Twenty-Fourth Argument.

polite learning, with all its refinements, have fixed their abode! But, in the name of common sense, how can we clear them from the imputation of absurdity, folly, and madness? And by what means can they be reconciled, I will not say to the religion of the meek Jesus, but to the philosophy of a Plato, or calm reason of any thinking man? How perverted must be the taste, how irrational and cruel the diversions of barbarians, in other parts of the globe! And how applicable to all the wise man’s observation, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, and madness in the breasts of the sons of men!”

TWENTY-FOURTH ARGUMENT.

The total corruption of our nature appears, not only in the inclination of mankind to pursue irrational and cruel amusements, but in their general propensity to commit the most unprofitable, ridiculous, inhuman, impious, and diabolical sins.

1st. The most unprofitable: for instance, that of sporting, in profane oaths and curses, with the tremendous name of the Supreme Being. “Because of swearing the land mourneth,” said a prophet, thousands of years ago; and what land even in Christendom, yea, what parish in this reformed island mourns not, or ought not to mourn, for the same provoking crime?—a crime which is the hellish offspring of practical Atheism and heathenish insolence—a crime that brings neither profit, honour, nor pleasure, to the profane wretch who commits it—a crime for which he may be put to open shame, forced to appear before a magistrate, and sent for ten days to the house of correction, unless he pays an ignominious fine; and, what is more awful still, a crime which, if persisted in, will one day cause him to gnaw his impious tongue in the severest torments. Surely man, who drinks this insipid and yet destructive iniquity like water, must have his moral taste strangely vitiated, not to say diabolically perverted.

2dly. The most ridiculous sins. In what country, town, or village, do not women betray their silly vanity? Is it not the same foolish disposition of heart which makes them bore their ears in Europe, and slit their noses in America, that they may unnaturally graft in their flesh pieces of glass, shining pebbles, glittering gold, or trinkets of meaner metal? And when female Hottentots fancy they add to the importance of their filthy person, by some yards of the bloody intestines of a beast twisted round their arms or necks, do they not evidence the very spirit of the ladies in our hemisphere, who too often measure their dignity by the yards of coloured silk bands with which they crown themselves, and turn the grave matron into a pitiful May queen?

3dly. The most inhuman sins. “A hundred thousand mad animals, whose heads are covered with hats,” says Voltaire, “advance to kill or be killed by the like number of their fellow mortals, covered with turbans. By this strange procedure they want, at best, to decide whether a tract of land, to which none of them all lays any claim, shall belong to a certain man whom they call Sultan, or to another whom they name Cesar, neither of whom ever saw, or will see, the spot so furiously contended for. And very few of those creatures, who thus mutually butcher one another, ever beheld the animal for whom they cut each other’s throats! From time immemorial this has been the way of mankind almost all over the earth. What an excess of madness is this! And how deservedly might a superior being crush to atoms this earthly ball, the bloody nest of such ridiculous murderers!” The same author makes elsewhere the following reflections on the same melancholy subject: —“Famine, pestilence, and war, are the three most famous ingredients of this lower world. The two first come from God; but the last, in which all three concur, comes from the imagination of princes or ministers. A king fancies that he has a right to a distant province. He raises a multitude of men, who have nothing to do, and nothing to lose; gives them a red coat and a laced hat, and makes them wheel to the right, wheel to the left, and march to glory. Five or six of these belligerent powers sometimes engage together, three against three, or two against four. But whatever part they take, they all agree in one point, which is, to do their neighbour all possible mischief. The most astonishing thing belonging to their infernal undertaking is, that every ringleader of those murderers gets his colours consecrated, and solemnly blessed in the name of God, before he marches up to the destruction of his fellow creatures. If a chief warrior has had the good fortune of getting only two or three thousand men slaughtered, he does not think it worth his while to thank God for it. But if ten thousand have been destroyed by fire and sword, and if, to complete this good fortune, some capital city has been totally overthrown; a day of public thanksgiving is appointed on the joyful occasion. Is not that a fine art which carries such desolation through the earth; and, one year with another, destroys forty thousand men out of a hundred thousand?”

4thly. The most impious sins: for instance, that of idolatry. “Before the coming of Christ,” says a late divine, “all the polite and barbarous nations among the heathens plunged into it with equal blindness. And the Jews were so strongly wedded to it, that God’s miraculous interposition, both by dreadful judgments and astonishing mercies, could not, for eight hundred years, restrain them from committing it in the grossest manner.” Nor need we look at either heathens or Jews to see the proneness of mankind to that detestable crime: Christians alone can prove the charge. To this day the greatest part of them pray to dead men and dead women; bow to images of stone, and crosses of wood; and make, adore, and swallow down, the wafer god. And those who pity them for this ridiculous idolatry, till converting grace interposes, daily “set up their idols in their hearts,” and, without going to the plain of Dura, sacrifice all to the king’s “golden image.”

And 5thly. The most diabolical sin; persecution, that favourite offspring of Satan, transformed into an angel of light. Persecution, that bloody, hypocritical monster, which carries a Bible, a liturgy, and a bundle of canons in one hand; with fire fagots, and all the weapons invented by cruelty in the other; and with sanctified looks, distresses, racks, or murders men, either because they love God, or because they cannot all think alike. Time would fail to tell of those who, on religious accounts, have been stoned and sawn asunder by the Jews, cast to the lions, and burned by the heathens, strangled and impaled by the Mohammedans, and butchered all manner of ways by the Christians.

Yes, we must confess it, Christian Rome has glutted herself with the blood of martyrs, which heathenish Rome had but comparatively tasted. And when Protestants fled from her bloody pale, they brought along with them too much of her bloody spirit. Prove the sad assertion, poor Servetus! When a Romish inquisition had forced thee to fly to Geneva, what reception didst thou meet with in that reformed city? Alas! the Papists had burned thee in effigy; the Protestants burned thee in reality, and Moloch triumphed to see the two opposite parties agree in offering him the human sacrifice.

So universally restless is the spirit of persecution which inspires the unrenewed part of mankind, that when people of the same religion have no outward opposer to tear, they bark at, bite, and devour one another. Is it