What then is their real religious system? Why evidently they have none. Religion has never seriously entered into their calculations. So far, however, as their ideas have attained a definite shape, we may perceive a few principles of what is called natural religion, mingled with certain crude, ill-understood notions from revelation, but without any harmony or proportion in the general design.

The persons under consideration, while they do not deny the truths of Christianity, seem to think it somewhat too strict in its requisitions. Though they do not perform, as they admit, all that scripture, strictly construed, may seem to require, they comfort themselves with supposing that they observe with tolerable propriety all that the light of nature suggests, and all therefore that God in reality demands. Their domestic and social relations, we are told, are respectably filled: they are useful and honorable members of the community; so that, upon a general review of their character, they fondly conclude, that whoever may be finally excluded from the joys of heaven, they at least shall not be among the unhappy number.

In reasoning upon the subject of religion, especially with those who acknowledge the truth of revelation, it is not always safe to quit scriptural ground, and to recur to the principles of merely natural theology. If, however, the practice be on any occasion allowable, it is surely so in making the endeavor to convince the professed Christian of the unsuitability of his conduct to the dictates of revealed religion, by showing how completely he falls short even of the imperfect standard of deistical philosophy. For this purpose, it will be endeavored, in the succeeding pages of this essay, to point out a few prominent characteristics of what is called natural religion, with the corresponding duties and obligations of its professor. Deists themselves, though in their own conduct often the most profligate of men, have yet sometimes inculcated in their writings,

(perhaps for the purpose of spreading their pernicious tenets with more effect,) a morality and seriousness far beyond what many professed Christians think it necessary to attain.

Lest, however, the following views of natural duties should seem to convey an impression that the sincere though imperfect fulfilment of them, (if they had been thus fulfilled,) would have been sufficient for human salvation, and thus supersede or diminish the necessity for the system of mercy offered in the gospel, it will be desirable to add several characteristics also of Christian theology, and to allude to some of those inportant points which are made known exclusively by divine revelation. It must, however, be premised, that a general comparison of natural and revealed religion is by no means intended, and much less a complete delineation of either. A few detached points of observation are all that will be marked out, without even regularly entering into the proofs upon which the admitted principles depend.

To ascertain precisely how much is implied in the term natural religion is impossible, since no two deists themselves exactly cohere in their plan of speculation. Were it not that hatred to Christianity forms an indissoluble bond of union between them, we might often doubt whether they were disciples of the same school. It is not true that deism is free from its sects and factions. It partakes of them as much as is possible in a system of mere negatives. The deistical writers disagree, among other important subjects, upon the materiality or immateriality of the human soul;-upon the question respecting innate ideas, which is evidently a momentous point for consideration in their system ;upon the nature of the rewards of virtue and the punishment of vice, and whether these may or may not extend beyond the present state ;-and especially do they differ upon the method of ascertaining and enforcing moral duty; some asserting that it arises from

an innate sense; others from reason pointing out the eternal fitness of things; and others from the mere local knowledge of social and political regulations.

The difficulty of ascertaining how much or how little is included in what is termed the religion of nature, is greatly increased by the general system of borrowing without acknowledgment from the precepts, and even the doctrines, of revelation. By the free, though unacknowledged, use of this assistance, certain deistical writers have contrived to adorn their pages with something that much resembles a tolerable system of external duties. It is true, that the whole spirit and vitality of the duty is in such cases entirely lost from the absence of those Christian motives by which alone it could be produced; yet the duty itself continues to remain on the deistical page,—not indeed as what was ever intended seriously to be enforced,-but as what was necessary to allure those more sober free-thinkers who still professed to admire the morality of the gospel. The delicate exotic evidently faded in its new soil, yet its withered trunk and lineaments were exhibited as proofs of its having been indigenous to the unkindly spot.

To learn, therefore, the true extent of natural religion, it might seem expedient to refer to those writers who flourished antecedently to the Christian era; or to those modern pagans to whom Christianity is entirely unknown yet even here we might be deceived, since whatever of God is acknowledged among the heathens themselves, may, for what deists know to the contrary, be only traditional vestiges of an early revelation, or may have been indirectly introduced by means of Judaism, or even in later times of Christianity itself.

Strictly speaking, therefore, the very term natural religion, if meant to imply a religious code impressed generally upon the human mind, even irrespectively of serious reflection on the subject, is liable to much exception. The very idea of a superior Being, though

almost universally diffused, is more probably the result of reasoning and argument, if not of remote tradition, than of an innate persuasion necessarily coeval with the first dawnings of the human understanding. To vindicate the goodness and justice of God, which may seem to our feeble reason to require that he should not leave himself without witness in the conscience of any intelligent being, it is by no means necessary to suppose the idea of his existence to be a native impression. If such an idea really exists, it matters not, in the present argument, in what manner it was derived.

On the present occasion, therefore, disquisitions of this kind are by no means required; for if a duty has been explicitly admitted by deists themselves, (whatever might be their motive for its admission,) it will equally answer the present purpose,-namely, that of appealing to the consciences of professed Christians,whether the duty were really suggested by natural reason, or whether, being first disclosed by divine revelation, it appeared so rational, that even those who rejected revelation in general could not refuse to admit that individual precept.

Natural religion, as professed by deists, is founded, in common with revealed, upon a belief of the existence of God. From this primary doctrine spring all our moral obligations; so that nothing can be more important than to keep it ever present to our view.— We cannot, indeed, easily find persons who formally and avowedly deny it; but a considerable degree of practical forgetfulness on the subject is almost universal. For this forgetfulness, the best remedy is indeed the constant perusal of the sacred volume. There we

uniformly perceive traces of the Divinity: there his nature, his perfections, his offices are plainly unfolded. We are explicitly taught in what manner he made, and in what manner he governs the world. Scarcely any event is recorded without evident marks of his interposition. The whole volume of revelation, therefore,

is admirably and specifically calculated to remedy that lamentable defect in human nature, by which we are so often inclined to forget what we nevertheless acknowledge, in our deliberate judgment, to be true. He who in theory believes that a God exists, will in scripture find himself constantly reminded of this important fact, and will derive, almost unconsciously, various useful and practical inferences for the regulation of his conduct and his heart, without which his speculative assent would be of no avail.

But, even independently of revelation, merely natural considerations, we might suppose, would keep alive in us this primary article of all religious belief. For are not vestiges of a divine hand stamped upon every object, animate and inanimate, in nature? Is not our own frame, in particular, a frame most "fearfully and wonderfully made," a perpetual evidence to us of the existence of our Creator? Or, if we look from our bodies to our minds, do not we perceive still further proofs of the same indisputable fact?

The first deduction of reason is, that something must have existed from all eternity. We cannot conceive of things having been produced absolutely with

out cause.

Now, whatever exists must have existed either by the necessity of its own nature, or by the agency of some other being. If by the agency of some other being, we may in imagination trace it to its cause, and to that cause go on to apply the same reasoning, till we ultimately arrive at something which we acknowledge must have existed absolutely, and by its own nature from all eternity. This argument fairly considered is irresistible; and the only possible way of seeming to elude its force, is by a sort of half-formed idea that this ultimate cause might have begun to exist in time, and not have been from all eternity. if it began to exist in time, there must have been some cause of its beginning, some reason why it was produ

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