To mark how thou would'st fainly reconcile If thou art fetter'd, man, I would but file Away thy chains ;--be free! trust nature's laws, And thy glad heart with mine, shall throb to reason's cause. 'Tis true, that thou must die! as all men must, No matter what their creeds are or may be, Mere faith will not immortalize mere dust, Nor doubt (of that which mocks all scrutiny) Annihilate its immortality, If it be more than mortal; for the restWere there ten thousand gods, thou art left free To doubt all they have not made manifest; Doubt is but search of truth! confirm'd by reason's test. Eternity, that sound that seems to ring An everlasting warning in thine ears, That awful vision past imagining, That theatre of all thy hopes and fears, Might be believed in; but! the skull appears Ev'n on its threshold! psha! one feels while viewing it, "Tis done with,-full of dust, as once of tears, If this be thy god's method of renewing it,Indeed he has a dirty way of doing it. I fear not! mine is all a dreadless faith, I nothing fear, of which I have no notion, Which-man whatever he hath said, or saith, Proves only by a wild and vague devotion, Eternity is liken'd to an ocean, But what is the eternal! liken'd to? Why a strange something conscious of the motion Of deathless life,-alas! this will not do ; Would that it were proved truth! but none can prove it true. Byron the mountain, ocean, rock, or wild, These were the pleasant places of thy dream, Wherever grandeur swept or beauty smil'd, There didst thou love to pour th' enduring beam The honest show of all that should redeem The heart from bigot fangs; 'twas ever so Dare but to doubt his creed, and ev'ry man's your foe. In superstition; yet the time may be, I. W. IMRAY. * Save and except, thy law, NECESSITY!—Ed. LETTER 35.-FROM THE REV. ROBERT TAYLOR. LIFE AND CHARACTER OF DR. LARDNER. (Continued from p. 438.) DEAR MR. CARLILE, I left Dr. Lardner in my last account of him, in the engagement of domestic chaplain to Lady Treby (the widow of Sir George Treby, Knight, who had been Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas) and tutor to her son, Brindley Treby, Esq. a situation that fully accounts for the general turn of his character; there is no situation on earth more horrible than that of subjugation to petty-coat divinity. In ten thousand passages of his great work, may critical observance perceive the check of Lady Treby's apron-string: a thousand sentences have got a turn they never would have had, if pudding had been safe! One of the most barbarous and cruel things I know of, is the cool indifference with which the thief who carries the key of the pantry in his pocket, will rail me down the hypocrisy, the insincerity, and all that sort of stuff, of those who have written and preached one way, while every sentiment of their hearts, and every suggestion of their minds ran the other. We should have known what Dr. Lardner's real sentiments were, if Dr. Lardner had been free. In Dr. Lardner's day, rational preaching was no recommendation to popular favour; and often, full often, must he have had the mortification of seeing the shallow shirking evangelical scoundrel, elbowing his way into popularity and becoming the master, while he for want of the winning graces, remained the man. Previous to the account of his deafness, which Dr. Lardner gave (as quoted in my last,) and as early as 1723, he was engaged with a number of ministers, in carrying on a course of lectures on a Tuesday Evening, at the Old Jewry. At this time, and indeed some years before, he was a member of a literary society consisting of ministers and lay gentlemen who met on Monday evenings at Chew's coffee-house in Bow-lane, Cheapside. The chairman of this society, at every meeting, proposed two questions, to be freely and candidly debated; beside which, each member in his turn produced an essay on some learned or entertaining subject. Such institutions have been of eminent service to the republic of literature: they have given rise to many important discoveries, and to many valuable works, which otherwise would never have existed. When it is recollected, that to these coffee-house declamations we owe the origination of a performance in the theological world to which there is no similar nor second, our supercilious dunces, who never had the ability to entertain any audience, that were allowed to think, to judge, and to answer the declaimer, will have worn their threadbare coat of affected contempt out at the No. 15.-Vol. 2. 2 H elbows. How would their Reverend Daniel Wilsons, their nasal-twanged Fletchers, their tintinabulous-voiced Collyers, their repentant-atheistical Chalmers, their damnation Pye Smiths, their hell-fire Blackburns, and all the fry of their blackguardreverences, look and feel if once they trusted themselves to speak in any place or under any circumstances where they might be replied to ? I have a little bit of vanity in finding out, that Dr. Lardner sometimes preached on the very spot where subsequently stood the Areopagus. A fatality hangs over that spot. With all Dr. Lardner's merit, he was forty-five years of age, before he obtained a settlement among the dissenters. On the 24th of August 1729, he happened to preach for the Rev. Dr. William Harris, at Crutched Friars, and the consequence of it was, that he was unexpectedly invited to become assistant to their minister by the congregation. How humble indeed must have been the circumstances of this great man, to make the falling in of such a second fiddleship to a beggar's dignity, a thank-god piece of preferment! His biographer has not the honesty to tell us, how much would be likely to be left in the plate after the master had been satisfied, for the gleaning of the man whom they had hampered upon the harvests of a Crutched Friars conventicle. Poor Dr. Lardner! how does one's heart smart for such a man, at forty-five years of age, giving God thanks for his promotion from Lady Treby's dumplings, to second-lick at general subscription butter-milk. O God! think of the plight of the evangelical supernumerary, endeavouring to puff the afternoon embers of enthusiasm into a second glow, to boil the pot for the understrapper: when if he doesn't puff hard and almost blow his lungs out, the sixpences tinkle as slowly on the plate, as if they were purposely keeping tune to the Dead March in Saul! O, think of such a man in such a plight and you must forgive him his prayer on the occasion: "O Lord, our hope is in thee! do thou strengthen us, and make us sufficient for what thou callest us to. Cause thy face to shine upon us. Let us see thy power and thy glory in the sanctuary." (i. e. in a nasty dirty chapel in Crutched Friars) "May thy people be comforted and continually edified more and more in their most holy faith! May God hear my earnest prayers, in enabling me to perform this service, he has called me to, so as it may be for his glory, and the edification of his people." To which I only add, to the honour of the three persons of the trinity, my own sincere ejaculations, O Lord! O Lord!! O Lord!!! With this illustration from his life, one cannot doubt that Dr. Lardner's writings were one continued campaign against his convictions. For though the admissions and cessions, which he was obliged to make in the course of such a work, his surrender of the celebrated passage of Josephus, his admission of the forgery and fraud of more than 99 plus 99 hundredth parts out of a hundred, of all the once redoubtable array of Christian Evidences, must have exposed him to the suspicion of his contemporaries, and entailed on him a constant state of martyrdom, he surrendered all its glories to the necessities of his situation, by the publication of sophisms and falsehood, equally disparaging to his character of mind and heart. 1. Among these may be reckoned his disrespectful treatment of Mosheim, and of all who advanced beyond him in liberality of sentiment. 2. His saying and un-saying, in order to chime in with all parties, on the prosecution of Woolston. 3. His known and wilful slanders on that great man's character, for the purpose of standing well with those who sought to justify his most flagrantly unjust imprisonment. 4. His most sneaking evasive chicanery throughout all his works, to keep the miraculous powers claimed by the church of Rome, so far in countenance, as that he would say and not say, believe, and not believe them, at the same time. 5. His branding the Emperor Julian with the reproach of being a persecutor. 6. His justification of the character of that evangelical childkiller, Constantine. 7. His credit given to the disgusting details of the supernatural and physically impossible sufferings of martyrs, who never had any existence, but in the invention of monkish romance writers. 8. His universal shuffle, of quoting other writers, and appearing to decline giving any opinion of his own, whenever he wishes a falsehood to carry its effect, without running the venture of telling it himself. 9. His egregious pervading sophistry through his whole work, of taking it for granted: 1st.-That all passages to which something of the same turn of thought or expression may be found in the New Testament, must necessarily be quotations from the canonical books of the New Testament, and could not as well have been so from the apocryphal books, in which the same thoughts and phrases were to be found. And 2nd. That proofs of the antiquity of the New Testament would be tantamount to proof of the truths of its contents. 10. His putting, on palpably Pagan documents, a Christian significancy, in outrage of their evident drift and purpose. 11. His accumulation of immensity of irrelevant matter from Pagan learning, that never had the remotest relation to Christianity, and vamping off the vasty olla podrida, as so much evidence of the Christian Religion. All these things, notwithstanding, Dr. Lardner's is the standard work (in its department) on the Christian evidences, and has done, and will continue to do incalculable good. It is much more in the hands of unbelievers, than of Christians. Universal experience attests that the state of mind in which any one would be induced to study the works of Lardner, is a state in which no man could continue. Christians are not, and never were inquirers. To affect to be acquainted with Lardner, and to refer others to him, is a custom of mere gasconade, and canting coxcombery. Lardner's Credibility may be fairly reckoned as a weapon put into the hands of infidelity. For any one helping sentence that it seems to hold out to Christianity, it has twenty mortal thrusts at it. I have never met a Christian in my life, that dare stick to the text of Lardner, or, indeed, who had diligently studied him. No man ever resorts to Lardner till he begins to doubt; and Lardner's work administered as physic to a doubter, is something like oil to put a fire out, and reminds one of the contrivance of the shipwrecked mariner, who tied himself to the anchor, that he might make sure of having something to float him ashore. It is an infallible cure for doubt. I remain, your's truly, ROBERT TAYLOR. I acknowledge with grateful feelings, the subscriptions and obliging letter from Glasgow, which appear in number 14; as also the honour of having been elected honorary member of the Society of Free Inquirers, of New York, United States. With this week's parcel, my son DIEGESIS will be with you; and I shall be most happy, if you shall get him ready to accompany his brother SYNTAGMA across the Atlantic, in testimony of their father's most cordial brotherhood and unity of heart and purpose, with all the friends of virtue, truth, and liberty, that the sun shines on. I have been so intensely occupied in giving his last lessons to my godlike boy, and my feelings have been so affected in parting from him, that I must cry mercy, if I seem to be behind hand in other relations, or to have discharged this attention somewhat too perfunctorily. I have had another DIVINE REVELATION, Sent to me from the Rev. Vicar of Swineshead, in Lincolnshire; but God is so very troublesome, and so ready to work all sorts of miracles, except the one that would do! that I have not time to attend to him. Besides I consider myself affronted, at his not sending an angel to open my prison doors, or doing something for me, in an intelligible and understandable way, the devil may have his visions, apocalypses, adumbrations, typifications, and manifestations for me. King's College, Oakham, Oct. 5, 1828. For "The Lion." PROVIDENCE!-What is Providence?-A creature, a phantom of the imagination, revelling in human misery, wallowing in human blood, inflicting |