8. And whosoever shall write the history of thy life, of thy labour and of thy migration out of this world, and this, my discourse, uttered from my mouth, him will I commit to thy guardianship, as long as he shall continue in this life.

9. And when his soul shall leave his body, and this world must be quitted, I will burn the book in which his faults are written, nor will I torment him with any punishment in the day of judg

ment.

10. But he shall embark on the fiery sea, and shall pass over it without trouble or pain.

11. This is the duty which hangs over every poor man who is not able to do any of the things which I have mentioned-To wit: If a son be born to him, he shall call his name Joseph, so neither want, nor any sudden death shall happen in that house for ever.

CHAPTER XXVII.

1. Then came the elders of the town unto the place where the body of that blessed old man, Joseph, was laid.

2. And bringing with them funeral palls, they wished to roll it up according to the custom in which the Jews are used to bury." 3. But they found him hold his fine linen, for it stuck so close to his body, that when they wished to pull it off, it was found as immoveable and indissoluble as iron.

4. Neither could they find any extremities in that fine linen, which matter caused them the greatest wonder.

5. At length they carried him out to a place where there was a cave, and they opened the door to bury him among the bodies of his fathers.

6. Then I remembered the day when he walked with me into Egypt, and the great trouble which he bore on my account, wherefore I wept for a long while for his death, and leaning over his body I said.

u 19 John 40, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.

(To be continued.)

SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR THE REV. ROBERT TAYLOR.

(Omitted last week.)

Reading Room of the Sir Isaac Newton's Head, Nottingham.

Aberdonian.

R. T. of Aberdeen....

Three Anti-superstitionists.

Printed and Published by RICHARD CARLILE, 62, Fleet-street, where all Communications, post-paid, or free of expense, are requested to be left.

The Lion.

No. 13. VOL. 2.] LONDON, Friday, Sept. 26, 1828. [PRICE 6d.

MISS OR MADAM,

It is very strange that, in the English language, we have no proper cognomen or style of address by letter, for a young lady or for the youth of either sex. Sir and Madam very properly belong to mature age and to married people, as each, to some degree expresses parentage. The French address a young lady as Mademoiselle; but our English translation of Miss seems to me to be very imperfect. It does not apply well to a lady after she be twenty years of age, and less so after she be thirty. I am about to address you and another lady of Nottingham, who have had the misfortune to turn thirty before marriage, and I am quite at a loss to know how I ought to begin my letter. My politeness will not allow me to style you OLD MAIDS, though such be the social jeer on ladies so unfortunately situated; and you, I am informed, will not much longer bear the taunt, a resolution for which I very much commend you, and wish you all possible joy in the change.

Our male youth are addressed as Masters, which is certainly etymologically inappropriate; and our male adults are styled Misters, which is a genuine barbarism in our language. Miss or Misses seems to be a corruption of Mistress, and Mistress a corruption of I know not what. So that there appears to be a radical defect in all our social names, or in our style of social address.

In speaking of the master and the servant, we are accustomed to describe them as the master and the man, as if the master were not a man. And the virtue of the female is sometimes unintentionally impugned, in the same way, by saying, the Mistress,

Printed and Published by R. CARLILE, 62, Fleet Street.
3 C

No. 13-VOL. 2.

or Miss and the Maid; as if the unmarried Mistress were not a Maid.

This imperfection in our style of address has chiefly arisen from the progressive change in the social condition. Formerly an Esquire was a man of some renown, and a Knight something of the hero; but now we have Knights and Esquires in the countinghouse, and at the counter, who would look wild with surprise, if asked what feats in arms they had performed. Therefore, until society reaches, through the growing knowledge of the times, something like a stable condition, we shall not have an appropriate and well regulated style of address for the various classes of society. I mean classes as to sex and age, for I contemn all other titular distinctions.

This is a curious preface to a theological letter; but as this is to be altogether a very curious letter, the oddness will match with the oddity.

When I met you, in your father's house, in Houndsgate, Not-, tingham, you very frankly confessed to me your religious creed, as that of a follower of Ludovick Muggleton. You took somewhat especial pains to make yourself a little offensively pleasant, or pleasantly offensive; for such was in reality your expressed anxiety to represent yourself as something very different from me in matters of religious opinion. I cautioned you not to make yourself too sure of a disagreement between us; for, wherever I can bring an assumed opponent to definitions, I can soon explain how nearly we agree. This was your case. I had been previously entirely ignorant of the tenets of Muggleton, and had, in fact, set him down as one of the outrageous madmen, in matters of religion, which the Protestant Reformation had heated into life. But you have shown me, that I have mistaken the man. I have examined several biographical works, since my return to town, and Evans's sketch of all religions; but, in no one of them have I found a sketch of the opinions of Ludovick Muggleton, such as I received from you. If Muggleton were in opinion what you have represented his followers now to be, he must have been one of the greatest and most useful reformers of the absurdities of the Christian religion, that the Protestant Reformation produced. And I can well understand, that the purity of his principles, compared with others of that time, would lead to his failure, and to that suppression, in all public records, of any statement of them, which we now find.

I very well understand from you, that Muggleton retained some of the errors of the Christian religion, but he struck down the most glaring of its absurdities, as I learn from you, in treating of body and life, without any of the common nonsense about soul and spirit, in seeing that the body perished, that the principle of life perished not, but rose again to a new formation, and in

abolishing prayer and public worship, the sabbath and its priestly purposes. Indeed, the great superiority of Muggletonianism over every other sect of the Christian religion is, that it requires no priests, that it practises no delusions upon its followers, and that you meet for mutual instruction or amusement on the seventh day, and not for the hypocritical formality of religious ceremony. I told you instantly, on hearing these your tenets, that I was half a Muggletonian; but now, I will go farther, and say, that as far as I can see what Muggleton was as a reformer of the abuses of the Christian religion, I am wholly a Muggletonian. It is very possible, that, with the greater knowledge of the age, I may go farther than Muggleton went; but remember, taking your account of him to be correct, I go farther on the same road that Muggleton travelled, and had he been living in my time, he, probably would have been what I now am.

You seemed to make a merit of hostility toward me, and would not be acquiescently told, that there was similarity in the character of Muggleton and myself; but I hope, that now, I explain and say the same in print, you and Mrs. Burton, and your little flock of Muggletonians will not be afraid to meet me on the seventh day, when I again come to Nottingham, nor will you again say, it would be well for the world, if such a man aş Carlile had never existed.

Carlile agrees with every one, who understands and defends the tenets on which an agreement can be founded. Every one agrees with him on the ground, that he has no tenets but those which he understands, can explain and defend. The disagreement arises, if you and others will take up tenets that are not understood, and that can neither be explained nor defended.

For instance, let us take and explain the following proposition: CARLILE HAS NO GOD. This proposition was raised against me in almost every new company that I visited in Nottingham: and 1 had continually to explain, that I adopted all of the godhead or of deity, that is respectable; but that I could not associate myself with the gods, godhead, or deity of the ignorant and the bad passioned part of mankind. I adopt the gods or deity of the poets, where they do not personify; and all that I object to with relation to any of the gods of mankind, past or present, is, that I will not consent to their being personified; I will not consent to make figures of them, that shall resemble either men or monsters; I will not shape them into mannered beings, that correspond with all the bad passions of mankind; I will not degrade my god by comparison with aught on earth or elsewhere. God can have no parallel. God cannot be described. God is not known. These are truisms, to which all men assent: and all the difference that exists between me and others is, that I adhere rigidly, in thought, act, and practice, to these truisms, and they do not.

They find parallels; they describe; they pretend to know and to communicate with God. This, in them, is often so badly done, as to amount to blasphemous presumption; while I, though punished as a blasphemer of deity, have never blasphemed, am incapable of such blasphemy, and have, in fact, been punished for that kind of incapacity: have been punished for doing the act which I abhorred, and which, equal to or above all men, I am incapable of doing: which I have never done: and the not doing of which has been a shunning of the universal and profitable example that surrounds me. Such is one of the monstrous anomalies which the insanity of religion works among mankind.

The points on which I agree with Muggleton, or rather with you, Miss Clay, are these. I entirely agree with you, in the rejection of the personification of soul or spirit, which is an error similar to that of personifying the deity. I agree with you, in the simple and correct view which you took of body and life, leaving the one to dissolution, the other to resurrection. I entirely agree with you, as far as you astounded another lady, who was a Calvinist, in the admission, that, at that resurrection, there could not possibly be a recollection of the past or the body. And I also agree with that lady, whose notion of heaven and future state you spoiled by that admission, in asking:-" Of what use then is all this preaching, about a heaven, hell, and future state; if we are not to be conscious of the past?" I must confess, Miss Clay, that I thought your Muggletonianism a very strange portion of the Christian Religion and like unto nothing so much as my allegorical view of it, which personifies the principle of reason.

But, then, again, you ran into a tirade against reason, and treated the word, as if it were your devil. Here you were incomprehensible; and I am sorry to say, that, I am sure, you did not understand yourself, nor the proper meaning and application of the words you were using. When you talked about faith and reason, you were lost, and could not state your ideas in the same clear manner, as when you told me, that the Muggletonians had no form of worship, no prayer, no Sabbath for religious ceremony, and no doctrine about souls or spirits. I was very much pleased with you; though you would not say that you were pleased with me. You were not pleased with me for agreeing with you, and wanted me to be something else in religious faith, that was not so much like yours. This I attributed to prejudice and to your previously ill-formed notions of who and what Carlile really You would not even confess your misapprehension; but thought, as it seemed to me, that I was playing with you. It was this appearance in your carriage toward me, that made me resolve to address to you a public letter: to see, if, by such means, I can correct your erroneous impression of me.

was.

I have nothing more seriously to add upon the subject of