many respects, with those recorded of our Saviour in the genuine gospels, that every mind capable of a moment's reflection, must consider the former as imitations of the latter. I repeat the word must, because we know that the humble and illiterate disciples of Jesus were utterly unacquainted with the sciences and history of India, only at this day beginuing to be known, and that the evangelists, ignorant even of the Greek and Roman classics, COULD NEVER HAVE SEEN THE SANSCRIT BOOKS, Or Copied the BHAGAVAT OF THE SUBLIME VYASA."-Page 110..

The prior existence and notoriety in India of the divine story of Chrishna, can no longer be denied. That his worship prevailed in the time of Alexander the Great, is confirmed by a passage in Arrian-

"That the name of Chrishna and the general outline of his story were long anterior to the birth of our Saviour, and probably to the time of Homer we know, very certainly."-Sir William Jones in Asiatic Researches, Vol. 1, page 259.

"The BHAGAVAT, one of the most celebrated of the eighteen Indian PURANAS, in which the miraculous feats of Chrishna are detailed, was stated by Sir W. Jones, at a very early period of our knowledge of India, to be a composition of very high antiquity; for Vyasa, the supposed author is affirmed to have flourished, and astronomical calculations are adduced to prove the fact, 1400 years before the commencement of the Christian æra."-Maurice's Preface, page 2.

The astronomical calculations which prove the fact, are supported by the powerful demonstrations of M, Bailli, and the pitiful attempt to overthrow them, has been completely exposed by the learned professor Playfair, of Edinburgh, who acquits the Brahmins not only of the charge, but of the capability of devising that system of chronological back-reckonings, upon the idle supposition of which alone, their chronology can be disputed.

They did not make such back reckonings; because it can be demonstrated that it is absolutely impossible that they should have done so. They must have been beforehand in science of the whole human race, had such an idea occurred to them.

The dogmatical assumption that the Bhagavat must have been an imitation of the gospel, even because the humble and illiterate disciples of Jesus were utterly unacquainted with the sciences and history of India, and that the evangelists could never have seen the Sanscrit books, or copied the Bhagavat of the Sublime Vyasa," supposes the pretty leap over all remembrance of the possibility of the Evangelists, having made their imitations from some intermediate copy; such as the DIEGESIS, which stood between them and the Bhagavat, and which being an imitation of the Bhagavat, would give the same character to all writings made from it, though the compilers in the dernier

instance, might have been wholly ignorant of the nature and character of the original. A copy from a copy, is a copy still, and that to any extent. We are required also on this assumption, to suppose that there was such a person as Jesus, and that he had disciples, and that those disciples were humble and illiterate, and that the Disciples and Evangelists were the same persons, and that the Evangelists were ignorant of the Greek and Roman classics, &c., that is we must suppose every thing, and believe every thing...

ROBERT TAYLOR.

TWENTY-THIRD DISCOURSE,

Delivered before the Society of Universal Benevolence, in their Chapel, Founders' Hall, London,

On Sunday, Dec. 31, 1826,

On Time.

By the Rev. ROBERT TAYLOR, B. A. Orator of the Society.

MEN AND BRETHREN,-As the great and final object of this moral science, is to promote the happiness of mankind, and that, by any means by which it may be promoted; our stepping aside, for this occasion, from the direct line of the logical arrangement which we were pursuing, with the intention of a more advantageous return to it, has more than its apology. It is expedient, it is profitable, therefore fit and right to be adopted.

We had arrived at the consideration of that order of moral qualities, which stands on the nice line of demarcation between virtue and vice, and which, consequently calls for the most heedful application of judgment and caution in determining the vast alternative whether, and how far they are to be propounded to the emulation, or denounced to the avoidance of the character which our system of morals aims to form.

But as no impressions of mind, whether physical or moral, whether with great and good, or with but little or no reason for their origination; so they are but actually ascertained to exist and to make up a part of the human character, should escape the notice of the diligent student and scholar in the great science of human character; it cannot but be admitted that the strong universal and most natural impressions of mind, accompanying the observance of the grand divisions of time, on this, the last day of the year, claim from us a suspension of the ordinary course of reflection, in favour of the paramount interest of the reflections tnost congenial to the season. The business of the moral philosopher is to assist the mind under these impressions, and to turn

them to the best account for the promotion of its improvement and the increase of its happiness.

TIME, which in a strict and philosophical sense has no existence; but which, to us, is the result of a perception of succession in our ideas; while we perceive that succession, cannot but be accompanied with reflections which may be useful or injurious to us, according to the correctness or error with which they are disposed and arranged in the mind.

A natural feeling of melancholy and depression of spirits, a feeling, as uncongenial to virtue as to happiness, is apt to attend the observance of what we call the flight of time. The year has gone by never to return; and what is worse, we are older than we were; and what is worse and worse, never going to be young again-where is the old man? (I forgot, no, my young friends, you must never call any body old; and if that be not good morality; I'll be judged by any man on earth who would rather step across a stile than jump over it.) But where is the man, who having seen what he hath seen, and seeing what he sees, has not at some time or other been tempted to put up that fervent heart-felt prayer, which is as good as any other prayer, and quite as likely to be granted-O mihi præteritos si Jupiter referet amos-O that Jupiter would give me back again the years that are gone by.

But as if this natural impotence and tendency of the mind itself, to despondency and gloominess, the worst and most deplorable state into which the mind can fall, were not enough; not only poets, who are said to deal in fiction; and priests, who certainly never deal in any thing else, and are the natural and sworn enemies of human happiness, but those who have held the character of philosophers, and from whom better things might have been expected, have concurred to increase the morbid tendency, to thicken the shades, and "shed a browner horror on the woods."

Philosophers, by fixing the beginning of the new year (which is entirely arbitrary, and might as well have been reckoned from any bright day in March or April), exactly in the depth of winter, when the sap of life is down in the animal as well as in the vegetable kingdom. And "dread Winter spreads his latest gloom, and reigns tremendous o'er the conquered year."

Poets, with congenial fiction swell the mischief, and charm us to delusion, like the fabled swan that sings itself to death, so sweet, and yet so false.

"Alas, the meanest flower the garden yields,
The vilest weeds which flourish in the fields,
Which dead in wint'ry sepulchres appear,
Revive in spring and bloom another year.

But men, the learned, the brave, the great, the wise,
When once the hand of death hath closed their eyes,
In tombs forgotten lie, no sun's restore

They sleep, for ever sleep to wake no more."

Priests and religionists of all denominations, who are all, more or less implicated in the guilt of priestcraft, or in a guilty connivance at it, have added to this foolish and frightful conceit of sleeping in damp sheets to all eternity, the still more frightful, still more foolish conceit, of being awakened out of this sleep after we shall have got used to it, by the sound of God-a'mighty's clarionet, calling us up, to one or other of two sorts of entertainment, eternal singing, or eternal roasting, between which, no sensible man would know which to choose, if he might help himself.

Thus has poor humanity been hardly dealt with on all hands, and its infirmities and natural evils, if there are any natural evils, (which is hugely doubtful) those natural evils, which under a management well and entirely within our power, might have been overruled to be the discipline of virtue, and the means of exalted happiness, have been enhanced and aggravated into horror not naturally appertaining thereto, and served to betray us into the power of vice, and its sure attendant, misery.

Man, not finding in his own reason the resources of consolation and fortitude, which there and there alone are to be found, and which there most certainly would be found, had he been but faithful to himself, becomes the vanquished where he might have been the victor, and yields to that, which was formed to yield to him.

Not allowed, from the first dawning of that noble faculty, which is all that makes a man noble, to give it the supremacy above ali authorities whatever, to trust to its guidance only, and to crush with the heel of instant scorn, as the detected adder in his path, all pretence to any other guidance; the faculty itself becomes debilitated and weakened, and reason is consequently charged with deficiency and impotence, which is really attributable only to the operation of those debilitating causes.

Will reason alone, (it hath been asked) enable a man to overcome the fear of death? or to contemplate with entire satisfaction the progress of year after year, stealing another and another from the supposed allowance of the thread that the three sisters, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, spin for him?

On the supposition, (a supposition which I hope to show you is as false as it is mischievous,) that reason is not competent to this, the effort has been given up, and the desperately plunging mind has either sought to quail its terrors of death, in the delirious conceit of coming to life again after death, or hath suppressed the inconvenient meditation of the transit of time, which it is known can lead to no other issue, by what is far more rational and far the better way, ringing and drinking the old year out, and the new year in.

But this custom, though not that which a severe application of reason would sanction, indicates in its universal prevalence, that No. 7.-Vol. 4

P

the contemplation of the lapse of time, is not naturally terrible to the human mind, nor would have been so at all, had the human mind been uncontaminated with the foul venom of superstition. It is not with a painful, it is not with an unpleasing sentiment, it is not with an immoral or bad one, that friend will meet with friend this evening, and over (as I hope with all of us) the flowing bowl, will find courage to take Old Time by the beard, and tell him we don't fear him. We have grown older together, and still are happy. We shall grow older together, and hope to be happy still.

It was a less rational and less effectual way of conflicting with the apprehensions which superstition had suggested, on observance of the lapse of time, that supposed a certain fate or inexorable decree of somebody that was undertaker-in-chief to the universe, had appointed to each individual the precise moment; before which nothing could terminate, and beyond which nothing could extend the term of his existence. Fixed said they,

"Fixed is the date of all the race of earth,
And such the hard condition of our birth,
No force can then evade, no wisdom save,
All sink alike, the coward and the brave."

Such a conceit, originating at first in a mistaken and ignorant observation of the regular and necessary action of physical causes, and afterwards for the purposes of craft and tyranny, transferred to those figments of the imagination called metaphysical or spiritual causes, is to this day the source of the courage and of the fears of the nations that have fallen under the profession of the Mohammedan faith; nor is it indistinctly traceable as the main-spring of the courage of the machines that are employed to fight battles in Christendom. The ball that is to be fatal to them, is supposed to have received a commission for the purpose. And there can be no doubt that the ball that goes to meet the man, is quite as sensible as the man that goes to meet the ball.

The uncertain continuance of human life, is founded in physical necessities of which the just and rational appreciation is a far better remedy against inordinate apprehensions, and a far surer solace against certain anticipations of it, than any impressions of imagination can produce. Certain it is, that human beings live a longer or a shorter term, precisely according to the laws of their physical organization. As houses and ships are more or less durable according to the quality of the materials of which they are constructed. So that youth and age cannot be estimated by the number of years that a person has lived, without taking the diathesis of his constitution into the account. The ephemeris is very old in half a day: the eagle is young after half a century.

There is besides, a certain incommunicable art or knack of