ness of the Christian religion, and the debilitating effects which the sincere belief of it had produced on his own understanding: his main argument for it, being, "I reverence it, because it is contemptible; I adore it, because it is absurd; I believe it, because it is impossible."* Nothing was considered more obnoxious to the cause of the gospel, than the good sense contained in the writings of its opponents. The inveteracy against learning, of Gregory the Great, to whom this country owes its conversion to the gospel, was so excessive, that he not only was angry with an Archbishop of Vienna, for suffering grammar to be taught in his diocese, but studied to write bad Latin himself, and boasted that he scorned to conform to the rules of grammar, whereby he might seem to resemble a heathen. The spirit of superstition quite suppressed all the efforts of learning and philosophy. Christianity was first sent to the shores of England by the missionary zeal of Pope Gregory the First, not earlier than the sixth or the beginning of the seventh century. Our King Alfred, who is said to have founded the University of Oxford, in the ninth century, lamented that there was at that time not a priest in his dominions who understood Latin, and even for some centuries after, we find that our Christian bishops and prelates, the "teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters, of the whole Christian community, were Marksmen, i. e. they supplied by the sign of the cross, their inability to write their own names.§ Though philology, eloquence, poetry, and history, were sedulously cultivated among those of the Greeks and Latins, who in the fourth century still held out their resistance against the Christian religion: its just and honourable historian, Mosheim, admonishes his readers by no means to conclude that any acquaintance with the sciences had become universal in the church of Christ.|| "It is certain, (he adds) that the greatest part both of the bishops and presbyters, were men entirely destitute of learning and education. Besides, that savage and illiterate party, who looked upon all sorts of erudition, particularly * De carne Christi Semleri, Edit. Halæ Magdeburgicæ, 1770, vol. 3, Quoted in Syntagma, page 106. † Dr. Mandeville's Free Thoughts, page 152. See History of England, almost any one. § Evans's Sketches. Ecclesiastical History, Cent. 4, part 2, chap. 1, sec. 5, p. 346. p. 352. that of a philosophical kind, as pernicious, and even destructive of true piety and religion, increased both in number and authority. The ascetics, monks, and hermits, augmented the strength of this barbarous faction, and not only the women, but also all who took solemn looks, sordid garments, and a love of solitude, for real piety, (and in this number we comprehend the generality of mankind) were vehemently prepossessed in their favour." Happily the security and permanency given to the once won triumphs of learning over her barbarous foes, by the invention of the art of printing,* the now extensive spread of rational scepticism, and the never again to be surrendered achievements of superior intelligence, have forced upon the advocates of ignorance, the necessity of expressing their still too manifest suspicions and hostility against the cause of general learning, in more guarded and qualified terms. But what they still would have, the sameness of their principle, the identity of their purpose, and the sincerity of their conviction that the cultivation of the mind, and the continuance of the Christian religion, are incompatible, is indicated in the institution of an otherwise superfluous university in the city of London, for the avowed purpose of counteracting the well foreseen effects of suffering learning to get her pass into the world untrammelled with the fetters of superstition. The advertisement of subscriptions to the intended King's College, in the Times newspaper, even so late as the 16th of this present month of August, in which I write from this prison, in the cause and advocacy of intellectual freedom, avows the principle in these words :-"We, the undersigned, fully concurring in the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES on which it is proposed to be established, namely, that every principle of general education for the youth of a Christian community, ought to comprise instruction in the Christian religion, as an indispensable part; without which, the acquisition of other branches of knowledge, will be conducive neither to the happiness, nor to the welfare of the state." In other words, and most * In the year 1444, Caxton published the first book ever printed in England. In 1474, the then Bishop of London, in a convocation of his clergy, said, “If we do not destroy this dangerous invention, it will one day destroy us.” The reader should compare Pope Leo the Tenth's avowal, that "it was well known how profitable this fable of Christ has been to us:" with Mr. Beard's Apology for it, in his third letter to the Rev. Robert Taylor, page 74, and Archdeacon Paley's declaration, that " he could not afford to have a conscience." See Life of the Author attached to his work on the Evidences of Christianity, p. 11. London 12mo. edit. 1826. 4 unequivocally in the sense intended, the utmost extent of learning which the university propounds, will never reach to the rendering any of its members competent to conflict with the learning of the enemies of the Christian faith; to produce either orators who dare attempt to vie on equal grounds with their orators; readers, who dare trust their conscious inferiority of understanding to read, or writers that shall have ability or disposition to answer their writings. The old barbarous policy of Goth and Vandal ignorance, to suppress and commit to the flames the writings of Infidels, to decry their virtues, and to imprison their persons; to shelter conscious weakness under airs of affected contempt; to crush the man when they can no longer cope with his argument, to destroy the reasoner, when they dare not encounter his reasoning, is still the dernier resource of a system, that cannot be defended by other means, but must needs be left in the dust from whence it sprang, whenever the mind of man shall be allowed to get a fair start, without being clogged with it. "In consequence of the conquests of the Romans, there arose imperceptibly, but entirely by the operation of natural and most obvious causes, a new kind of religion, formed by the mixture of the ancient rites of the conquered nations with those of the Romans. Those nations, who before their subjection, had their own gods, and their own particular religious institutions, were persuaded by degrees, to admit into their worship, a great number of the sacred rites and customs of their conquerors.' ""* And from this conjunction, helped on or retarded from time to time, by those exacerbations and paroxysms, which ever attend the fever of religion, as it afflicts the sincerely religious, and the policy of those wicked tacticians, who have always known how to raise or lower the spiritual temperament to their purpose, arose that heterogeneous compound of all that was good and all that was bad in all religions, which, after having existed under various names and modifications, and gained by gradual usurpations a considerable ascendancy over any or all the idolatrous forms from which it had been collected, began to be called Christianity. "The wiser part of mankind, however, (says Mosheim) about the time of Christ's birth, looked upon the whole system of religion, as a just object of contempt and ridicule."+ * Mosheim, Cent, 1. † Mosheim, Cent. I. Ch. 1. "About the time of Christ's appearance upon earth,* there were two kinds of philosophy which prevailed among the civilized nations. One was the philosophy of the Greeks, adopted also by the Romans; and the other, that of the Orientals, which had a great number of votaries in Persia, Syria, Chaldea, Egypt, and even among the Jews." The Greek and Roman mode of thought and reasoning, was designated by the simple title of PHILOSOPHY.† That of the eastern nations, as opposed to it, was called GNOSTICISM. The Philosophy, signified only the love and pursuit of wisdom. The Gnosis, signified the perfection and full attainment of wisdom itself. The followers of both these systems, as we might naturally suppose, split and subdivided into innumerable sects and parties. It must be observed, however, that while the Philosophers, or those of the Grecian and Roman school, were infinitely divided, and held no common principle of union among themselves, some of them being opposed to all religion whatever; the Gnostics, or adherents of the oriental system, deduced all their various tenets from one fundamental principle, that of their common deism, and universally professed themselves to be the restorers of the knowledge of God, which was lost in the world. St. Paul mentions and condemns both these modes of thought and reasoning; that of the Greeks, in his Epistle to the Colossians, and that of the Orientals, in his first to Timothy.§. The GNOSIS, or Gnosticism, comprehends the doctrine of the Magi,|| the philosophy of the Persians, Chaldeans, and Arabians, and the wisdom of the Indians and Egyptians. It is distinctly to be traced in the text and doctrines of the New Testament. It was from the bosom of this pretended oriental wisdom, that the chiefs of those sects, which, in the three first centuries, perplexed the Christian church, originally issued. The name itself signified, that its professors taught the way to the true knowledge of the * Our author means any time about or near the era of Augustus. § Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit.-Coloss. i. 8. Avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science, falsely so called.-1 Tim. vi. 20. Il The Magi, or wise men of the east, (Matthew ii. 1,) i. e. the Brahmins, who first got up the allegorical story of CHRISHNA. Deity. Their most distinguished sect inculcated the notion of a triumvirate of beings, in which the Supreme * Deity was distinguished both from the material evil principle, and from the creator of this sublunary world. The PHILOSOPHY, comprehended the Epicureans, the most virtuous and rational of men, who maintained that wisely consulted pleasure, was the ultimate end of man; the Academics, who placed the height of wisdom in doubt and scepticism; the Stoics, who maintained a fortitude indifferent to all events; the Aristotelians, who, after their master, Aristotle, held the most subtle disputations concerning God, religion, and the social duties, maintaining that the nature of God resembles the principle that gives motion to a machine, that it is happy in the contemplation of itself, and entirely regardless of human affairs; the Platonists, from their master, Plato, who taught the immortality of the soul, the doctrine of the trinity, of the manifestation of a divine man, who should be crucified, and the eternal rewards and punishments of a future life; and from all these resulting, the Eclectics, who, as their name signifies, elected and chose what they held to be wise and rational, out of the tenets of all sects, and rejected whatever was considered futile and pernicious. The Eclectics held Plato in the highest reverence. college or chief establishment was at Alexandria in Egypt. Their founder was supposed to have been one Potamon. The most indubitable testimonies prove, that this Philosophy was in a flourishing state, at the period assigned to the birth of Christ. The Eclectics are the same whom we find described as the Therapeuts or Essenes of Philo, and whose sacred writings are, by Eusebius, shown to be the same as our gospels. Nought, but the supposed expediency of deceiving the vulgar, and of perpetuating ignorance, hinders the historian to whom I am, for the substance of this chapter, so much indebted, from acknowledging the fact, that in every rational sense that can be attached to the word, they were the authors and real founders of Christianity. Their CHAPTER VI. ADMISSIONS OF CHRISTIAN WRITERS. IN studying the writings of the early advocates of Christianity, and fathers of the Christian church; where we should naturally look for the language that would indicate |