams, and reforms and revolutions are ia 
 like manner brought about by the combined power of human 
 opinion ; I feel that I may contribute my little part, hoping 
 that thousands of others may rally to the standart of morality 
 and good order, and hurling from power all sectional dema- 
 gogues and sectarian demi-gods ; thus save our country from 
 threatened ruin, for without such reform, will this happy 
 government, as sure as the march of time, suffer the fate of ail 
 others. 
 
 With friendly hand I've held the glass 
 To all promiscuous as they pass, 
 If folly there her likeness view, 
 I fret not that the mirror ^s true ; 
 And vshould their guilty forms offend, 
 I made them not but would amend." 
 
412 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 " Vice is a monster of such hideous mien, 
 That, to be hated, needs but to be seen." 
 
 If asked, why it is that my thoughts are so unique, and 
 my objections so great to conventional customs and human 
 authority, in ethical science, and matters of religion, I answer, 
 that there is a silent and mystic power in the primeval forest, 
 that awakes the soul to deep and solemn meditation, far beyond 
 the vain and arrogant gabblings of men ; and here it was, in 
 those voiceless wilds and slumberous solitudes, amidst the 
 marks of former and ruined worlds, and the tombs of eternal 
 ages, that my thoughts ran out and back through mouldering 
 ages, upon the ever vasselating and impotent character of man, 
 in his short and melancholy march from time to eternity. I 
 have traced man's every thought, as will be seen in my article 
 on sensation and perception, to their shallow and fickle foun- 
 dation, and find that they inhere in nothing stable, but rise by 
 the shifting breeze like waves of the ocean, then sink and are 
 gone forever, except again awoke by the power which first 
 created them, being as much dependent upon the circumstances 
 that begot them, as is the effect upon its cause, or the stream 
 upon its source. Thoughts are mere fortuities so far as regards 
 any human power over them, each thought being prompted by 
 its antecedent and sufficient cause, and that by a prior cause, 
 and so on and on ad infinitum, there being not a single gap or 
 broken link in the eternal chain of causality, the first link in 
 the endless series being held firm and fast by the hand of God 
 himself, the creator and primum mobile of all things. 
 
 Both the intellectual and vital phenomena of man are forced 
 states, nor has he any more power over his thoughts than he 
 has over the pulsations of his heart, or the powers of digestion 
 and assimilation, each being equally dependent upon external 
 and antecedent agencies, not only for their existence, but their 
 organic harmony and healthful activity. But as it will soon be 
 seen, in my article on "Volition, that man's every act is governed 
 by laws as pre-ordained, fixed, and undeviating as those by 
 
REVIEW. 413 
 
 which Grod governs his vast and harmonious universe, we will 
 return, for a moment, to the book of nature, God's first and 
 glorious revelation of himself and of his eternal and immutable 
 laws whence we derive all our knowledge of science and of self- 
 preservation ; yes, and where the loftiest flights of imagination 
 and the purest emotions of soul are enjoyed, far beyond what 
 the arrogant pretentions and petty arts of man can bestow. 
 When deeply buried in the gray old forest, and far removed 
 from the unhallowed haunts and cruel persecutions of man, our 
 thoughts left free from human excitements and the corruptions 
 of party, grow deep, solemn, intense, and religiously just. Here 
 amidst God's sublime and glorious works, and in those calm and 
 tranquillizing retreats, we can meditate with an unbiased and a 
 true integrity of soul. Let the student of nature cast off all the 
 contemptible conventionalities of man and the virulence of feel- 
 ing engendered by party faction, and reposing upon some lofty 
 peak of our towering cliffs, view the scene around him. In stern 
 and solemn grandeur stand the ruined ramparts of eternal 
 ages before him, while their dark and frowning crags, flung out 
 in dread array, threaten destruction to all beneath. Afar off 
 is seen the towering domes of the everlasting hills, sleeping 
 in the quiet sky, and onward yet, peak surmounts peak, till 
 the blue outlines sweep off into the invisible distance. 
 In the face of the moss-grown cliffs are seen the products of 
 old ocean's oozy bed, and the marks of miUionary ages stand 
 out in bold rehef, speaking volumes to the reflective mind, 
 in regard to the dispensations of God, and giving the lie to 
 vain man, who supposes God to have made everything for him, 
 when whole families of beings have lived and died long before 
 his creation, and when he has not an eye to see nor a capacity 
 to conceive of but a speck of God's vast universe. 
 
 The very pebble under his feet, which has been rounded by 
 the rolling flood, carries his thoughts back along the lengthened 
 vista of time into the unsounded depths of past eternity, whence 
 with sad and solemn pace they may tread back along the me- 
 
414 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 lancholj shores of time, beholding on every side, the remains of 
 former and ruined worlds, in the frames of organic beings, which 
 no longer exist on earth, and far beneath the mountains ponder- 
 ous crush, whole forests of the ancient floras of unknown date are 
 DOW being disinterred for the use of man. The very crag on 
 which he sits, is of submarine origin, and around him are seen 
 to sleep, in their rocky tombs, thousands of beings that once 
 had a life and a residence allotted them on this earth, as well as 
 himself, and after all the vain and sacrilegious boastings of man, 
 he has no more assurance of the favor of God, our common 
 creator, than they, for if there be a God, and a just God, justly 
 will he act towards all his creatures. But the dying sun has 
 sunk beneath the western peaks and left his hectic flush upon the 
 fast fading face of nature, symbolizing the dying soul that sinks 
 from this stage of action to its grave, but as our glorious 
 sun has gone to shine on other worlds and to rise again in un- 
 dying and exhaustless vigor, so are we assured that the confirm- 
 ed and undying soul will rise again to shine in the realms of 
 eternal bliss. The shades of night fall thick around, and a 
 silence as solemn and intense as that of death itself now reigns. 
 No sound is heard nor living creature seems to move, save the 
 owl and the bat that flit through the gloomy void beneath. 
 The eagle is upon his craggy throne and the noiseless vul- 
 ture has glid by on easy wing to his caverned cliffs. The home- 
 bound bee has hummed his last lay, and the ground crickets 
 low faint chirp is heard no more. The pall of death rests upon 
 the faded scene, and nothing is heard or felt, save the pulsations 
 of our own heart, every throb of which tells us that we are one 
 beat near our destined end, and that soon, yes, very soon, this 
 body must sink down to the dark abyss of eternal oblivion, 
 and after being dissolved into its primitive atoms, will be thrown 
 into the great laboratory or whirlpool of commingled elements, 
 again to be parceled out by the plastic hand of nature, into new 
 and unknown forms. And here it is, and now it is, that the 
 upstart man, poor silly wretch, may have a crushing conscious- 
 
REVIEW. 415 
 
 ness of his own insignificauce, and of the extreme pittance of 
 his allotted existence here. Yes, here it is that the lessons of 
 wisdom are to be learned, the illusions of hfe dispelled, and all 
 things duly appreciated. But it is midnight, and nothing breaks 
 the intense silence, save the doleful howl of the wolf, and the 
 wild scream of the panther, commingled with the voice of the 
 imprisoned waters that come up on the ebbing air, and seem to 
 sound the sad knell of departed time. This is no scene of imagi- 
 nation but one of reality, which I have often experienced, and 
 as often reflected as T now do. With subdued and chastened 
 awe, I have seen the finger of God, and felt that fearful power 
 which has lifted those Himalayan piles of awful sublimity from 
 nether darkness to the light of day, and in triumph thrown 
 them to the very skies. 
 
 But the sun of day, like the sun of our eternal redemption, 
 has risen in resplendent glory, and awoke milUons of minds that 
 slept, as it were, in death, to their active vocations of the day. 
 He has shot his luminous and life-giving rays into the darkest pits 
 and wildest nooks of the forest, filling the air with ten thousand 
 wild odors, and making it vocal with the thanks-giving notes of 
 the feather-ed songsters, showing unmistaken proof of the kind 
 dispensations of providence, and of God's watchful care over 
 all his creatures — " suffering not a sparrow to fall to the ground 
 without his notice." • The early flower now opens its virgin bosom 
 to the wooing zephyrs, and the whole face of nature is lit up 
 with a joyous serenity and heavenly harmony, showing a govern- 
 ment far above the vile and grovelling creeds, and the distract- 
 ing and desolating domination of man. 
 
 From this observatory of nature, the pupil may be — 
 
 Led through, the rampart's time worn way, 
 Mid ruin wide and old decay, 
 
 And down through caverns deep and dim arcades, by dark 
 owlet's nooks and old wizard's haunts, to the verdant and cool- 
 ing grot beneath, where the forest is dark with the undying 
 
416 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 laurel, flowering shrubs, and floating umbrage that kisses the 
 dimpling streams. Thence we might lead him — 
 
 To -winding brooks and rivers free, 
 That lave their way by rock and tree, 
 Midst wavy hills and mountains blue, 
 Where changing scenes are ever new. 
 
 But after contrasting an object of nature with that of art, 
 I will close this long preliminary. 
 
 When once hunting in a deep and secluded glen hard by, I 
 suddenly turned a point of rocks, and there beheld a young girl, 
 just budding into blushing womanhood. She had washed in the 
 brook and was combing her hair, as I approached her, and 
 though startled as much as a timid fawn of the wild forest, she 
 did not fly before me, but stood under the arch of a moss grown 
 rock, from the base of which burst out a pure and purUng spring. 
 Not having seen her father's cabin, which was hid by the dense 
 foliage of the forest, I was as much surprised as herself, and 
 whether the novelty of the scene heightened my imagination, 
 in regard to her native charms matters not, as loving the works 
 of God more than that of man, and nature more than art; on 
 returning to camp, I recorded the following lines for the recrea- 
 tion of my companions, it being enjoined upon every member to 
 relate at night, the adventures of the day. 
 
 There in nature's bower stood, 
 
 A pure unsullied maiden bud, 
 
 Whose modest blush and gentle mien, 
 
 Would well befit a seraph queen. 
 
 Her love lit eye and dimpled cheek, 
 
 Impressed with more than words can speak, 
 
 And to her beauty beaming face, 
 
 Was added perfect form and grace — 
 
 A model foot and agile limb, 
 
 A tapered arm and waist so trim, 
 
 With swelling breast? so full and fair, 
 
 With ruby lips and raven hair; 
 
 A breth of nectar and cheek all bloom, 
 
 Who, that's a man, would not be a groom. 
 
 For not in this case, as in what is called high and artistic 
 
REVIEW. 417 
 
 life, would the cheek become bedaubed by the stuffing of foul 
 chemicals from artificial faces, nor would the olfactories be of- 
 fended by the fetid eructations from mid-night suppers and 
 soured wines, more intolerable than the fumes of the city sewer. 
 Ko emetics are here necessary to cleanse the stomach of the 
 dregs of luxury and rid the brain of sick head-aches; but the 
 fountains flowing free, and the air. with silicious purity, coming 
 fresh from the fragrant pines and perennial forest; all is health 
 and happiness. No loathsome exhalations or harmful damps, as 
 upon our rich and loomy lands are here known, nor has the 
 burgler's hand, the bloody sword, or the corrupting influences 
 of ambition ever entered those sacred retreats and quiet abodes 
 of innocence and simplicity. This is truly the unoffending and 
 favored Eden of earth, and worthy of more regard that the ac- 
 cursed Eden of old, which has eternally damned the world of 
 mankind, and had Milton, instead of stealing from Homer's wars 
 of the Gods, distorting his imagination and slandering our peace- 
 ful God and his holy Angels in their disgraceful and doubtful 
 fights with the poor old Devil, who will trouble no one either in 
 heaven or on earth, that will stay at home and honestly attend 
 to their own business, had have spent, his talents in depicting 
 these blest Edens, and truthful and natural scenes of real life, 
 his book would have been greatly more worthy of virtuous con- 
 sideration. But some great Church leader has called him the 
 divine Milton, and all must follow, with as much good sense and 
 independent thought as is exercised by sheep, when, if the leader 
 jumps into a well, the whole flock follows. There can be no- 
 thing more insidiously corrupting to the youthful mind than 
 those epic romances, that bring not only man in bloody struggle 
 with man, but brings Gods by the ears, and makes a hellish 
 Bedlam in the peaceful abodes of heaven, but such is the influ- 
 ence of human authority, that heaven and hell may be made 
 convertible terms — white is black, and black white, and both 
 one and the same, as vain-glorious man shall ordain. Wars 
 amongst nations, fillibusterings, mobs, duels, and murders of 
 
 18* 
 
418 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 every damning dye, have their origin in the false inculcations 
 from high authority of chivalrous deeds and of military glory; 
 and the veriest laggard amongst the devotees of creed, has but 
 to look back upon religious wars, crusades, and horrid persecu- 
 tions, ill which the Devil had his fill, and then to recollect the reign 
 of Knight-errantry and the prowess of maddened folly, to know 
 that what I affirm is true. More than half of the heart-rend- 
 ing scenes and frightful butcheries of the world, have arisen 
 from the lawless maraudings and cold blooded murders of the 
 inhuman Jews, as recorded in the Old Testament, since which 
 time, every fanatic, particularly in the Catholic faith, feels that 
 he has a sacred license to do the same. 
 
 These are the fruits of example, and as long as we remain 
 idolatrous, and look to mortal man for things immortal, will we 
 be prone to yield to the ambitious and selfish schemes of erring 
 man. 
 
 With laws from God as light as day, 
 In darkness still we grope our way, 
 Involved in doubt by fool or knave, 
 The free born soul is made a slave, 
 And though to heaven often cries, 
 With low bent knee and down cast eyes, 
 No power i^has to see the fraud, 
 That blinds it to the living God. 
 
 I quote the following few lines from Tennyson, as correspond- 
 ing with my own, above written. 
 
 " Perplexed in faith, but poor in deeds. 
 At last he beat his music out: 
 There lives more faith in honest doubt 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds." 
 
 But we will return to the subject of these reflections, an 
 object well worthy of the painter's pencil and of the poet's first 
 regard. But then this Sylvan Goddess was not of the bottle- 
 ended and fashionable form of the mother spider, nor of the 
 bloated rotund of the green fly, but was a perfect model of 
 God's own fancy, and with this taste of Deity, by the by, have 
 
REYIEW. 419 
 
 our modern fashionables fallen out, as they have, with his humble 
 simplicity in religion and all other things, and formed fashions 
 and written formulaes for themselves. 
 
 When parting with this lovely child of nature, whose eye 
 beamed with a capacity ample for the highest human attain- 
 ments, I handed her the following lines^ hastely formed with my 
 pencil. 
 
 Farewell, lovely maid, I shall see thee no more, 
 Till we meet on the banks of eternities' shore, 
 And then we will think of the Rockcastle cave, 
 And the spring where we met in the evergreen grove. 
 
 This was under the lofty cliffs and near the banks of the 
 Rockcastle river, where all is dark with the thrift of vegetation, 
 and where the " everlasting silence" of the rocks and hills have 
 not been broken from the early dawn of creation, but by the 
 voice of the huntsman's rifle, the horn, and the hound. In this 
 Eden of God's own little innocent and unoffending Eve, nature 
 reposed in her richest attire, and here, too, in the home of the 
 wood nymphs and sylvan deities, did Flora come forth in her 
 vernal robes, gemmed in the brightest hues and perfumed by 
 ten thousand sweet odors, from her fair and blooming train. 
 There was the grotto's cool and dripping arch, moss-grown and 
 crowned with many a flower and flaunting woodbine. And there, 
 too, was the gushing spring that flowed from beneath, form- 
 ing a limpid rivulet, which glid sparingly on, till lost in the 
 dense foliage of the overhanging and undying laurel, ivy and 
 holy, sacred trees, dedicated in classic days to the god Apollo, 
 and used as garlands to wreath the victor's brow. Yes, and 
 then there was the voice of the cataract, that softly echoed 
 through the imprisoned dell, the sweet chirp of birds, as they 
 sported from bow to bow, through the leafy forest, the buzz of 
 bees and the flutter of humming birds, as they sought the nec- 
 tared flowers, which, added to the sighing pines that tuft the 
 topUng heights and yield their fragrance to the passing breeze, 
 rendered this spot, to a soul who can enjoy the sacred scenes of 
 
420 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 nature, lovely and charming beyond the power of language to 
 express. 
 
 The reader will doutless excuse these rhymings and erotic 
 wanderings, when I tell him that ray motives are pure, and that, 
 as I have a contempt for the dull, artistic, and mechanical rules 
 of book-making, I have determined to boldly pursue my own 
 free and independent thoughts, lead where they may, believing, as 
 I do, that when the heart is right the head cannot be wrong. 
 Besides, I think my course legitimate with the object and title 
 of my book, and certainly greatly more pleasing and instructive, 
 in the teachings of human nature in its varied phases, and illus- 
 trating the works of God in their endless forms, than the dry 
 and common place details of our schools and books generally. 
 
 My resolve has been, neither to dack to the mandates of 
 fashion, nor to worship the man who plays the fool, but to act 
 with a firm and undeviating rectitude of moral purpose. I know 
 that the cold, selfish and incensate heart, being corrupted by 
 the fascinations of art, and immersed in the giddy whirls and 
 amorous wiles of our nocturnal awakenings, cannot enjoy the 
 calm and soft retreats of nature, and the life of artless simpli- 
 city and innocence. 
 
 Beginning with Adam, God's precepts have been spurned, 
 and his original designs thwarted, by the traterous passions and 
 arrogant pretentions of man, and it is by deserting the kind 
 and simple laws of God and yielding to the dogmatisms of man 
 that we become the victims of every wild delusion of fashion 
 and fraud, and are led into scenes that vitiate the taste and cor- 
 rupt the moral feelings, and prove, in the end, the mockery of 
 all our hopes. For this dream of life will soon be over, when 
 we shall lie down with our brother emmets in the dust, and care 
 no more for this poor body, or its few fetid remains from the 
 vermin's feast. From dust we came and unto dust we return, 
 and as naked we came into the world, naked and without hoops, 
 shall we appear at the judgment bar of God, there to account 
 for the deeds done in the body, and where the chaff will be 
 
REVIEW. 421 
 
 separated from the grain, and burnt as stubble. If such sepa- 
 ration could be made here, the poor would not perish for want 
 of fire, as there would be fuel enough to relieve the afflictions 
 of the whole human family. 
 
 Kemember, vain-glorious Dives, that thou hadst thy good 
 things in the other world, and Lazarus his evil things, and now 
 that he has his reward in heaven, thou art tormented in hell. 
 " Before God, all nations are as a drop of a bucket, and the 
 inhabitants of the earth as grasshoppers, yea, they are as noth- 
 ing and are counted to him less than nothing and vanity." 
 " No flesh shall glory in his sight." 
 
 The resplendent and boundless empire of God in all its in- 
 effable glory, may be unfolded to our raptured gaze, and the 
 bigoted and narrow minded man of fashion and of formal creeds 
 has no eye to see or soul to feel, while the inexhaustible riches 
 of nature with the impress of the divine spirit may be display- 
 ed around us, in the glowing light of heaven, and as blind as 
 the mole of nether darkness are the craven devotees to human 
 dictation and to vulgar prejudice. In short, the recondite and 
 unfathomable depths of nature are only revealed to minds of 
 higher thoughts and nobler feelings, that look not to the grovel- 
 ling machinations of man, but to the fixed, eternal, and immut- 
 ,able laws of the great Jehovah, for their lessons of wisdom. 
 
 More than two thousand years ago did Homer, Socrates, 
 Plato, and Aristotle, with the powers of inspiration scan the 
 arcane of nature, and leave to the world maxims, proverbs, and 
 intellectual and moral codes of instruction which has never since 
 been equalled. And the answer to this startling and omnious 
 fact why, and how it is, that in the early history of man, and 
 in a heathen land, the great intellects and brilliant lights of 
 earth have been found, is plain. The Greeks did not take up 
 all the early portion of their lives in cbnstringing the brain and 
 dwarfing the mind, by dead languages and dry details of petty 
 and local things, which serve only to make a pedantic display 
 in our daily fairs of fashionable life, where the beau-ideals with 
 
422 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRATE. 
 
 the butterfly's fame, worth and duration, will always find the 
 modern belles in chase. Yes, now it is and here it is, that a 
 few ready dimes will gingle louder and shine brighter than 
 many pounds of solid and unostentatious worth; and hence it 
 is that men of modern ambition, seek an education of brilliant 
 embellishment, to the neglect of those great and eternal prin- 
 ciples, by which we live, move, and have our being, and a want 
 of which knowledge leaves us in darkness and doubt, in regard 
 to the nature of God, of ourselves, and of the laws that are 
 to make us happy or miserable through time and eternity. 
 
 The Greeks, with minds far above such contemptible 
 conventionalities, fluttered not with the gaudy and epheme- 
 ral wings of insects, but soared aloft on eagle's pinions, and 
 breathed inspiration from the higher spheres. The pupil, in 
 early life, with a mind free aifd unincumbered by party creeds, 
 and untainted by the frauds of men, v/as put to the study of 
 nature, and God's irrevocable laws, by which all .things are gov- 
 erned. And, now, with these facts before us, it is an easy 
 matter to see why Demosthenes, the prince of eloquence, and 
 the other great masters in every department of life, whose date 
 was centuries before the Christian era, should have been so 
 superior to our men of the present date. When Shakespeare, 
 another student of nature, said there was sermons in trees, < 
 books in running brooks, and good in every thing, expressed 
 more than can be found in any whole volume of our modern text- 
 books, where the astounding falsehoods and stupid accumula- 
 tion of useless particulars, for ages past, are with great appa- 
 rent learning and complicacy, arranged and doggedly drilled 
 into the pupil's brains. Dead languages and special creeds, 
 occupy almost the whole of the educational portion of our lives, 
 which with the false and gratuitous assumptions, to suit the 
 purposes of party, and the logical quidities and abstract subtil- 
 ities based thereon, constitute the sum total of a modern college 
 education, from which no moral improvement or practical good 
 can ever be expected^ 
 
REVIEW. 423 
 
 It is granted by Sir William Hamilton, the greatest critic 
 of the age, that there has been no improvement in mental and 
 * moral science since the days of Plato and Aristotle; and Comte, 
 in his " Positive Philosophy," affirms that no one proposition 
 in mind, morals or religion, has been agreed upon by writers, 
 from that day to this, and it is as certain as that no number of 
 falsehoods can make a truth, that no improvement ever will be 
 made, till we abandon the ever vacillating machinations of mail 
 and look to the eternal and immutable laws of nature as our 
 guide. If the reader will look back into the history of man, 
 he will find that men existed five hundred years before Christ, 
 whose mighty minds still govern three-fourths of the human 
 family, and if from this he cannot draw lessons of practical 
 worth, he had better cease to read. 
 
 Confucius, Pythagoras and* Zoroaster, were amongst the 
 illustrious sages of that age, whose profound wisdom, and human 
 and disinterested sincerity has given them a name that will last 
 through eternal ages. Those consummate thinkers spoke not in 
 dead languages, or unmeaning types of non entities, but in the 
 universal language of the heart; and taught those primal and 
 august verities of the living God, that lifts the soul far above 
 the petty gossip and party struggles of this warring world. Such 
 ultra mundane wisdom was not obtained from the institutions of 
 man, but from the divine spirit which is everywhere seen im- 
 pressed upon the works of nature, and there are none of the 
 illustrious ancients who did not seek inspiration from that 
 quarter. Confiicius retired to the silent and meditative forests 
 and fields — Pythagoras, it is said, became inspired in the cave 
 of the Cretan Jupiter, while Zoroaster obtained divine wisdom 
 by twenty years solemn meditation amidst the awful and mac- 
 cessible solitudes of Elbrooze. Demosthenes did not gain his 
 irresistible powers of eloquence from dry and mechanical pedago- 
 gues, but somewhat like Patrick Henry, whose soul was enlarg- 
 ed and elevated by the natural scenes in fishing and hunting, 
 for he had no other training till he came forth like a blazing 
 
424 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 comet, but he trained himself to the voice of nature and the 
 bursting billows upon the solitary sea-shore. It is well known 
 that all the Grecian philosophers, those mighty men of imperish- 
 able fame, taught in the open fields; and Christ himself, resource- 
 able as he was, often fled from the face of man to forests, caves, 
 and mountains, and, indeed, the bosom of nature has been the 
 sacred retreat, not only for the Jews, but for persecuted Chris- 
 tians in all ages. 
 
 Every intelligent reader ought to know, without the recital 
 of those cases, that there is but one object of adoration, and 
 but one guide to truth; and I only bring them up here so show 
 their contrast with the grovelHng and slavish disciples of creeds, 
 who succumb to the arbitrary rule of man, and to justify myself 
 in introducing my readers to the simple and kindly instructive 
 scenes of nature. And now, as I have proposed to give the full 
 history of man, it becomes my duty to seek him in his every 
 condition of life, and I am well assured, from long observation, 
 that the larger portion of the misery we suffer, is from the 
 disappointments of an undue ambition, and that there is more 
 true happiness in the humble cabin than in the stately palace. 
 Such is the reckless and criminal extravagance in the fashions of 
 our day, that forty-nine out of fifty are unable to sustain the 
 style that exists around them, and forty-nine out of fifty conse- 
 quently become unhappiness. Nor is this vanity confined to life, 
 but it is glaringly seen in the vainglorious paraphernalia of 
 death itself, by which countless millions go annually to the 
 grave, which with the smiling approbation of God might be 
 made to sustain the suffering widow and orphan, for God must 
 look upon those glaring marks of selfishness and vanity, with 
 marked disapprobation. I ^ay glaring marks of selfishness and 
 vanity, for would the body of a Lazarus, or other poor being be ' 
 thus costly decorated. And more than this, a fashionable 
 interment cannot take place, but by aid of the printer, and 
 there is just as much pride and formality in a burial ticket as 
 in a ball ticket, and if the invited party be small, our vanity 
 
REVIEW. 
 
 425 
 
 and family pride suffers; and hence the habit now in cities of 
 hiring a train of fine hacks and mourners, in order to make a 
 vainglorious display of great popularity and grief. Coffin makers, 
 hackmen and priests, all know how to take advantage of this 
 most rebellious christian custom In catholic countries, there 
 are four marked grades- of burial distinction, the honors 
 conferred being according to the amount of money paid. I have 
 witnessed these ceremonies, with sad and melancholy reflections 
 upon the demented and incurable character of man. For the 
 lowest order, the coffin is set mortifyingly flat upon the floor of 
 the church, the cheap and common candles burn dully, there is 
 a pittance of holy sprinklings, and the chantings are short, 
 surely and sluggishly dull. From this lowest state of degreda- 
 tion, the corpse may be raised, by proper means, to the higher 
 spheres of honor and of popular admiration, where the rich 
 robes glitter in the tall and brilliant lights, and where, instead 
 of a dull old pater and his little white-aproned urchins, adult 
 forms in rich array are seen to bow in solemn majesty, and the 
 divine display of holy orders, is looked upon with awe and 
 adoration by the multitudes, who are governed more by sights 
 and sounds than by common sense, and who have more confi- 
 dence in the tricks of men, than in the voice of God. But be 
 it so, for so it is in the history of man, who sees the abhorrent 
 and startling deformities of others, yet cannot see his own de- 
 fects. These are ungodly fashions of the day, that not only 
 follow men to their grave, but pursues them through its dark 
 portals and down to the fiery pits of perdition, and now, were 
 we to serve our God instead of men, we should save the mil- 
 lions that decorate our bodies for the flames, and also the mil- 
 lions that it takes again to pray them out; which, if applied to 
 purposes of charity, we should not only be Christians in name 
 but Christians in practice, much to the relief of our suffering 
 fellow mortals, and as I have said, to the smiling approbation 
 of our Creator. If every man who dies, would take from his 
 burial expenses, one hundred dollars, as I have done, and leave 
 
426 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 it in his will to some orphan asylum, what great good might 
 we do, both in living and in dying. We should become the great 
 physicians of souls as well as bodies, and we should moreover, 
 rid the country, without the force and cost of law, of its lawless 
 bands of vagabonds and cut-throats, who have been forced into 
 the world, by the neglected and corrupt state of society, and 
 being despised, because of their unavoidable misfortunes, and 
 cast out from society, have become despondent and desperate in 
 their feelings: by a law as fatal in the government of mind, as 
 those in matter, which causes sparks to rise and water to 
 descend. 
 
 If we will reflect for a moment upon the endless outlets of 
 life — upon those who are eaten by their fellow-beings, devoured 
 by wild beasts, preyed upon by worms, consumed by fire, or 
 buried in the deep caves of the bottomless and boundless ocean, 
 we will feel more inclined to yield to Jehovah's fixed and fatal 
 laws of mortality, and better satisfied to send our friends to the 
 bar of God, divested of every mark of rebellious vanity. Be 
 assured, my reader, that neither wealth nor fame, no, nor the 
 pride of heraldry, nor the pomp of power, can avail anything 
 in the decisions of our eternal destiny, which is fixed, not upon 
 the pretensions of man, or the decorations of body, but upon 
 the deeds done in the body. The remains of the poor savage, 
 the simple child of nature, which cannot be attended by the 
 rich plumed hearse and the sable train of our boasted style, 
 will sleep as calmly and as safely in the hands of its God, under 
 the rude log pen, where the serpent may coil, the fox make his 
 lair, and wild beasts prowl around, as beneath the monumental 
 piles of marble, or in whitened sepulchers upon the confines of 
 the busy mart ; yes, sooner would I here sink softly into the 
 arms of nature, amidst those voiceless wilds and slumberous 
 solitudes, than to attempt to rest amidst the sweating toil and 
 ceaseless din of the smoky cities. Give me, as more natural 
 and in better accordance with our aptitudes, the green fields 
 and purling and warbling woodlands and the refreshing air of 
 
REVIEW. 421 
 
 heaven, as more pleasing in life and sacred in death, than the 
 marble piles and paltry efforts of man, all of which are doomed 
 to perish, while nature (the laws of God) must endure in fresh- 
 ness and in pristine purity and power through the endless ages 
 of eternity. The black banners of death were unfurled in the 
 garden of Eden, and his pall has enshrouded the earth in sad- 
 ness, in sorrow and in mourning ever since. Man and all the 
 works of man must perish, and to know this, is the first lesson 
 in the book of wisdom. Where is proud Babylon with its mas- 
 sive walls, hanging gardens, and men of mighty fame ? Where 
 Niniveh, Belbec, Tyre and Sidon, and where Palmyra, Rome 
 and other more modern cities ? They have been swept, as it 
 were, with the besom of destruction, while nation has succeeded 
 to nation, like waves of the troubled ocean. Cities are now 
 being disinterred upon every portion of our globe, where man 
 has once existed and his arts been exerted ; but alas, alas, 
 they are gone forever, and shall we not inquire why and how, 
 and shall we not draw lessons of practical wisdom and moral 
 worth from them ? 
 
 The very principle in man's character that I have been 
 above combating even to the very grave, has proven the mockery 
 of all man's hopes. No sooner does Grod bless us with fortune, 
 with fame, and prosperity, than we ungratefully abuse his gifts. 
 We at once become puffed up witb our self-importance and with 
 vain conceits, and forgetting not only the donor of such bless- 
 ings and the author of our existence, but the object for which 
 they were given — the relief from misery and want, and the hap- 
 piness of all God's children. A tyrannical usurpation appears 
 to be the universal result of prosperity, and as universally does 
 oppression beget rebellion, rebellion anarchy, and anarchy dis- 
 truction. We no longer look to the great God of the universe, 
 as our common father, but become idolatrous, setting up gods 
 for ourselves, even men and money, which become, in the end, 
 the bane of our happiness, the opprobrium of man and the 
 eternal destruction of his immortal soul. Pampering our appe- 
 
428 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 tites, we lavish upon our stomach every luxury of life, and upon 
 our poor dying body, all that its debilitated and degenerated 
 form will bear. We look no longer to the God of nature, but 
 the God of art for all we want — the fashions of the day and 
 the admiration of the world. Look at the chivalry, the fortune, 
 and the fame of Greece, of Rome, and of Spain, and where are 
 they now. The fragments that have not been scattered amongst 
 the barbarians of the world are too insignificant to be classed 
 amongst the civilized nations, and marvel not, for soon will all 
 other nations of earth take their turn to the bottom of the 
 wheel. Reflect for a moment upon our own happy government, 
 and how many honorable men are to be found amongst the 
 honorable members of Congress ? No honorable man will falsify 
 or corrupt the community, and yet will politicians be all things 
 to all men, corrupt the masses by offering the temptation of 
 dissipation, and purchase votes at the expense of their constitu- 
 ents souls. Where is there a man in Congress who would give 
 twenty thousand dollars to elevate the whole community to a 
 high standard of moral perfection, and yet there are many who 
 have paid that sum to elevate themselves to a temporary, and I 
 think, degraded position. It is notorious that no moral man 
 can now ride the triumpLttut car of State, or enjoy the favor of 
 the people, and hence it is that availability, and not moral worth, 
 has become the watch-word and the governing point amongst 
 political parties; and what is most grievously true is, that the 
 greater the rascal the better the prospect. It is no longer as it 
 was iu the early reign of our glorious Republic, when we stood 
 shoulder to shoulder as one united family, and faught the enemies 
 of human liberty ; but now our family is divided, and the greatest 
 enemies to the peace and happiness of society are found in our 
 own camp. The struggle is no longer against the common enemy, 
 but against each other for the spoils — an eternal and disgrace- 
 ful turmoil amongst the ins and outs for office, wholly regardless 
 of the good of society and of the perpetuity of our happy Union. 
 What, I ask, is to be expected of a nation, when the most un- 
 
REVIEW. 429 
 
 scrupulous scoundrels and smartest trickers are esteemed as the 
 smartest men of that nation ? Such a mass of corruption and 
 load of sin requires no curse of God for its destruction, as from 
 its own organization and internal cancer it must fall to pieces. 
 All history shows, that whenever the sacred principles of truth, 
 honesty and justice, are sacrificed to sensual gratifications and 
 sordid interests, that that nation is crushed under its own weight 
 of crime, and it cannot be expected that God will subvert his 
 just and universal laws to save us from a greater load of sin, 
 than sunk the den of Sodom. The curse of nations has ever 
 been based upon the one universal trait of the human mind — 
 the admiration of great achievements, it matters not by what 
 cruelties or frauds obtained. 
 
 I but recently read a particular account of Catherine of 
 Russia, most unjustly called, even by Christian writers, Cath- 
 erine the Great, when by the feelings of humanity and the de- 
 cisions of morality she should have been condemned as a cruel 
 monster in human shape, and held up to all future ages in 
 terms of wrathful detestation. But such is unfortunately the 
 taint and tendency of man to idolatry and human authority, 
 that Catherine's cold blooded butchery of her husband, and her 
 drunken debaucheries with her murderous paramours, have 
 been suppressed, and she heralded to the world, in the face of 
 God's holy and heavenly decrees, as the greatest of women. 
 
 This case I give not as rare, for such cases are of daily oc^ 
 curence amongst the rulers of men, but to show the principle 
 that has been the downfall of all nations, and which is at this 
 time sapping the foundations of our own government. Men, 
 because of high station, and called statesmen, and rulers of the 
 people, may indulge with impunity in dirty deeds and shame- 
 less artifices, which would put a man of humble station in the 
 stocks. We associate purity with power, and hence the doc- 
 trine that the king can do no wrong, and that preachers, 
 because their name claims a holy association, must themselves 
 be holy ; and by the by, I but recently witnessed a trial where 
 
430 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 it was proven that a clergyman aimed to seduce a sister upon 
 this very principle, by assuring her that two pure Christians 
 coming together, could no more stain or tarnish each other, 
 than two purely white handkerchiefs, rubbed against each other, 
 could do. This sister, though young, was not quite so slavishly 
 conj&ding in the clergy as most of members are, or the argu- 
 ment would have been irresistible. We Protestants, and par- 
 ticularly our clergy, pronounce the Catholics a priest-ridden 
 set, when, in honest truth, I know no difference, for we are all 
 preacher-ridden ; and particularly our sisters who, being kind- 
 hearted and submissive to human authority, are too prone to 
 look to man instead of God for their enjoyments in religion. 
 
 Military glory, (that is the butchery of onr fellow-mortals) 
 lordly magnificence and imperial power, has by all nations and 
 through all ages been adored, to the neglect of their creator 
 and his laws, from the ignorance of which they are ultimately 
 destroyed, and I have only to refer the reader to the ancient 
 cities above named, greatly more magnificent than any now on 
 earth, and to emperors who conquered the world and wept, be- 
 cause there were no others to add to their military glory and 
 exaltation of power, for the fact. They are known no more, 
 but by their fragments that have been torn to atoms and 
 scattered over the earth. And oh, where is that power, and 
 what was that power, which reared those mighty monuments 
 of folly, the pyramids of Egypt. They have, like the builders 
 of "Babel, passed from time to eternity, to be known no more 
 for ever. And shall we hope, in our vain-glorious folly, for 
 any thing better ? Our village has been turned upside-down 
 for the last week by concerts, fairs, and other means of scrap- 
 ing, together monumental funds, and in the last hour I have 
 been called upon by two different agents ; one for means to 
 rear up a fine new edifice for the education of young ladies of 
 the better classes, where liot only foreign languages were to be 
 taught, but logic, rhetoric, belles lettres, and many other 
 things of the pedagogue's art and elegance, to the astonish- 
 
REVIEW. 431 
 
 ment of the ignorant and old fashioned folks whose daughters 
 are thus prepared for the intrigues of fops, whose education has 
 been of the same high order of embellishments. Not a word is 
 said in the long catalogue of stultifying studies, in regard to the 
 instructions of the heart, the manner of rearing a family, or the 
 means of providing for them, but the whole course is to pam- 
 per the vanities of mind, already destructively too great, which 
 fact I have, throughout this work, strove to show, by bringing 
 up before the reader its melancholy history, throughout all 
 ages. The other, a grave old clergyman, who doubtless acted 
 conscientiously in accordance with the ambitious style of the 
 times, asked for aid to pull down one of the largest and best 
 arranged old colleges of the West, to build upon its ruins, as he 
 said, a more modern and stylish house, "for such," said he, 
 '* is the taste of the times, that our sons are getting ashamed 
 of its old-fashioned looks, and I am sure that our sons have 
 just as good a right to a fine college, as other men's sons, and it 
 is our duty to furnish it to them." 
 
 Now, these are not gratuitous assumptions and abstract 
 teachings of human nature, such as you find in the books, but 
 they are actual occurences of every-day-life, and though they 
 may appear to the thoughtless as little matters, they are like 
 little straws, showing the direction of the winds or sparks 
 that might explode the world, if made of powder as the human 
 passions are. One month's training of the youthful and tender 
 heart to kind feeling, sincerity, and all the refining and enobling 
 qualities of soul, such as may be had under the guidance of 
 kind and gentle nature, is worth more here and hereafter, than 
 years of vain and pedantic instruction in fine colleges, for just 
 as far as God is above man, is nature, his works, above the 
 works and arts of man. 
 
 Luther's whole merit in the reformation, he brought about, 
 was in his exposure of the clergy's pretensions to mystic learn- 
 ing, and the people's slavish submission to their wily craft and 
 sensual criminality, and for a time he turned the attention of 
 
432 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 the Christian world from the adoration of man to that of their 
 God, and to the reading of his simple word and judging for 
 themselves ; but alas, how soon did they again crouch to 
 human authority and relapse, as before, into man-idolatry. 
 These undeniable facts must convince every observing man, 
 that, except a Luther arises from time to time, that the influence 
 of man will become greater than that of God, and the soul of 
 religion be lost, as it was in past ages. The condition of 
 things above spoken of, becoming a grievance to the pious ob- 
 servers of the church, there arose a John Wesley whose sincerity 
 of soul, pious fervor and resolve of purpose, enabled him to 
 brave the scowling contempt that was cast upon him and his 
 humble followers, by the high, the learned, and the fashionable 
 dignitaries of the church of Christ. Wesley preached with the 
 power of sincerity and truth, against the fashions, follies and 
 cold formalities of the day, and against the hollow-hearted 
 and criminal expenditures of God's blessings, which are given 
 for the good of our suffering fellow-mortals, and not to pamper 
 our vain and sensual gratifications. This second Luther, from 
 his great piety and zealous exertions, did much in lowering 
 the pomp and worldly pride of the Christian church, but how 
 soon, 1 ask the intelligent reader, was it, till sordid interest 
 and sensual gratification placed the church again under a formal 
 and fashionable hierarchy. The Methodists are now as fashion- 
 able and vain-glorious a people, as any within the paL of the 
 Christian profession, as far as their wealth and ability will en- 
 able them to be, the Devil having again got the upper hand of 
 all the Luthers, big and little. Next there appeared, in our own 
 country, an Alexander Campbell, whose Millennial Harbinger 
 was thrift with invectives against theological and pretended learn- 
 ing, in the simple precepts and teachings of Christ, and above 
 all, of milking the goats to death. He contended that without 
 artistic learning and arbitrary license from men, every man was 
 licensed, by God himself, to preach the Gospel, and do good to 
 
REVIEW. 433 
 
 his fellow-men; and accordingly they did so, till by large ac- 
 cessions they waxed strong and became vain of their power. 
 And now, though opposed to theological artifice and juggling, as 
 they call it, they found that they could not stand up against 
 the polemic sophistry and subtilties of the scholastic pugilists; 
 and, consequently, became ashamed, not of their pure designs and 
 humble piety, but of their want of learning and of their old 
 fashioned churches. And now it was that the Devil stepped in, 
 as usual, and excited their worldly pride and ambition, by say- 
 ing to them, that they had just as good a right to be fools as 
 the more fashionable congregations, and the result has been 
 that they milk the goats closer, and contribute more money, for 
 the training of their leaders in the gratification of their sec- 
 tarian ambition, than any class of professors in the United 
 States. 
 
 That these are items in the history of man, cannot be denied, 
 and if the pious and humble Christian will ask himself, why it 
 is so, he can find no answer than that Satan is still in pursuit 
 of the children of God, and by creeds, competitions, ambitions, 
 and enmities he divides the flock and cuts them off by detach- 
 ments. I know that long training in logical and abstract sub- 
 tilities, will give to the theologian polemic and persuasive pow- 
 ers, but what of it, as there is no religion in it, as the Devil him- 
 self exercises more efficient and persuasive powers than all the 
 Divines on earth put together, for he certainly, according to the 
 pulpit declarations of the day, bears off at least ninety-nine in 
 the hundred of the human family. The only way to meet the 
 eloquence of Satan, is to buckle on the simple armor of truth 
 and justice, and thus resist his powers of persuasion, as Christ 
 did upon the mount. My object throughout this work being 
 to teach man his nature, and to point out to him that proneness 
 in his character to superstition and idolatry, which has degrad- 
 ed man below the dignity and high destiny of his immortal 
 soul, and to convince the clergy of the necessity of humility, 
 
 n 
 
434 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 brotherly love, sincerity, truth and justice, with the hope they 
 may appreciate my labors and profit therefrom, I close these 
 Essays. 
 
 And now, may our kind and Heavenly Father, who made 
 us and knows our weakness, aid, guide and protect us through 
 life and save us in death. 
 
DEATH. 
 
 Thought after thought, having already, added greatly to 
 my intended limits, I should say nothing more, but my pro- 
 gramme being, man from his cradle to his grave, the reader may 
 expect to hear something of his descent to his fated and final 
 resting place, beyond which we cannot go, for all is hid in dark- 
 ness and in doubt. I shall say but little more than to warn the 
 reader that death is certain and the time uncertain, and 
 that he should, consequently, always be prepared to meet 
 the event. We are born with the seeds of destruction within 
 us, and we live through life under the irrevocable and crushing 
 mandates of death, every birth adding one to the dead, so that 
 at any one period of time, the past dead is incalculably beyond 
 the present living. Every annual revolution of the earth, at 
 this note of time, sends thirty-three millions of our race to their 
 grave, thus vastly enlarging the bounds of mortality. 
 
 There is a dread of bodily death greatly beyond the reality 
 of death, our morbid imaginations making it dreadful. If we 
 can believe the recorded statements of Doctor Adam Clark, 
 and many other men of note aiid truth, the feelings of drowning 
 are delightful and transporting beyond the power of language 
 to express. In hanging there is not the slightest pain, the rope 
 instantly checkin:^ the blood in the superficial vessels, in return- 
 ing the blood from the brain, and the deep seated arteries still 
 throwing it in, the man dies of apoplexy and without a 
 pain, as struggling, or muscular action, is no proof of pain, 
 in epileptic, hysterical and other violent fits, the patients, on re- 
 covering, laugh and talk, and tell you they were not conscious 
 of any suffering whatever, and such we know to be the happy 
 
 435 
 
436 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 aptitude of our organic laws, that we, in old age, and in all pro- 
 tracted diseases, as in cases of fever, for instance, we outlive 
 those sensibilities, which wastes away imperceptibly, as does a 
 candle or a fire from exhausted fuel. But be all this as it may, 
 we know that the busy fit of life, with its hopes and fears, its 
 doubts, its cares, and its bright illusions and blasted hopes will 
 soon be over, and that death will come in some shape or other. 
 At best, the joyous scenes of our early life pass our fading me- 
 mories as an idle dream, and all earthly objects quickly pall upon 
 our senses. Man is but a bubble upon the stream of time, a 
 fading shadow, a flitting sun-beam. This earth is not his home, 
 and in his rapid march to eternity, he hangs but for a moment 
 upon the dials point, and then vanishes for ever. We soon 
 find ourselves ebbing out from the shores of time and launching 
 into the boundless and fathomless ocean of futurity. The man 
 who was young but yesterday, is old to-day, and being deserted 
 by the gay of an hour, who feel no farther interest in him, he 
 may now sit down, and feeling and hearing his own muflBed 
 heart faintly and slowly beating his funeral march to the grave, 
 meditate upon his prospects for the future. The ten thousand 
 objects of his youthful emotions, and the tender ties of kindred 
 and friends, that time has twined around him, are at once to be 
 for ever severed. New and untried worlds are now to be entered, 
 and a final adieu bid to this world and all that's in it. If a good 
 man, however, he goes with an inextinguishable life 'to the great 
 Father and to Christ who died for him, whose eternal years and 
 ceaseless joys shall be his everlasting inheritence. The Chris- 
 tian dies but to be born to immortal youth and unfading felicity, 
 weighed against which, this world, with all its wealth and 
 honors, is lighter than a feather. The Christian need not fear 
 death, when his faith lights up the dark chambers of the grave 
 and guilds the empire of death itself, and when he can, with 
 transporting joys, cry out with the sainted Paul, " death 
 where is thy sting, grave thy victories." Death with the 
 Christian is but a welcome messenger from the courts of heaven, 
 
DEATH. 431 
 
 to bear him up midst the shouts of angels to be crowned with 
 a crown of glory, and to be set down with his loving Saviour, 
 who died for him and who holds him as dear as his own blood. 
 O now, how happy in those blessed abodes, where there are no 
 broken and bleeding hearts, whose foes cannot oppress him, and 
 friends will not desert him, and where sickness, and sorrow, and 
 parting, will be known no more, for ever and for ever. 
 
 These are the revealed promises and the rational rewards of 
 a true Christian ; but when the false Christian dies with a con- 
 scious guilt in his breast, instead of ascending to heaven, midst 
 the shout of angels, he has no hope but to be consigned to 
 hell, midst dread tormentors and the howl of devils. The poor 
 pantheist and atheist can have no hope but to sink down, down 
 to the dark and fathomless abyss of eternal oblivion, a thought 
 more repulsive than the active torments of hell itself. 
 
 But here Mes the remains of a poor fellow mortal, whose 
 soul has been summoned to the bar of God, to account for the 
 deeds done in the body. These lips may have spoken soft words 
 of brotherly love, and of sweet comfort to the afflicted, or they 
 may have been defiled by falsehood, envy and malice. These 
 hands may have worked in the cause of virtue and of humanity, 
 or they may have engaged in deeds of damning dye; and these 
 feet may have led to the house of mourning to minister to the 
 wants of the widow and the orphan, or they may have led to 
 dens of iniquity and *to scenes of sensual pollution. This body 
 may have been that of an adored statesman, but it is all the 
 same, for fate has put its seal upon him. Those eyes that may 
 have beamed with intelligence, with love and with patriotism, 
 are now forever dimmed. — These lips that may have spoken 
 words of eloquence, which turned all eyes to the speaker and 
 controlled the nations will, are now but lifeless clay: and this 
 body, this walking miracle, that once moved with stately pride 
 and conscious power, through our senate chambers, is now 
 loathsome, gangrene, and doomed with the beast — to the 
 revel of worms and to the vermin's feast. 0, what mute elo- 
 
438 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 quence is here — A sadly, deep and solemn scene — A book, yes, 
 a book, a book, filled with lessons of wisdom, a book, worth all 
 the books on earth to the meditative soul. 
 
 Robed in white, he soundly sleeps, 
 
 Cold in death, his silence keeps, 
 
 His features shrunk and purpled o^er, 
 
 His smiles have fled for evermore. 
 
 His eyes are closed and leaded tight, 
 
 His yaws tast shut with napkin white, 
 
 His hands are crossed, his work in done, 
 
 His feet are tied, his race is run. 
 
 And now to the coffin his body is borne, 
 
 And next to the grave where his friends sadly 
 
 And gaze on the pit so dark and cold, 
 
 The grave''s now closed and the tale is told. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 I HAD thought that when I pursued man through all his dark 
 and winding avenues of life and down to the silent grave, to 
 have finished my task and done my duty; but it now strikes 
 me, that I may write a short chapter more, with great advant- 
 age to the living. 
 
 I have abundantly shown, throughout my essays, that six 
 thousand years of experience proves that no amount of theolo- 
 gical learning, nor ponderous and puritanial sanctimony, can 
 ever advance the cause of morality or add anything to the hap- 
 piness of man. The party religions, manufactured in our theo- 
 logical schools, and vended at high rates in our holy marts, to 
 the demented masses, are but relics of the dark ages, filled up 
 with high sounding variations to suit the guzzling gullibility of 
 mankind for mystic things, who have found it easier to purchase 
 religion ready made, than to obtain it by a long life of honesty. 
 And in truth, it is a well ascertained fact, in those latter days 
 of paradeful extravagance, that it will beggar any man to 
 entertain a clear conscience against the ambition for sordid gain 
 and wordly honors. Hence, it is, that we cover our consciences 
 with a dark robed priest, or a cloak of hypocrisy, just as we 
 soothe our cankered ulcers by a court-plaster. Some professors, 
 by way of speculation, purchase from their holy fathers an 
 indulgence, and make one hundred per cent worldly gain by the 
 operation, while others, by way of honest trade, subscribe to a 
 party religion, and thereby not only obtain the influence and 
 aid of his club, but can be allowed to overreach his neighbor 
 in a trade and chickle over it. His tythes may be thus paid 
 and he become a thrifty member and shining ornament to his 
 
 439 
 
440 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 creed party; while the man who has a heart of universal love 
 and is consequently too honest to subscribe to any of the war- 
 ring creeds of men, is left without support, save that of a clear 
 conscience and the smiling approbation of his God, Men may 
 cast him out, and dogs may lick his sores, not being plastered 
 over by creeds, bat the God of might and mercy will receive 
 him into a house, " not made by hand, eternal in the heavens." 
 I wish to draw a graphic distinction here, which would to 
 heaven, could be heralded by Gabriel's trumpet throughout the 
 abodes of human habitation — It is simply and sacredly this: — 
 That the man who has the heavenly sunshine of universal sym- 
 pathy, love, kindness, humility, and forgiveness, is a good man, 
 without the aid of creeds and church rituals; while the man 
 whose malevolent soul is bloated with creeds and church formu- 
 laes till he becomes satanic enough to broil his fellow man for 
 an honest difference of opinion, as John Calvin did Michael 
 Servetus, is a bad man. 
 
 These are facts T aim to show the reader, and to convince 
 him that creeds and sectarian hatreds have been the bloody 
 daggers and revolvers of the church of Christ, to the cold 
 blooded murder of millions upon millions of the distracted and 
 fanatical parties. And though revolting to the sensibilities of a 
 kind hearted and true Christian, we are yet forced to buckle on 
 those deadly weapons, as outward signs of religion, the religion 
 of our lowly, meek and lovely Jesus, whose tolerant and for- 
 giving spirit, never persecuted or maltreated a living creature, 
 and who felt for all mankind as common brothers, to be drawn 
 by the cords of love, through kind treatment and pure examples. 
 Christ's sweet and child-like manner of winning souls, however, 
 is known no more by his ministers, who 
 
 *' Preach a monster of such hideous mien, 
 That, to be hated, needs but to be seen." 
 
 God is not preached up as a father of kindly and forgiving 
 heart, and as of equal, immutable and eternal justice, but as a 
 
APPENDIX. 441 
 
 fearfully, jealous, partial, and cruel God, who has created a 
 Devil and given him a hell to put us in. That from Adams sin 
 down to Christ the whole of Gods children went to hell in mass, 
 and that since that time near thirty three millions go annually. 
 That he has interwoven sin and temptations into our very con- 
 stitutions and given the Devil stratagems ample for our 
 destruction. 
 
 They say that 
 
 All God's works haye gone a drift, 
 
 And added much to Satans thrift, 
 
 Whose kingdoms large and growing fast, 
 
 And mast the world absorb at last. 
 
 As in Adam's fall we sinned all, 
 
 All God has sent to hell. 
 
 Till time has added numbers great, 
 
 So great no man can tell, 
 
 Hells rooms, Lord, are jammed they say, 
 
 Not one to let or rent, 
 
 Whilst thou like churl art all alone, 
 
 With kingdom blank, not worth a cent. 
 
 Such things they teach of thee, Lord, 
 
 And faith do many think, 
 
 That thou dost wink at Satan's craft, 
 
 And aid the dirty slink . 
 
 The hen protects both night and day. 
 
 With mother ■'s tender care. 
 
 Her little brood from owls and hawks. 
 
 And other beasts of pray. 
 
 Then can it be that thou, Lord, 
 
 Will yield to Satan's claims. 
 
 When he ne'er hatched a chick himself. 
 
 Nor fledged it for the flames. 
 
 The reader must excuse me in these ludicrous doggerels, 
 for as contrary as I feel them to be from my deep, solemn and 
 sincere habits of meditation, they come forcibly to my mind, as 
 the legitimate results of the doctrines of the day. The awful 
 solemnity of the subject and my earnest intensity of feehng, 
 would not allow me to say any thing that did not flow from the 
 bottom of my soul, the fountain of universal love and ardent 
 desire for the happiness of every creature on earth. Oh, what 
 a happy thing it is in this world, to be a bigot and a strict 
 
 19* 
 
442 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 sectarian with a heart of stone. It must be a consolation 
 which I have never felt, to think that God is partial, and that 
 we are special favorites of heaven, and that God has lived and 
 labored for us alone, to the neglect of all others. My heart, 
 on the contrary, is of flesh, and has become a wreck from its 
 frequent meltings and palpitations for the woes and wants of 
 others. Would to God that all party religion and all party 
 and individual strife for property were done away, so that 
 there would be no dogmatic cruelties and persecutions for our 
 lowly and humble Jesus' sake, that we might have one God, 
 one faith and one church, forming a perfect brotherhood and a 
 paradise, on this, God's goodly earth ; that we could have a 
 community of property, and all think and work to one interest, 
 and for the mutual happiness of each other ; that war, murder, 
 law-suits, forgeries, perjuries and thefts might be done away. If 
 such be our nature that this cannot be done, may we not, o God, 
 rid the Bible of its stumbling blocks to a true knowledge of 
 thee and vital religion I That thou hast revealed a religion to 
 man in mysteries not to be understood, in order to divide thy 
 flock and lead them astray ; that thou doest wink at the 
 wickedness of men and harden their hearts, that the Devil may 
 get them, cannot be true. These words and thoughts, and 
 many more such, are to be found in the Bible, and are not 
 from thee, o God, but from men of bad hearts and of a selfish 
 and false religion. I have a hatred, my heavenly father, for 
 such things, so inconsistent with thy great and glorious cha- 
 racter, as to drive thy children from thee. When a youth, I 
 was surrounded with a puritanical influence that made me afraid 
 to laugh, as it was read to me from Scripture, " Woe be unto 
 them that laugh, for they shall weep," or words to that effect. 
 ISIany other passages were quoted from time to time, to crush 
 my youthful heart and blight the budding soul of life. My 
 soul felt big with gratitude and desire to enjoy the blessings 
 thou hast so bountifully spread around us. But alas, alas, it 
 is with sad and melancholy regret, I say that feared thee, my 
 
APPENDIX. 443 
 
 good father, but could not love thee, the Devil being represent- 
 ed to ray tender and credulous heart, as more social and in- 
 dulgent in innocent sports than thyself. More mature reflec- 
 tion, my father, convinced me, that as we did not make our- 
 selves, that thou didst make us, and fill us with those divine 
 instincts said to be prohibited by Scripture. Then it was, O 
 God, that I, for the first, that I had confidence in thee, drew 
 near thee, and had pleasure in thy presence. The ten thousand 
 times that I have since communed alone with thee in the 
 silent forest, and amidst thy glorious works, have convinced 
 me of thy greatness and thy goodness, almighty God, the 
 maker of heaven and earth. 
 
 And now let me say to parents who wish to enlarge and 
 elevate the souls of their children to love for God and a 
 knowledge of his wondrous works, to take them out of the 
 schools of artistic and technical nonsense into the open 
 forests, and show them the glowing heavens above and the 
 green earth beneath. Convince them that God blooms in 
 every flower and grows in every blade of grass, and that we 
 breathe incense from every sweet zephyr that wafts around us. 
 That all nature is instinct with divinity, and cries aloud against 
 the slanders promulgated by men against the God of nature. 
 
 We need not the spectacles of musty books to read God's 
 natural revelation, for the book is open before us that every 
 man, who is not prejudiced by a false education, may see and 
 read the sacred truth for himself. If he goes forward with the 
 bigots nut-shell soul and clipped wings, he might as well re- 
 main in his dirty cage, for he cannot soar with the eagles ex- 
 panded pinions from height to height, through mid-heaveqs 
 pure and untainted air, and look with an eye of gratitude and 
 adoration at the enchanting scenes around him. The worthy 
 President of Centre College, to whom I have taken the liberty 
 of dedicating my essays, is a noble specimen of one of nature's 
 (God's) brightest ornaments ; for though he belongs to a 
 church of creeds, his soul is so elevated and expanded by 
 
444 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 science, that he clearly sees the adorable attributes of the 
 great and eternal Jehovah of the universe, and worships him 
 in spirit and in truth, unswayed by party prejudice and by 
 human authority. And here I will take occasion to remark, 
 that though I have spoken of the clergy in many places, as 
 being the authors of creeds and the dividers of the church of 
 Christ, that I have a great regard for them ; and farther, 
 that where I spoke of the clergy harmonizing for ever in a com- 
 mon cause of filling the pews and increasing the tythes, that I 
 did not impute to them any sordid or improper motive, in the 
 spirit that moved them to throw aside their prejudices for the 
 time. No, no, it is far from me and the kindly and benevolent 
 feelings I aim to sustain, to doubt the hearts or cast odium 
 upon any. 
 
 O king of kings, and Lord of Lords, 
 
 The father of all that be, 
 With humble heart and love sincere 
 
 We come, we come to thee. 
 Thy children, Lord, through earth^s vast bounds 
 
 Of high and low degree 
 Will, when death shall let them go, 
 
 All come, yes, come to thee. 
 
 When fortune, friends and blasted hopes 
 
 With all on earth shall flee, 
 We'll come with hopes renewed, Lord, 
 
 We'll come, yes, come to thee. 
 And when the sun and moon shall Cade, 
 
 And time no longer be. 
 We'll dwell in immortal youth, Lord, 
 
 Yes, dwell, forever dwell with thee. 
 
APPENDIX. 445 
 
 I MUST ask of the unthinking and idolatrous portion of the 
 community, to excuse me for my firm and unflinching belief in 
 the unity, eternity, the omnipotmc£, the omniscience, the omnipres- 
 ence, the wisdom and the goodness of God; as seen in the creation 
 and harmonious government of his mighty works; and, conse- 
 quently, for my unavoidable disbelief of, and mortal hatred to 
 every thing that discredits, dishonors and defaces the virgin 
 purity of our Christian records. Were I to hear a voice, pro- 
 fessing to be from God himself, declaring that harlots, liars, 
 rogues, adulterers and murderers, were favorites of heaven and 
 persons after God's own heart, I would discredit my own senses, 
 rather than believe that the great Jehovah of the universe could 
 thus violate his own uncreated, underived, inherent, irreversible, 
 immutable and eternal attributes. , 
 
 The Bible, as Sir Isaac Newton and many other great and 
 good men have said, has been " more tampered with than any 
 other book that has ever been handed down to prosterity I" I 
 am not the first, then, to affirm this fact, nor have I been the 
 first amongst the millions who have been led astray by those 
 odious stumbling blocks that obstruct the way to religion. The 
 many things so glaringly and shockingly incompatible with the 
 character of a wise and just God, gave me years of inquietude 
 and unhappy reflection, and hence it is, that I do from the 
 bottom of my heart, most solemnly and religiously protest against 
 them, as calculated to produce open sceptics out of the Church, 
 and doubting and unhappy members in it. I could never have 
 found my God, after having subscribed to slanders recorded by 
 man against him, and it was only by the glorious perfections of 
 Christ, and the purity and simplicity of his teachings in the 
 New Testament that I was saved from rejecting the whole sys- 
 tem as an impostor, for the incongruous and abhorrent boluses 
 prescribed by the priesthood, and crammed down my credulous 
 throat, had poisoned both my soul and body, near to their eternal 
 death. 
 
446 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 Let us here read what the Rev. William Paley, in his " Evi- 
 dences of Christianity," ?ays upon this subject : 
 
 " Undoubtedly, our Saviour assumes the divine origin of the 
 Mosaic institution: and, independently of his authority, I con- 
 ceive it to be very difficult to assign any other cause for the 
 commencement or existence of that institution; especially for 
 the singular circumstance of the Jews' adhering to the unity, 
 when every other people slid into polytheism; for their being 
 men in religion, children in every thing else; behind other na- 
 tions in the arts of peace and war, superior to the most improv- 
 ed in their sentiments and doctrines relating to the Deity. Un- 
 doubtedly, also, our Saviour recognizes the prophetic character 
 of many of their ancient writers. So far, therefore, we are 
 bound as Christians to go. But to make Christianity answer- 
 able with its life, for the circumstantial truth of each separate 
 passage of the Old Testament, the genuiness of every book, the 
 information, fidelity, and judgment, of every writer in it, is to 
 bring, I will not say great, but unnecessary difficulties, into the 
 whole system. These books were universally read and received 
 by the Jews of our Saviour's time. He and his Apostles, in com- 
 mon with all other Jews, referred to them, alluded to them, used 
 them. Yet, except where he expressly ascribes a divine author- 
 ity to particular predictions, I do not know that we can strictly 
 draw any conclusion from the books being so used and apphed, 
 beside the proof, which it unquestionably is, of their notoriety, 
 and reception at that time. In this view, our Scriptures afford 
 a valuable testimony to those of the Jews. Bat the nature of 
 this testimony ought to be understood. It is surely very different 
 from, what it is sometimes represented to be, a specific rati- 
 fication of each particular fact, and opinion, and not only 
 of each particular fact, but of the motives assigned for 
 every action, together with the judgment of praise or dispraise 
 bestowed upon them. Saint James, in his Epistle, says, * Ye 
 have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the 
 Lord.' Notwithstanding this text, the reality of Job's history, 
 
APPENDIX. 44t 
 
 and even the existence of such a person, has been always deemed 
 a fair subject of inquiry and discussion amongst Christian Di- 
 vines. Saint James's authority is considered as good evidence 
 of the existence of the book of Job at that time, and of its re- 
 ception by the Jews; and of nothing more. Saint Paul, in 
 his second Epistle to Timothy, has this similitude : ' Now as 
 Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist 
 the truth.^ These names are not found in the Old Testament. 
 And it is uncertain, whether Saint Paul took them from some 
 apocryphal writing then extant, or from tradition. But no 
 one ever imagined that Saint Paul is here asserting the authority 
 of the writing, if it was a written account which he quoted, or 
 making himself answerable for the authenticity of the tradition; 
 much less, that he so involves himself with either of these ques- 
 tions, as that the credit of his own history and mission should 
 depend upon the fact, whether Jannes and Jambres withstood 
 Moses, or not. For what reason a more rigorous interpretation 
 should be put upon other references it is difficult to know. I do 
 not mean that other passages of the Jewish history stand upon 
 no better evidence than the history of Job, or of Jannes and 
 Jambres (I think much otherwise) ; but I mean, that a reference 
 in the New Testament, to a passage in the Old does not so fix its 
 authority, as to exclude all inquiry into its credibility, or into 
 the separate reasons upon which that credibility is founded: and 
 that it is an unwarrantable, as well as an unsafe rule to lay down, 
 concerning the Jewish history, what was never laid down, con- 
 cerning any other, that either every particular of it must be 
 true, or the whole false." 
 
 The reader will pause and reflect upon every word here 
 spoken by Paley, who very justly says that Christianity is not 
 to be sacrificed upon the altars of Judaism.' Mark his words, 
 that " Christ recognized many — not all of their ancient writer s,^^ 
 " and so far, therefore, are we hound to go." And, farther, 
 " that it is an unwarrantable, as well as an unsafe rule to lay down 
 concerning the Jewish history, what was never laid down concerning 
 
448 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 any other, that either every particular of it must he true, or the 
 whole false." 
 
 Just but establish this rule and it is all the Deist wants to 
 overthrow our whole system of religion. Thus it will be seen 
 that I have said no more of the Old Testament than the first 
 Divines in the world have done, and were it not that I have a 
 contempt for all human authority when the divine is open before 
 us, I would give the reader many quotations of a more pointed 
 character. 
 
 But surely, surely, there can be nothing more asked, than 
 for a man to be intelligent and honest, and to have the honor 
 of God and the good of man at heart, in order to read and 
 judge for himself. 
 
APPENDIX. 449 
 
 I HAVE been most agreeably surprised, when having my 
 proof-sheets read over, to find my multifarious views on so vast 
 a subject as the character of man from his cradle to his grave, 
 in its endless phasis, so well connected and the argument so con- 
 sistently sustained. I know that I had embodied in every 
 sentence thoughts worthy of serious meditation ; but having 
 thrown these thoughts together from genial manuscripts, writ- 
 ten at different times and in distant lands, just as I saw men 
 moved in their veering character, as circumstances controlled 
 them, and not having revised those sheets before they went to 
 press, I am the more surprised to find that I have made a book so 
 well connected and firmly sustained throughout, as to claim the 
 attention of every reader, and cause him to inquire into his own 
 character, what he is, where he is, whence he came, and whether 
 he is going, and the relation he stands in to his God, and his 
 duty to his fellow-man. My only object and highest aim was 
 to throw out a few solemn reflections, to show to vain and idol- 
 atrous man that God is the only source of immutable and etern- 
 al knowledge, and that he should not, therefore, worship the 
 vacillating and contradictory opinions of our erring fellow- 
 mortals ; and in so doing, I have necessarily had to expose the 
 ambitious and arrogant leaders of both of religious and poUtical 
 parties. This, however, has been done in so kind, so sincere and 
 so delicate a manner, as to avoid as much as possible the giving 
 of offence to any ; but should any man with conscious guilt, ap- 
 propriate what is intended for all evil-doers, without distinction 
 of party, to himself, individually, let him do so, and thus claim 
 the animadversion of all pious and impartial thinkers. 
 
 My friends often say to me, " I know, sir, that religion has 
 been much abused, and divisions, disputes, and hard feelings 
 got up in the church of Christ, in consequence of the liberty the 
 clergy take with the word of God ; but I would not for the 
 world have undertaken, as you have done, to expose their er- 
 rors. Why, sir, they will jump upon you like bull-dogs, and 
 tear you to pieces." Now, if 1 know myself, I have labored 
 
450 MAN FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE. 
 
 alone for the salvation of souls, but I must say that such silly 
 and craven souls are not worth saving, when from a slavish fear 
 of man, they would shrink from their duty to their God, and 
 abandon sacred truth to be strangled by falsehood and the ma- 
 chinations of ambitious and designing parties. Truth, immortal 
 truth, has no more to fear from the low and petty quibbles of 
 men, than has the everlasting mountain that rears its mighty 
 form into the light of heaven, far above the frowning clouds, 
 and defies the thunder's brawl. V Yes, but the clergy are men 
 of learning, and have made those very points you controvert, a 
 life-time study, while you, in your secular and assiduous pursuits 
 of life, have never had one uninterrupted hour to devote to 
 such erudite and abstruse subjects." True, but no amount of 
 learning can ever bring pure water from a muddy fountain, or 
 evolve truth from falsehood. Those gentlemen, I know, can 
 draw wine and water from the same vessel, just as they draw 
 contradictory creeds from the same book, and that they have 
 all the powers of jpa/pal sorcery, and of abstract and logical de- 
 vice, but these are like dew-drops upon the lion's mane, when 
 exposed to the withering light of heaven, and tested by the 
 immutable and eternal laws of the great Jehovah. Such 
 mogic mortals, we well know from all past as well as present 
 history of man, can wield the minds of their credulous and de- 
 mented devotees, just as a boy does his top, and that 
 
 " The}' a rope of sand can twist, 
 Firm as learned Sorbonist," 
 
 having reference to a learned theological school in France, es- 
 tablished by the chaplain and confessor of Louis IX., where the 
 clergy were marvellously trained in all manner of chicanery and 
 tricks. But these ropes of sand, though they may deceive the 
 dull and idolatrous eye, must crumble to pieces before the touch- 
 stone of simple and sacred truth. Yes, and we farther know, 
 that those great medicine men and magic rulers of the people, 
 are book- worms ; but as the Rev. Isaac Watts says in his work 
 upon the improvement of the mind, that " a mere book worm, 
 
APPENDIX. 451 
 
 who dwells among books all his life, may have amassed together 
 a vast amount of trash, and yet be a contemptible sort of a 
 character in the world." Yes, man may worm his way amongst 
 musty books, as do his brother mothes, but he can never become 
 truly inspired and gain strength of opinion to soar aloft in the 
 heavens and compete with the noble eagle, whose natural eye 
 in an unclouded sky and under the glorious orb of day, scans 
 the distant horizon. 
 
 Those gentlemen, I mean the leading and warring schismatics 
 and intolerant persecutors, who broil their brothers alive, have 
 ever sought to make God the accomplice of all their crimes, and 
 against the man who will not submit to hear his kind father 
 and great creator slandered and mankind enslaved to idolatry, 
 they not only threaten the vulgar prejudices of their blind devo- 
 tees in this world, but they crush him with anathemas, and 
 preach for him a hot, howling and hideous hell ; but they can 
 never thus alarm one who has communed with a God of sincere 
 love and of equal handed justice, as often as the author of these 
 essays has done. 
 
 And now, father, as we shall soon pass, yes eternally pass 
 from this life to the dark and silent abodes of the dead, wilt 
 thou, at whose quickening touch all nature kindles into life and 
 into sweet and smiling harmony, rid our souls of their foul envy, 
 malice and party-pride, and melt them by the influences of holy 
 love, into one harmonious and undying brotherhood ; for if we 
 give not to our brother in true meekness of spirit that love and 
 forgiveness which thou hast commanded to be given in this 
 world, how can we ask it of thee in the world to come ? And 
 all these things being asked for by the name and through the 
 mercy and intercession of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 
 to him must be the glory and majesty for ever and ever. 
 
 FINIS. 
 
 1} 
 
 m 
 
MOMENTOUS WORK. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF INSPIRATION, BEING 
 AN INQUIRY CONCERNING THE IN- 
 EALLIBILITY, INSPIRATION AND AU- 
 THORITY OF HOLY WRIT. By the Rev. 
 John Macnaught, M. A. Oxon, Incumbent of St. 
 Cliiysostoms Church, Everton, Liverpool. 12mo. 
 $1.37. Mailed free. 
 
 This work is more significant than any which has 
 appeared since the advent of Strauss's Life of Jesus. 
 The vulgar idea of the supernatural inspiration of the 
 Bible is here abandoned ; and what is more, it is shown 
 that many of the chief dignitaries, including four 
 Bishops of the Church of England, have held, on the 
 dy^ similar opinions. The citadel of bigotry, super- 
 stition and intolerance, may now be considered as 
 authoritatively surrendered. 
 
 " It is the first book written by an Orthodox cler- 
 gyman which decidedly denies the doctrine of Scriptu- 
 ral Infallibility. It is well written and manly." 
 Christian Inquirer, [ Unitarian^ 
 
 From the Westmi7ister Review, 
 " Distinguished by a fearless investigation of truth, 
 an uncompromising hostility to deception and make- 
 believe. Distinguished likewise by clearness of con- 
 ception, closeness of argument, purity of expression, 
 and completeness of arrangement. And unless intol- 
 erance and superstition shall succeed in smothering 
 the work, it is one which will exercise a wide influence 
 — one which will give form and substance to thoughts 
 which have been floating vaguely in many mens minds 
 — one which will supply a rallying point, and become 
 in lieu of a creed to those who are dissatisfied with tra- 
 ditional and untenable theories respecting inspiration.'* 
 
 Published by CALVIN BLANCHARD, 
 
 76 Nassau St. New York. 
 
ROUSSEAU'S CONFESSIONS COMPLETE. 
 
 THE COIST^ESSIONS OF JEAN JACQUES ROUS- 
 SEAU. Newly Translated, without Omissions or 
 Expurgations. 
 Period First relates to Rousseau's youthful adventures 
 to the thirtieth year of his age. 
 
 Period /(S'tJC^Tic? embraces his literary and public career. 
 
 Both Periods n^ake two large, elegant 12mo Volumes, 
 
 sold separately, at $1 25 each, or $2 50 the set. Mailed free. 
 
 " There hardly exists such another example of the miracles which com- 
 position can perform." — hord Brougham. 
 
 " There have been what purported to be translations of the world 
 famous Confessions of Rousseau before ; but Mr. Calvin Blanchard's, just 
 issued, is the first that we know of which is unmutilated and accurate." — 
 Putnam's Monthly. 
 
 " It has been translated into every language of Europe ; the librarian 
 of Napoleon devoted a large volume to the classification of the difierent 
 editions of it.- Evening Post. 
 
 " Blessed be the early days when I sat at the feet of Rousseau, prop/ici 
 sad and stately as any of Jewry. Every onward movement of the age, 
 every downward step into the dephts of my own soul, recalls thy oracles, 
 Jean Jacques!" — Margaret Fuller. 
 
 The Confessions incidentally portray the remarkable 
 times immediately preceding the French Revolution. The 
 squalid wretchedness of the peasantry ; the gross licen- 
 tiousness of the clergy ; the gallantries of the nobility. 
 It introduces us to those famous philosophers, Voltaire, 
 d'Holbach, Diderot, d'Alembert, Hume; to Mesdames de 
 Warens, d'Epinay, and the enchanting d'Houdetot. But 
 the heart revealings of J^ea7i Jacques are its crowning glory. 
 
 Just published by 
 
 CALVIN BLANCHARD. 
 
 16 Nassau Street, N. Y. 
 
LIBERA.!:. book:s 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 CALVIN BLANCH ARD, 76 Nassau St., N. Y. 
 
 (sent by mail postage free.) 
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY, 8vo. pp. 838 S3 OQ 
 
 COMTE'S SOCIAL PHYSICS 25 
 
 STRAUSS' CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE LIFE 
 
 OF JESUS, 2 vols. Svo 4 50 
 
 FEUERBACH'S ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY, 12 mo. 1 .oO 
 
 GREG'S CREED OF CHRISTENDOM, 12mo 1 25 
 
 HOWITT'S HISTORY OF PRIESTCRAFT, 12mo 75 
 
 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S RIGHTS OF WOMAN, 75 
 VOLNEY'S NEW RESEARCHES ON ANCIENT HIS- 
 TORY, 12mo 1 25 
 
 VOLNEY'S RUINS, paper cover and bound 30 and 50 
 
 TAYLOR'S DEVIL'S PULPIT, 12mo 1 25 
 
 TAYLOR'S ASTRO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES, being 
 
 the second series of The Devil's Pulpit, 12mo 1 37 
 
 TAYLOR'S BELIEF NOT THE SAFE SIDE 10 
 
 TAYLOR'S LECTURES ON FREE MASONRY 25 
 
 WHO IS THE LORD GOD.? By TAYLOR.. 30 
 
 WHO WAS JESUS CHRIST.? 10 
 
 WHO IS THE HOLY GHOST.? By TAYLOR 10 
 
 WHO IS THE DEVIL ? By TAYLOR 15 
 
 THE NEW CRISIS, or Our Deliverance from Priestly Fraud, 
 
 Political Charlatanry and Popular Despotism 13 
 
 THE ESSENCE OF SCIENCE, or The Catechism of Posi- 
 tive Sociology and Physical Mentality. By a Stu- 
 
 dent of Auguste Comte, 12mo 60 and 37 
 
 HITTELL'S PLEA FOR PANTHEISM 25 
 
 HITTELL'S PHRENOLOGY 75 
 
 "WHAT IS TRUTH ? or Revelation its Own Nemesis, 12mo. 1 25 
 
 MACNAUGHT ON INSPIRATION, 12mo 1 37 
 
 VESTIGES OF CIVILIZATION, 12mo 1 25 
 
 HITTELL'S EVIDENCES AGAINST CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 2 vols, 12mo 2 50 
 
 HELL ON EARTH ; or, an Expose of the Infernal Machina- 
 tions and Horrible Atrocities of Whited Sepulcherism : 
 
 together with a Plan for its Final Overthrow 18 
 
 ROUSSEAU'S CONFESSIONS, Complete, 2 vols, 12mo. 2 50 
 FOURIER'^ SOCIAL DESTINY OF MAN, 8vo....$l and 1.50 
 HOW TO GET A DlVORCE ; together with the Laws of 
 
 all the States in the Union on this subject 25 
 
 BOCCACCIOS DECAMERON, 12mo illustrated 1 00 
 
 THE LIBRARY OF LOVE ; 24mo. with engravings. The 
 most exquisitely amorous and recherche effusions 
 ever penned. Comprising : 
 OVID'S ART OF LOVE, and Amorous Works entire, 50 
 
 KISSES OF SECUNDUS AND BONNEFONS, 50 
 
 DRYDEN'S FABLES 50 
 
^ 
 
 Wisdom and Merriment. 
 
 ]\Iany a learned and wise (?) man has become in- 
 sane, and (pity 't is) nearly all become, especially with 
 the beautiful half of humanity, dull company, in con- 
 sequence of not properly alternating the grave and 
 weighty with the gay and light* To indulge in fun, 
 frolic and merriment, is beneath their dignity. And 
 so their dignity mopes through the world, disgusting 
 it with wisdom, and sometimes horrifying it with the 
 any thing but dignified maniac's yell. 
 
 To correct this evil, I publish, along with works 
 which exercise the intellect to its utmost, books, the 
 tendency of which, is effectually to relieve the intel- 
 lectual, by bringing into corresponding active ex- 
 ercise the humourous, gay and mirthliil faculties. 
 
 If the mystic claims that — 
 
 " Eeligion never was designed 
 To make our pleasures less " — 
 
 the positivist cannot rationally claim less for deep, 
 independent thinking. 
 
 As to the pious libel, that licentiousness is an ac- 
 companiment of free thinking, it is beneath my dig- 
 nity to pay any regard to it ; and to be frightened 
 by it, out of the least particle of fun, or natural, 
 and therefore rightful enjoyment, exceeds my cow- 
 ardice. 
 
 CALYIN BLANCHARD. 
 
 IHBD?9 
 
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