submitting, adoring, believing, and lying?-how should they levy an unjust doit upon a people who had learnt to ask ques tions, and to insist on being answered-and who might possess themselves of the truth, and nothing else but the truth, by propounding the fair and reasonable challenge," Remember we are men, and treat us as such: and let us hear what ye have to say to those who say-ye have played most foully with us." In the language of the noblest poet, of our own or of any other age, we might ask:

"How bold the flight of passion's wandering wing,
How swift the step of Reason's firmer tread-
How calm and sweet the victories of life:
How terrorless the triumph of the grave,

How powerless the mightiest monarch's arm :-
Vain his loud threat, and impotent his frown;
How ludicrous the priest's dogmatic roar,
The weight of his exterminating curse
How light, and his affected charity
To suit the pressure of the changing times
With palpable deceit! But for thy aid
Religion. But for thee, prolific fiend,

Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men,
And heaven with slaves!"-

PERCY BYSSIE SHELLEY.

Men and Brethren :- -We have in this, and the preceding discourse which I have caused to be printed, fully brought before you, that great and important branch of moral righteousness, comprehended in the word PATRIOTISM. In that preliminary discourse which the press has afforded you opportunity at your leisure to revise, setting forth the Duties which a man owes to his Country; in the full performance of which, by each man, its happy condition is constituted: and in this taking into cousideration the correllative obligations, in which the country and state is held to the freedom and happiness of its members. From which ye have this COROLLARY."That to know what ye have a right to expect, is as important, as to know what ye have obligations to perform." And as all duties, are relative only to the reason for those duties, and morality, with all the precision of mathematical science, alloweth nothing to be done, but exactly, to and for the measure of that, which is to be paid for the doing it : —Ye will see, that that line of conduct and that mode of sentiment which would be becoming and fit towards a government which provided for the happiness of the governed, would be unfit and unbecoming, and by the eternal and immutable law of righte ousness, unjust and wicked, towards a government which did not provide for the happiness of the governed; for in such a sameness of conduct in difference of cases, the eternal distinctions of right and wrong are abolished, and wild disorder and confusion brought in, to lord it over the destinies of degraded and insulted man..

The true patriot, therefore, and every wise and good man, will be a true patriot-will consider, not merely what he owes to his count--but also what his country owes to him, in order, that being well acquainted with what he has a right to expect; and having seen the terms made good, for which government was instituted his loyalty may be the dictate of his reason, and his payment of all necessary levies and reasonable taxes the expression of his justice.

Of a Jure-Divino-ship, or right in any man, or in any set of men, to be his governors- -or for any reason in the world, than their being the best qualified to be so: the honest and faithful citizen knows nothing, and will endure nothing. The terms submission and obedience, come not within his vocabulary, and he will hear in them, from whatever quarter proceeding, the voice of treason and rebellion; of treason and rebellion against all wise and virtuous governors-who would have no reason to be wise and virtuous, if their subjects had no duties but to submit and to obey. Nero was submitted to, and that good Christian, Henry the Eighth, was obeyed, and Nero and Henry the Eighth, might have been wise and virtuous men if they had not been submitted to and obeyed. Tyrannical governors rob their submitting and obeying subjects of their liberty, but they never robbed any but submitting and obeying subjects, and the submitting and obeying subjects robbed them first. It is the slaves who make the tyrant what he is, who rob him of his motive, his, interest in virtue; and the priests do no better who would have their fine bird made of fine feathers only, and set up Cæsar's self to reign over us upon no better principle, than that on which Cæsar's dog would reign as well; it being all the same sort of dutiful allegiance with them, to cry, "God save the King," whether it be King Stork or King Log. But, I trow, Sirs, if it be of any consequence, and if there be any difference whether mankind be wise or wicked, whether their condition shall be happy or miserable, whether peace and plenty crown the smiling land and every honest individual in it, shall be capable of ensuring to himself a house and home, and a happy house and home; or whether gaunt misery shall pinch them to the bone, while the rich man's dogs are better fed than the poor man's children; and a proud and haughty aristocracy that have absolutely forgotten that they are men, and know not, care not, feel not for mankind-but ride in saucy triumph through a starving nation: there must be something to be done. There must be somewhere a capacity in man, formed by nature with powers to subdue the elements themselves to his dominions, and to make the winds and the sea obey him, there must be in him, a capacity to mend a state of things than which imagination could not conceive a worse. Where then is that capacity? Why comes it not into action, when its operations are so called for? Must it for ever go so hardly with the world,

that honest labour and willing diligence should not be able to ensure the means of comfortable subsistence, and that the few should have bread enough and to spare, while the many perish with hunger? It must. It will continue to all eternity. Because that which would set all right, is in the cupboard. It is locked up. There is a padlock upon it of ten hundred thousand millions tons weight. Unlock but that, and let the mind come forth: and bad men and bad policy will vanish as ill things of night before the splendour of the dawning day. A thinking and reflecting people never were, and never can be oppressed; a chapel-going, psalmsinging and Bible-reading people were made to be oppressed, 'tis their nature:-they like it. Would you then be your country": friend, your own best friend-would you be the means of happi-, ness to millions of mankind, and live for all the ends for which 'tis worth the living? There are obvious precepts for it. Have done: with baby's work. Have done with every thing that you are old enough to have done with-and having been educated, as we all were, by other people, let us begin again and educate ourselves. But for God's sake let us read no more in the old books, the bad print of which was never intended for any thing else, but to put the people's eyes out.-FAREWELL.

NOTE BY THE EDITOR.-This and the discourse printed in the last number were delivered by the Reverend Chaplain with very great effect upon the audience. In this second discourse, his delivery of the quotation from Shelley's Queen Mab was fine beyond description. His voice is not that which is best fitted for the orator and still less so for the reader; but his oratorical pow ers generally rise above the defects of the voice. The Chapel continues to be filled in the most respectable manner. The turn-' out displays as good a scene of the kind as any in London, where the Chapel is of an equal size and doubtless the attendance on an evening lecture would equal any of those which have followed Irving's ranting and oracular mysticisms.

This sect of Divinity- worshippers, they will deserve the name as long as they suffer themselves to be insulted with the liturgy there read, a liturgy positively more contemptible and more hypocritical than that of the Established Church, this sect is soon likely to occupy Salters' Hall Chapel. There is a current menace, that the new Lord Mayor, Brown, will open a crusade against the Infidels of the City; but let his Lordship be informed by one of them, that, as sure as he does, he will be made to appear most egregiously silly in the result of the contest. He is a lawyer, and a religious man; but neither law nor religion can check the certain progress of that good sense, that virtue, which is called Infidelity.

R. C.

ALL RELIGIONS ARE CRUEL.

Quantum Religio potuit suadere malorum!

PART I.-On the Cruelty of their Doctrines, Rites, and Customs.*

THAT all religious worship is absurd, as implying the existence of unproved objects of religion, is a remark too common and too obvious to be descanted on; but I believe the peculiar cruelty: which belongs to them all, has not been so generally noticed as their absurdity; neither did I, who have been all my life making war with religious fanaticism, ever remark this savage trait in the universal character of religion till I heard the remark accidentally made by a learned astronomer of London, who was descanting on the persecution of Galileo, while we were waiting with our telescopes for the late conjunction of the Georgian planet with the moon. I remember once hearing a late. eminent Police Magistrate, a friend and admirer of the great Jeremy Bentham,' say, that in his opinion, no Country Parsons ought ever to be made Magistrates, because the cruel doctrines of religion infallibly infected the character of the Priest, and were manifested in the fondness of the Clergy for punishments, and in the severity of their Magisterial conduct on the Bench: but I overlooked or forgot the · remark till lately, when the observation above alluded to, induced me to scrutinize the various institutions of religion, and religious emblems, with this particular view. Now, all I have here to beg of the candid enquirer, who still preserves any respect for religion, (if such a candid enquirer, entertaining such a respect, there be) is to reflect seriously on the following facts before he finally makes up his mind, whether to venerate or to execrate religion and the various objects of religious worship. I will first take the religion of the Jews, the vaunted prototype of Christianity, from their accredited authority, the Bible. In the first page of that mysterious and extraordinary document, it is stated, that Jehovah, the infi. nitely beneficent and all-powerful God, who had created the world out of nothing in six days, did sorely repent that he had made man, and jealous of his attempts at the seductive instigation of a snake to approach to him in knowledge, (for religion from the beginning warred against knowledge) condemned him and his unborn heirs to an eternal, and, as far as men's own efforts could avail, an irrevocable perdition. Here, then, Religion makes her first appearance in the world like a Fury, vomiting forth an odious

• Their cruel practices remain to be discussed more at length.

and revengeful anathema against the whole of the human race, innocent as well as guilty!!! But what is the remedy for the evil? The blood-thirsty and still more unjust atonement, involving the whole doctrine of sacrifices; a doctrine, which for some obscure causes, now hidden in the night of history, has been a constituent part of all, or nearly all religions on earth; has converted their temples and altars into slaughter-houses, and has imbued all their superstitious followers with a sanguinary and ferocious character.* Let us examine facts. Under the Jewish law, the sacrifice of bulls and goats was a part of that religion, which was destined to degenerate into Christianity when the one great sacrifice of the Son of God, engendered before his Mother, and of the same age as his Father, was to be nailed upon a cross, t like an insurance-mark, indicating, that by paying a certain premium to the priests, we might be safe against Hell-fire. All this is CRUELTY with a vengeance! During the whole period of Jewish history, we find sacrifices belonged to the Heathen as well as to the Jews; and the immense jealousy of Jehovah (for, as Pope says, one cannot bear a rival in the wrong) is shewn in the maledictions of his oracles against certain of the Jews who borrowed the sacrifices of the Pagans, instituted to the signs of the zodiac, and substituted them for their own proper offerftigs of blood to their partial protector, Jehovah. Thus Jeroboam, the son of Nebut, is smote on the hand for his sacrifice to the golden. calf, or the sign Taurus auratus, instead of the Pascal Lamb, or golden fleece of Jason, our present Aries. Collaterally with the period I have alluded to, that is, from the earliest Jewish history to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, there existed a religion of a very similar character, and from which the Christian rites and ceremonies have been principally derived-I mean the polytheism of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Here we have again instances of a thousand horridly brutal sacrifices of bulls, dogs, goats, sheep, and almost every domestic animal. The whole Heathen theology is a discourse of cruelty; and the deeds of the Gods are the deeds of Devils. And yet the worship of such personified vices is vaunted forth as a virtue!

There is a curious coincidence between the superstitious Christian sacrifices of more modern times and those of the Pagan mythology. The Romans had a Vulpium Combustio, and a sacri

1

It ought to be stated to the honour and humanity of the Quakers and Unitarians, (for there is honour and humanity among fools) that they have rejected the doctrine of atonement, and the divinity of Christ.

↑ It is a remarkable coincidence, that those few Surgeons in London, who have sought a spurious reputatiou for science and experimental enquiry by imitating or rather mimicking John Hunter's foolish and cruel experiments on living animals, have been almost the only religious members of the profession of any note at all, The incendiaries of manuscripts, the hole-and-corner-job men, and those who have wasted their time in disgustingly cruel experiments on animals, have been the pious persecutors of their human unbelieving brethren of the profession. :