DEDICATION

TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST THREE BOOKS OF THE

DIVINE LEGATION OF MOSES;

1738.

GENTLEMEN,

TO THE FREETHINKERS.

As the following discourse was written for your use, you have the best right to this address. I could never approve the custom of dedicating books to men, whose professions made them strangers to the subject. A discourse on the ten predicaments, to a leader of armies, or a system of casuistry to a minister of state, always appeared to me a high absurdity.

Another advantage I have in this address is, that I shall not lie under any temptations of flattery; which, at this time of day, when every topic of adulation has been exhausted, will be of equal ease and advantage to us both.

Not but I must own you have been managed, even by some of our order, with very singular complaisance. Whether it was that they affected the fame of moderation, or had a higher ambition for the honour of your good word, I know not; but I, who neither love your cause, nor fear the abilities that support it, while I preserve for your persons that justice and charity which my profession teaches to be due to all, can never be brought to think otherwise of your character, than as the despisers of the Master whom I serve, and as the implacable enemies of that order, to which I have the honour to belong. And as such, I should be tempted to glory in your censures; but would certainly refuse your commendations.

Indeed, were it my design, in the manner of modern dedicators, to look out for powerful protectors, I do not know where I could sooner

find them, than amongst the gentlemen of your denomination: for nothing, I believe, strikes the serious observer with more surprise, in this age of novelties, than that strange propensity to infidelity, so visible in men of almost every condition; amongst whom the advocates of deism are received with all the applauses due to the inventors of the arts of life, or the deliverers of oppressed and injured nations. The glorious liberty of the gospel is forgotten amidst our clamours against church tyranny; and we slight the fruits of the restored tree of knowledge, for the sake of gathering a few barren leaves of freethinking, misgrafted on the old prolific stock of deism.

But let me not be misunderstood; here are no insinuations intended against liberty: for, surely, whatever be the cause of this epidemic folly, it would be unjust to ascribe it to the freedom of the press, which wise men have ever held one of the most precious branches of national liberty. What, though it midwifes, as it were, these brain-sick births; yet, at the same time that it facilitates the delivery, it lends a forming hand to the misshapen issue: for, as in natural bodies, become distorted by suffering in the conception, or by too strait imprisonment in the womb, a free unrestrained exposition of the parts may, in time, reduce them nearer to their natural rectitude; so crude and rickety notions, enfeebled by restraint, when permitted to be drawn out and examined, may, by the reform of their obliquities, and the correction of their virulency, at length acquire health and proportion.

Nor less friendly is this liberty to the generous advocate of religion: for how could such a one, when in earnest convinced by the evidence of his cause, desire an adversary whom the laws had before disarmed; or value a victory, where the magistrate must triumph with him? Even I, the meanest in this controversy, should have been ashamed of projecting the defence of the great Jewish lawgiver, did not I know that the same liberty of thinking was impartially indulged to all. And if my dissenting in the course of this defence from some received opinions need an apology, I desire it may be thought that I ventured into this track the less unwillingly, to show, by my not intrenching in authorized speculations, that I put myself upon the same footing with you, and would claim no privilege that was not in common.

This liberty then may you long possess; may you know how to use; may you gratefully acknowledge! I say this, because one cannot, without indignation, observe, that amidst the full possession of it, you still continue, with the meanest affectation, to fill your prefaces with repeated clamours against the difficulties and discouragements attending the exercise of freethinking: and, in a peculiar strain of modesty and reasoning, employ this very liberty to persuade the world you still want it.

In extolling liberty, we can join with you; in the vanity of pretending to have contributed most to its establishment, we can bear with you; but in the low cunning of pretending still to groan under the want of it, we can neither join nor bear with you. There was indeed a time, and that within our own memories, when such complaints were seasonable and even useful; but, happy for you, gentlemen, you have outlived it: all the rest is merely Sir Martin; it is continuing to fumble on the lute, though the music has been long over. For it is not a thing to be disguised, that what we hear from you, on this head, is but an awkward, though envenomed imitation of an original work of one, whoever he was, who appears to have been amongst the greatest, and most successful of your adversaries. It was published at an important juncture, under the title of 'The Difficulties and Discouragements which attend the Study of the Scripture.' But with all the merit of this beautiful satire, it has been its fortune not only to be abused by your bad imitations, but to be censured by those in whose cause it was composed; I mean the friends of religion and liberty. An author of note thus expresses himself: † "Nor was this the worst: men were not only discouraged from studying and revering the Scriptures by-but also by being told that this study was difficult, fruitless, and dangerous; and a public, an elaborate, an earnest dissuasive from this study, for the very reasons now mentioned, enforced by two well known examples, and believed from a person of great eminence in the church, hath already passed often enough through the press, to reach the hands of all the clergymen in Great Britain and Ireland: God in his great mercy forgive the author." Seriously it is a sad case! that one well-meaning man should so widely mistake the end and design of another, as not to see by the turn and cast of the Difficulties and Discouragements,' that it is a thorough irony, addressed to some hot bigots then in power, to show them what dismal effects that inquisitional spirit, with which they were possessed, would have on literature in general, at a time when public liberty looked with a very sickly face! Not, I say, to see this, but to believe, on the contrary, that it was really intended as a public, an elaborate, an earnest dissuasive from the study of the Scriptures! But I have so charitable an opinion of the great author, for a great author without doubt he was, as to believe that had he foreseen that the liberty, which animates this fineturned piece of raillery, would have given scandal to any good man, he would, for the consolation of such, have made any reasonable abatement in the vigour of his wit and argument.

*In a comedy of Dryden's.

Revelation Examined with Candour, in the preface.

The author was the excellent Dr Hare, late bishop of Chichester.

But you, gentlemen, have a different quarrel with him: you pretend he hath since written on the other side of the question. Now though the word of his accusers is not apt to go very far with me, yet, I must own, I could be easily enough brought to believe, that an author of such talents of literature, love of truth, and of his country, as this appears to have been, would as freely expose the extreme of folly at one end, as at the other; without regarding what party he opposed or favoured by it. And it is well known, that, at the time this is pretended to have been done, another interest being become uppermost, strange principles of license, which tended to subvert all order, and destroy the very essence of a church, ran now in the popular stream. What then should hinder a writer, who was of no party but that of truth, to oppose this extravagance, as he had done its opposite? And if he pleased neither bigot nor libertine by his uniformity of conduct, it was for his honour.

How public a blessing is such a virtue! which, unawed by that fatal enemy of sense, as the poet calls it, the danger of offending, dares equally oppose itself to the different follies of party in extremes.

But to return to our subject: The poor threadbare cant of want of liberty, I should hope then you would be, at length, persuaded to lay aside; but that I know such cant is amongst your arts of controversy; and that something is to be allowed to a weak cause, and to a reputation that requires managing. We know what to understand by it, when after a successless insult on religion, the reader is entreated to believe that you have a strong reserve: but till the door of liberty be set a little wider, you have not room to display it.

Thus, at the very entrance of your works you teach us what we are to expect. But I must beg your patience, now I am got thus far, to lay before you your principal abuses of that liberty indulged to you for better purposes; or, to give them the softest name I can, in an address of this nature, your arts of controversy.

By this I shall at once practise the charity I profess, and justify the opinion I have passed upon you.

Your writers, I speak it, gentlemen, to your honour, offer your considerations to the world, either under the character of petitioners for oppressed and injured truth; or of teachers to ignorant and erring men. These sure are characters that, if any, require seriousness and gravity to support them. But so great strangers are we to decorum, on our entry on the stage of life, that, for the most part, like Bayes's actor in the 'Rehearsal,' who was at a loss to know whether he was to be serious or merry, melancholy or in love, we run giddily on, in a mixed and jumbled character; but have most an end, a strong inclination to make a farce of it, and mingle buffoonery with the most serious scenes. Hence, even in

religious controversy, while the great cause of eternal happiness is trying; and men and angels, as it were, attending the issue of the conflict, we can find room for a merry story; and receive the advocate of infidelity with much welcome,* if he comes with but a disposition to make us laugh; though he brings the tidings of death, and scatters round him the poison of our hopes, yet, like the dying assassin,† we can laugh along with the mob, though our own despair and agonies conclude the entertainment.

This quality making a writer so well received, yours have been tempted to dispense with the solemnity of their character; as thinking it of much importance to get the laugh on their side. Hence ridicule is become their favourite figure of speech; and they have composed sad treatises to justify its use, and very merry ones to evince its utility. But to be fair with you, it must be owned, that this strange disposition towards unseasonable mirth, drives all parties upon being witty where they can, as being conscious of its powerful operation in controversy; ridicule having, from the hands of a skilful disputant, the same effect in barbarous minds, with the newly invented darts of Marius, which though so weak as to break in the throw, and pierce no farther than the surface, yet sticking there, they more entangle and incommode the combatant, than those arms, which fly stronger, and strike deeper. However, an abuse it is, and one of the most pernicious too, of the liberty of the press. For what greater affront to the severity of reason, the sublimity of truth, and the sanctity of religion, than to subject them to the impure touch of every empty scurrilous buffoon? The politeness of Athens, which you pretend so much to admire, should be here a lesson to you; which committed all questions of this nature, when they were to be examined, to their gravest and severest court, the Areopagus: whose judges would not suffer the advocates for either party to apply to the passions, so much as by the common rules of the chastest rhetoric.§ But a preposterous love of mirth hath turned you all into wits, quite down from the sanguine writer of The Independent Whig,' to the atrabilarious blas

Hence Anthony Urceus, surnamed Codrus, as vain and impious as any freethinker alive, being asked the reason (as we are told by Blanchini, the writer of his life) why he mixed so much buffoonery in his works, replied, "That nature had formed mankind in such a manner, as to be most taken with buffoons and storytellers."

+ Balthazar Gerard, who murdered the Prince of Orange. See his story.

See Plut. Vit. Mar. tom. ii. pp. 766, 767. Edit. Cruserii, 8vo.

Exemplo legis Attica, Martiique judicii causæ Patronis denuntiat Præco neque principia dicere, neque miserationem commovere. Apul. Lib. x. Asin. Aur. p. 827. Lugd. 1587, 8vo.