preserved in all the dispersions of mankind, through so many successive generations. There is no doubt that many thousand traditions, since the beginning of the world, have been utterly lost; and had not nature secured this tradition, would it not have been lost among the rest ?*

The harmony of opinion, says a learned writer, in regard to a future state, must be either that the doctrine, like that of the existence of the Deity, must have been innate in the mind, impressed on it by its great author, or derived from primæval tradition. For it otherwise surpasses all the strength of credulity, to believe that the legislators of every nation under heaven, should severally have hit upon the same expedient. On this ground, therefore, a man might safely place his foot. But, on so elevated a subject, though we may be accused of abstruse reasonings, and metaphysical subtilties, we have yet stronger holds than even these.

LETTER LXIV.

PHILOSOPHICAL vanity often contracts

the human faculty, and immerges the soul in matter, until it is unable to mount on the wing of contemplation. But, it is the genius of rising intelligence, to spurn the fellowship of inferior natures, to assert its affinity with those of an higher order, and to sigh for an intercourse and society more congenial and elevated. Death, says the materialist, is the final period of our being. But, superstition denies this; she stretches out life beyond life itself. Her fears extend further than our existence.

the idea of death, another eternal life in misery.

She has joined to inconsistent idea, of For when all things

come to an end, then, in the opinion of

super

stition, they begin to be endless. Then, I cannot tell what dark and dismal gates of Tartarus fly open; then rivers of fire, with all the fountains of Styx, are broken up. Thus doth dreadful superstition oppose the voice of God, which hath declared death to be the end of sufferings.*

In

* Plutarch.

In reply, I exclaim with the old philosopher, Video barbam et pallium, philosophum nondum video. Without a future state, all comes to nothing. If this doctrine be once abandoned, there is no justice, no goodness, no order, no reason, nor any thing upon which any argument in moral matters can be founded. Nay, even though we should set aside all consideration of the moral attributes of God, and consider only his natural perfections, his infinite knowledge and wisdom, as framer and builder of the world; it would even, in that view, appear infinitely improbable, that God should have created such beings as men are, and endued them with such excellent faculties, and placed them on this globe of earth; and all this without any further design, than only for maintaining a perpetual succession of such shortlived mortals as we at present are, to live in the utmost confusion and disorder for a very few years, and then fall eternally into nothing. What can be imagined more vain and empty? What more absurd? What more void of all marks of wisdom, than the fabric of the world, and the creation of mankind, upon such a supposition ?*

No substance, or being, can have a natural tendency to annihilation, or to become nothing.

From a change of accidents of the same substance, we erroneously argue a change of the substance itself; though a change of substance is improperly called a change: and hence we falsely imagine that immaterial substances, or beings, may have a natural tendency to decay, or become nothing.* Nothing, is that which has no properties or modes whatever; that is to say, it is that of which nothing can truly be affirmed, and of which every thing can truly be denied. Now, eternity and infinity, for example, are only modes or attributes, which exist merely by the existence of the substance to which they belong. He that can suppose eternity and immensity, and consequently, the substance by whose existence these modes or attributes exist, removed out of the universe; may, if he pleases, as easily remove the relation of equality between twice two and four.

Locke determined with his usual sagacity, when he made personal identity to consist in consciousness. When the dead rise, the question is not so much, with what body do they come? St. Paul calls the proposer of that question a fool; but, he would not have bestowed that epithet on the man who should ask, With

With what mind do they come?

The mind

is the man; and it informs us we shall neverdie. From analogy, it surely seems probable we may survive the change occasioned by death, and exist in a future state of life and perception. The difference of the capacities and states of life at birth and in maturity; the change of worms into flies, and the vast enlargement of their loco-motive powers, by such a change; birds and insects bursting the shell, their habitation, and by this means entering into a new world, furnished with new accommodations for them, and finding a new sphere of action assigned them; all these wonderful transformations afford analogical presumptions in favour of a future state. But, the condition of life in which we ourselves existed formerly, in the womb, and in our infancy, are almost as different from our present state in maturity of age, as it is possible to conceive any two states or degrees of life to be. That we are to exist hereafter, therefore, in a state as different from our present, as this is from our former, is but according to the analogy of nature; according to a natural order, or appointment, of the very same kind with what we have already experienced. The whole natural world, and government of it, is a scheme or system; not a fixed

D4