but without the invasion of any one right which men can justly claim under the freest and most equitable government. The parliament of one thousand six hundred and forty-one declared, that human laws cannot bind conscience; which is a declaration every sect makes out of power, and none observe willingly in it. But be it so. Human laws, however, may and ought to exclude those men from power in the state, kings especially, who profess a private conscience repugnant to the public conscience of that state. Such men will make use of power, and the better men they are, the more to propagate their own schemes of religion, to strengthen their own party and to recommend their particular notions about ecclesiastical government, which cannot be done without manifest danger to the public peace. The wisdom of our constitution has therefore joined, admirably well together, the two most compatible things in the world, how incompatible soever they may have been represented, a test and a toleration; and by rejecting alike the principles of latitudinarians and rigidists, has gone far to prevent those evils that gave occasion to the objection of atheists: as I hope that I have done in this essay, to prove, by considering the nature, rise, progress and effects of authority in matters of religion, that theology has been always liable to this objection, Christianity never. Christianity, genuine Christianity is contained in the gospels; it is the word of God; it requires, therefore, our veneration, and a strict conformity to it. Traditional Christianity, or that artificial theology which passes for genuine, and which we all profess, is derived from the writings of fathers and doctors of the church, and from the decrees of councils. It is therefore the word of men, and of men, for the most part, either very weak, very mad, or very knavish. It requires, therefore, no regard, nor any inward conformity to it. You have, I know, at your elbow a very foul-mouthed and a very trifling critic, who will endeavor to impose upon you on this occasion, as he did on a former. He will tell you again, that I contradict myself, and that by going about to destroy the authority of the fathers and the church, which I reject, I go about to destroy the authenticity of the gospels, which I admit. But if the dogmatical pedant should make this objection, be pleased to give him this answer; that I do indeed admit the gospels, not on the testimony of the spirit, like Calvin, but on that of the fathers and doctors of the church, who not only bear this testimony separately; but, assembled in a council at Laodicea, rejecting many other gospels, made a canon of these: and yet that his objection is impertinent, since I may receive the gospels on the credit of these men, of whom I think very little better than I do of him, for authentic Scriptures, just as well as

VOL. IV.-L

he receives the books of the Old Testament, concerning which he has started so many idle paradoxes, for such, on the credit of the Jews, though he rejects their oral law and the fabulous traditions of their rabbins. Thus I shall conclude this long essay, wherein I have recalled the sum of what I have said to you in conversation, and which has, I fear, too much of the loose and wandering air of conversation.

FRAGMENTS OR MINUTES

OF

ESSAYS.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE foregoing Essays, if they may deserve even that name, and the Fragments or Minutes that follow, were thrown upon paper in Mr. Pope's lifetime, and at his desire. They were all communicated to him in scraps, as they were occasionally written. But the latter not having been connected and put together under different heads, and in the same order as the former had been, before his death, if that may be called order; I have contented myself to correct and extend them a little, and to leave them as Fragments or Minutes, in the form in which they appear, though they might be styled Essays with no more impropriety than those which precede them. They are all nothing more than repetitions of conversations often interrupted, often renewed, and often carried on a little confusedly. The opinions I held are exposed as clearly, as they ought to be by a man who thinks his opinions founded in truth. I thought, and I think still, that mine were so. The more important, therefore, the subjects are, the more necessary it seemed to me not to disguise the truth, especially to friends not easily to be scandalised, even when their own opinions and prejudices were frequently contradicted, and on occasions when freedom of speech could be neither indecent nor hurtful. It could be neither indecent nor hurtful to these friends; nor will it be so, I hope, to those into whose hands these papers may fall after my death.

I.

I have read again Dr. Cudworth's posthumous treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality, which you sent me long ago: and, since you ask my opinion of it now, I shall take some notice of those, which this very learned author defends on two subjects, the nature of human knowledge, and the principles of natural religion. On the first I have written to you already, and on the last you know that I intend to write to you. On both of these I differ widely from the doctor, and am very far from finding any thing in this treatise, which can induce me, in the least degree to change my way of thinking. On the contrary, the great principle on which he proceeds seems to me of the utmost absurdity, and the consequences deducible from it at least as dangerous, perhaps more so, to the foundation of all religion, than the consequences that flow from the doctrines he opposes.

Cudworth enters into the dispute between Des Cartes and his opposers, who have triumphed exceedingly over him for saying, "I do not think that the essences of things, and those mathematical truths which can be known of them, are independent on God; but I think, however, that they are immutable and eternal, because God willed and ordered that they should be so." It is more probable, and it is more candid to believe, that this philosopher was in earnest, than that he was in jest, when he advanced this proposition. He might think that he took the best, if not the strongest side in dispute, and approve his own intention in the choice he made; as it deserves to be approved by every sincere theist, and modest inquirer into matters of the first philosophy, even by those who are not of his mind.

If Des Cartes was to arise, and to answer for himself, might he not distinguish between immutable and independent? Might he not say, that these truths are immutable, because they affirm what is conformable to that universal nature whereof God is the author, as he is of that intelligence by which they are perceived; and that they are, therefore, in a proper sense, both immutable and dependent? immutable, as much as the nature is to which they belong; dependent, on that Being by whose energy this nature began to exist, and is preserved. He might own himself afraid to assert, notwithstanding the decisions of schoolmen, or the decrees of councils, that there can be any entity whatever, or any thing in any being whatever, which is independent on God. He might lament his own fate, to be accused of atheism, because he em

ployed, in physical hypotheses, matter and motion alone; though he always supposed a first mover, and had proved, by a demonstration he thought good, the existence of an all-perfect Being: and to be thus accused by men, who presume to maintain that they have other objects of knowledge, besides the existence of an all-perfect Being, which exist by the necessity of their own natures, and independently on him. He would reject most certainly, with some of that sourness which he had in his temper as well as in his countenance, the imputation of betaking himself to a pitiful evasion. He would show, with great force, that his apprehension of admitting any thing independent on God into the corporeal or intellectual system, is a most reasonable apprehension, and no bugbear, as the doctor calls it. He might show, perhaps, the profane consequences of such metaphysics as the doctor's, by citing, among others, this assertion from the treatise we speak of here; "the eternal and immutable wisdom in the mind of God is thence participated by created beings independent upon the will of God." He might insist, that since "the wisdom of God is as much God as the will of God." and the will, by consequence, as the wisdom, it is absurd to distinguish them; and that it is something worse than absurd to reason about the divine, as we reason about the human intellect, to divide and parcel out the former on the plan of the latter. If the will of man is blind, dark, plumbean, flexible, and liable to be seduced, is the will of God to be conceived in the like manner? And if it is not, why are we led to conclude that a superior faculty is necessary to determine it, as the judgment of reason does, or should determine that of man? The ancients thought matter eternal, and assumed that the Demiurgus, or divine architect, composed the frame of the world with materials which were ready prepared, and independently on him in a confused chaos. Much in the same manner, such metaphysicians as the learned Cudworth have imagined a sort of intellectual chaos, a chaos of eternal ideas, of incorporeal essences, independent on God, selfexistent, and therefore coeval with the Supreme Being, and therefore anterior to all other natures. In this intellectual chaos, God sees, and man must endeavor to see, the natures, the real essences of things: and thus the foundations of morality are laid higher than the existence of any moral agents, before there was any system of being, from which the obligations to it could result, or to which they could be applied: just as the same philosophers suppose the incorporeal essences of white and black, for instance, to have existed when there was no such thing as color, and those of a square and circle, when there was neither form nor figure.

Des Cartes would have broken off the dispute by acknow