'As I am secretary to the club, it is my business whenever we meet to take minutes of the transactions. This has enabled me to send you the foregoing particulars, as I may hereafter other memoirs. We have spies appointed in every quarter of the town, to give us informations of the misbehaviour of such refractory persons as refuse to be subject to our statutes. Whatsoever aspiring practices any of these our people shall be guilty of in their amours, single combats, or any indirect means to manhood, we shall certainly be acquainted with, and publish to the world for their punishment and reformation. For the president has granted me the sole property of exposing and showing to the town all such intractable dwarfs, whose circumstances exempt them from being carried about in boxes; reserving only to himself, as the right of a poet, those smart characters that will shine in epigrams. Venerable Nestor, I salute you in the name of the club'. BOB SHORT, Secretary.'

No. 93. SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 1713.

-Est animus lucis contemptor.

VIRG. Æn. ix. 205.

The thing call'd life with ease I can disclaim.

DRYDEN.

THE following letters are curious and instructive, and shall make up the business of the day.

SIR,

TO THE AUTHOR OF THE GUARDIAN.

THE inclosed is a faithful translation from

* WILLIAM WOTTON'S, D. D.

y No. 92 is ascribed to Pope, on Steele's authority. See The Publisher to the Reader; and Guard. No. 108.

an old author, which if it deserves your notice let the readers guess whether he was a heathen or a Christian". I am, Your most humble servant.'

June 25, 1713.'

"I CANNOT, my friends, forbear letting you know what I think of death; for methinks I view and understand it much better, the nearer I approach to it. I am convinced that your fathers, those illustrious persons whom I so much loved and honoured, do not cease to live, though they have passed through what we call death; they are undoubtedly still living, but it is that sort of life which alone deserves truly to be called life. In effect, while we are confined to bodies, we ought to esteem ourselves no other than a sort of galley-slaves at the chain, since the soul, which is somewhat divine, and descends from heaven as the place of its original, seems debased and dishonoured by this mixture with flesh and blood, and to be in a state of banishment from its celestial country. I cannot help thinking too, that one main reason of uniting souls to bodies was, that the great work of the universe might have spectators to admire the beautiful order of nature, the regular, motion of heavenly bodies, who should strive to express that regularity in the uniformity of their lives. When I consider the boundless activity of our minds, the remembrance we have of things past, our foresight of what is to come; when I reflect on the noble discoveries and vast improvements, by which these minds have advanced arts and sciences; I am entirely persuaded, and out of all doubt, that a nature which has in itself a fund of so many excellent things cannot possibly be mortal. I observe further, that my mind. is altogether simple, without the mixture of any subXenoph. Opera, vol. i. p. 547, et seq. edit. A Ernesti, 8vo. Lips. 1763. 4 tom. M. T. Cicer. Opera, Pars Xmas, p. 5754, et seq. Cato Major, De Senectute, xxii. edit. J. Verburgij, 8vo. Amst. 1724.

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stance or nature different from its own; I conclude from thence that it is indivisible, and consequently cannot perish.

"By no means think, therefore, my dear friends, when I shall have quitted you, that I cease to be, or shall subsist no where. Remember that while we live together, you do not see my mind, and yet are sure that I have one actuating and moving my body; doubt not then but that this same mind will have a being when it is separated, though you cannot then perceive its actions. What nonsense would it be to pay those honours to great men after their deaths, which we constantly do, if their souls did not then subsist? For my own part, I could never imagine that our minds live only when united to bodies, and die when they leave them; or that they shall cease to think and understand when disengaged from bodies, which without them have neither sense nor reason; on the contrary, I believe the soul when separated from matter, to enjoy the greatest purity and simplicity of its nature, and to have much more wisdom and light than while it was united. We see when the body dies what becomes of all the parts which composed it; but we do not see the mind, either in the body, or when it leaves it. Nothing more resembles death than sleep, and it is in that state that the soul chiefly shows it has something divine in its nature. How much more then must it show it, when entirely disengaged ?"

SINCE you have not refused to insert matters of a theological nature in those excellent papers with which you daily both instruct and divert us, I earnestly desire you to print the following paper.

The notions therein advanced are, for ought I know, new to the English reader, and if they are true, will afford room for many useful inferences.

No man that reads the evangelists, but must observe that our blessed Saviour does upon every occasion bend all his force and zeal to rebuke and correct the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Upon that subject he shows a warmth which one meets with in no other part of his sermons. They were so enraged at this public detection of their secret villanies, by one who saw through all their disguises, that they joined in the prosecution of him, which was so vigorous, that Pilate at last consented to his death. The frequency and vehemence of these reprehensions of our Lord, have made the word Pharisee to be looked upon as odious amongst Christians, and to mean only one who lays the utmost stress upon the outward, ceremonial, and ritual part of his religion, without having such an inward sense of it, as would lead him to a general and sincere observance of those duties which can only arise from the heart, and which cannot be supposed to spring from a desire of applause or profit.

This is plain from the history of the life and actions of our Lord in the four evangelists. One of them, St. Luke, continued his history down in a second part, which we commonly call, The Acts of the Apostles. Now it is observable, that in this second part, in which he gives a particular account of what the apostles did and suffered at Jérusalem upon their first entering upon their commission, and also of what St. Paul did after he was consecrated to the apostleship until his journey to Rome, we find not only no opposition to Christianity from the Pharisees, but several signal occasions in which they assisted its first teachers, when the Christian church was in its

infant state. The true, zealous, and hearty persecutors of Christianity at that time were the Sadducees, whom we may truly call the free-thinkers among the Jews. They believed neither resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, i. e. in plain English, they were deists at least, if not atheists. They could outwardly comply with, and conform to the establishment in church and state, and they pretended forsooth to belong only to a particular sect; and because there was nothing in the law of Moses which in so many words asserted a resurrection, they appeared to adhere to that in a particular manner beyond any other part of the old testament. These men therefore justly dreaded the spreading of Christianity after the ascension of our Lord, because it was wholly founded upon his resur

rection.

'Accordingly therefore when Peter and John had cured the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, and had thereby raised a wonderful expectation of themselves among the people, the priests, and Sadducees, Acts iv. clapt them up, and sent them away for the first time with a severe reprimand. Quickly after, when the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, and the many miracles wrought after those severe instances of the apostolical power had alarmed the priests, who looked upon the temple-worship, and consequently their bread, to be struck at; these priests, and all they that were with them, who were of the sect of the Sadducees, imprisoned the apostles, intending to examine them in the great council the next day. Where, when the council met, and the priests and Sadducees proposed to proceed with great rigour against them, we find that Gamaliel, a very eminent Pharisee, St. Paul's master, a man of great authority among the people, many of whose determinations we have still preserved in the