selves to be fearfully and wonderfully made, not with a view to give glory to our creator, but with such admiration of our own energies and talents, that forgetting our sister the worm and our fellow servants the angelic host, we shall soon vault from the rank of creatures into that of selfexisting beings; thus, confounding mechanical skill with creative faculties, and reason with omniscience, we shall suppose, because we know and can perform much, that nothing is beyond our ability to execute.

I own that this persuasion, applied to moral purposes, and elevated by the conviction of supernatural assistance, was found amazingly stimulative by an extraordinary race of beings, who, (it is reported) were contented to endure not only poverty, pain and disgrace, but even death itself, rather than consent to do what they called a

sinful action. This obsolete phrase is so very dissimilar to unpleasant, unwholesome, unfashionable, stupid, tiresome, or any other epithet by which we express insurmountable repugnance, that I know not how to define it, and can only say, that let sin mean what it might, it was a bugbear which has happily disappeared with the other goblins and phantoms that have been dispelled by the astonishing refulgence of genius that has lately burst upon the world. Now, though the singular enthusiasts who pretended such anxiety to avoid this scare-crow, really did perform superhuman actions, and appeared not only blameless, undefiled, and actively benevolent, but were able to invert the order of nature, and dispensed temporal blessings as well as wise instructions to their auditors; they never insinuated that they were deities. On the

contrary, while they healed diseases with a touch, and suspended the active properties of the elements, they always spoke of themselves as frail, weak and mortal men, dignified only by being servants of that God from whom they professed to receive all their natural and extraordinary endowments.

In the present age we are so liberal as to pity these persecuted fanatics; and as there seems no good ground for accusing them of being ambitious or avaricious hypocrites, we candidly suppose, that they were prevented from converting their endowments in-. to instruments of self-aggrandisement by a perplexing sophist, named religion, who was continually telling them that all their virtues and excellencies, all their properties of mind and body, were entrusted talents, of which they were merely the accountable stewards; and

that instead of being ennobled and even deified by being appointed to an extraordinary trust, this larger share of faculties imposed upon them a more fearful responsibility. Thus they

trembled lest they should incur the punishment of misapplication, instead of glorying that they were wiser and better than other people.

Before these singular beings called upon the world to acknowledge the strength of meekness, the dignity of humility, and the abundance of poverty, another self-denying race of men flourished, whose existence, like the mammoth's, we are compelled to admit by discovering their visible remains. These people certainly were not destitute of a sense of their own importance, and in this they resembled the demi-gods of the present age; but then their self-regard was of a most quiescent nature, and might ra

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ther be called admiration than love. For they seemed to desire neither riches, honours, nor pleasures, which are very substantial food, but fixed their inclinations upon a gossamer sort of substance called reputation, which we now know is quite worthless, since the ablest chemists have not found it convertible into houses, lands, goods, titles, or even into routes, galas, or great dinners, though these latter articles, by proper dilation, may be spun out into this same gossamer. My dear fashionable reader, I really am serious when I tell you, that the ancients I am speaking of fought, toiled, meditated, and suffered, not for their own private emolument, but for the good of their country. Now, as the persuasion that myriads are of more importance than an individual, and that it is more desirable to make a nation prosperous than ourselves