of the dead, for the purpose of paying Charon, the ferryman, to transport their souls over the Styx to the elysian fields, so the catholics placed a silver coin in the mouths of their dead, to pay St. Peter for opening the gates of heaven to their immortal parts. The heathens taught also that the souls of the deceased wandered about the universe until they arrived at the river Styx, thence to be transferred to the elysian fields; and the catholics imitated their masters by believing that their souls wandered about the earth until they arrived at purgatory; each expected them to be purified by fire from their sins, as a ghost once tainted was required to be purified by brimstone, without which the bodies through which they were designed to migrate, would be of a more degraded character. These operations so suited to an active, but so burthensome to a sluggish soul, have been described by Virgil, as translated by Dryden, in the following lines:

"What feels the body when the soul expires

By time corrupted and consumed by fires?
"Nor dies the spirit but new life repeats
"In other forms-and only changes seats-
"Then death, so called, is but old matter drest
"In some new figure and a varied vest.
"Thus all things are but altered-nothing dies;
"And here and there the embodied spirit flies,

By time, or force, or sickness dispossessed,
"And lodges where it lights, on man or beast;
"The immortal soul flies out in empty space,
"To seek her fortunes in some other place."

Those leading men in the church, entitled "The Fathers," borrowing their doctrines from paganism, taught doctrines respecting the soul's immortality often differing from each other, and all in an equal degree opposed to Christianity. Tertullion's opinion was, that the soul of Jesus at his death descended to those of the patriarchs-that the soul of Adam came from God-that the breath of God was vapour. The church, in the days of Origen, had not determined, whether the soul was eternal, or created for a certain time; whether it was the cause of life, or was merely confined in the body as a punishment for previous transgressions. Origen himself taught, that all souls had existed from all eternity, and were imprisoned in the body as a punishment for their sins; and, from his days to the present, under some mode of explanation or other, the immateriality and immortality of the mental powers have been most singularly held by all sects of Christians, in common with deistical philosophers

and the ignorant and savage tribes, as the ground of hope upon which to rest future existence.

I now proceed to my second position:-That the immortal soul of the modern immaterialist is a substance or a shadow of no settled qualities; that these persons support a system not merely differing from their heathen model, but that the "immortal soul," as explained and defined by each separate advocate, differs from that which is described by all the

others.

Digby, a writer of the sixteenth century, thus defines the qualities of the soul "That it is able to move and to work "without being moved or touched: that it is in no place, and yet not absent from any place; that it is also not "in time and not subject to it, for though it does consist "with time, and is while time is, it is not in time."

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Dr. Watts taught, that there were two immaterial principles, or souls; one for life, the other for thought and agency.

Lord Bacon, while his reasoning would lead to an adoption of the materiality of man, yet endeavours to draw a distinction between the inspired and the sensitive souls, or, in other words, teaches two souls.

Dr. Hartley falls into a similar absurdity; for he, after ably shewing, by the facts which he adduces, that man must be material, yet, as if alarmed at his discovery, shrinks back upon the heathen hypothesis-asserting, and that too after every phenomenon of life and of thought had been explained and accounted for without the agency of any distinct immaterial principle in man, "That man consists of two parts, one of which is that substance, agent, or principle, "to which we refer our sensations and voluntary motions;" and that the thinking powers proceed from what he incomprehensibly terms, "the infinitiesimal elementary body."

Dr. Price, the ablest of the immaterialists, states his creed to consist of four parts:-First, "That I am a being "or substance, and not a mere configuration of parts."Secondly, “That I am one being, and not many."-Thirdly, "That I am a voluntary agent."-Fourthly," That my senses and limbs-my eyes, hands, limbs, &c.-are instruments by which I act, and not myself; or mine, and not me.”

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Mr. Locke, in evident inconsistency with the preceding authorities, maintained that our spiritual parts were "capable "of motion;" that created "souls are not totally separated from matter, because they are both active and passive, "and those beings that are both active and passive partake "of both matter and spirit."

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Mr. Rennell, improving upon all philosophers, both ancient and modern, in his zeal for immortality and the suppression of" dangerous errors," dissents from them all by admitting the possible extinction of the soul, and by conferring immortality upon brutes; the sources of life he describes as being composed of three parts, "vegetation" volition," and the life of the understanding;" and I had thought immaterialists all agree, that the soul of man is rational, immaterial, and immortal, and that it possesses no qualities in common with the body, or matter. Mr. Rennell, however,

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although so great an alarmist, and so zealous an advocate for an immortal soul, has made two admissions which would appear broadly to partake of those "dangerous errors" which he is the paid "Christian Advocate," of Cambridge, to refute.

The first is, the allowing brutes, in common with men, to have immortal souls; and the second, what must startle most believers in his doctrine, but is a singular specimen of his logical powers, that the naturally immortal soul may become extinct-for "the thinking principle is essentially “indivisible, but if it cannot be decomposed it may perhaps be finally extinguished."

If the first of these positions be true, I would ask this "Christian Advocate," Are the sloth and the oyster, in common with man, progressive and morally responsible beings? Was it (according to his religious creed) their immortal souls, as well as his own, that the "Son of God" came to deliver from condemnation? Was the immortal soul of his ox or his ass, as well as that of their owner, a part of the divine essence? And is the immortal soul of the ox or the ass to be the companion of the "Advocate" in a future state of existence? And are they each, at the judgment of the great day, to be appointed to their appropriate situation in heaven or in hell?

I would further ask the Lord Chancellor and Mr.Wetherell, with what consistency they can hold out Mr. Lawrence's work as subversive of the Christian doctrine of a future life, and destructive of public morals, because he taught "that "man had no more soul than an oyster, or any other fish "or insect," and yet extol the work of Mr. Rennell, which broadly admits the very points in question?

I would further suggest to these learned gentlemen, that as they deem Mr. Lawrence's tenets put his productions out of the pale of literary property-writings which, by the way, if they do not support the resurrection, leave it perfectly untouched to what class do they assign those of Mr. Rennell;

who, under the semblance of advocating the Christian's best hopes, actually erects a system destructive of the very foundation upon which they rest? A system conferring upon the frog and the flea immortality; and, by a strange perversion in the intellectual powers, a system supporting a self-existent and naturally immortal soul, which cannot be decomposed, yet, with all its "natural immortality," may be finally extinguished; but, in part, to quote Mr. Rennell (59)" To such paltry sophistry, and such palpable absurdities are men of "the highest professional eminence reduced, when they "would annihilate "-the noble attribute of reason in man, or supercede the Christian's only ground of future hopethe resurrection from the dead.

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In the preceding remarks I have, as much as possible, confined myself to a narration of the rise of the doctrine of an immortal soul-the natural causes of its incorporation with Christianity-and the definitions of its modern supporters; reserving, for a future occasion, the much-controverted points relative to the cause or causes of life, and of the rational powers of the human mind. As this is at once an abstruse and highly important investigation, it is, in an especial manner, necessary that fixed principles should regulate its discussion. I therefore recur to those laid down. in the preceding pages, and am bound to assume that the argumentative immaterialist cannot dissent from them; and while I view Mr. Rennell's doctrine as being equally unsupported by reason and opposed to revelation, I am prepared to admit the difficulties which even a materialist must ever find when speculating upon the organization and thinking powers of man: these difficulties, however, press in precisely the same manner, if not in an equal degree, when he contemplates the organization (and the mind too) of the monkey or the elephant; and we may be justly surprised at the philosopher, who, after conceding powers beyond his understanding to the very "matter whose properties he had been decrying, would announce his alarms, his piety, and his orthodoxy, only at a particular modification of this matter, and, with Christian and philosophic humility, state "We deny that medullary matter thinks;" and, therefore, with profound wisdom and Christian consistency infuses into the fly and the oyster spiritual essences, and confers upon them lives of immortality. Yet we might ask these "Advocates," so impiously bold in limiting the power of omnipotence, and in circumscribing the modifications of matter even when directed by infinite

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skill and contrivance, Where is the point at which the spiritual immortal Being is discovered to be necessary? Is it at the first production of the egg, or at the moment of its departure from the shell? If at the former, I would further ask these same 66 Advocates," How many immortal souls" have they destroyed at their breakfast tables, since they were appointed to suppress "dangerous errors?" If at the latter, What gives life to the sluggish, inert, " medullary" matter, previous to the breaking of the shell? And, in regard to man, Where is the spirit rendered indispensable; is it in the sensibility of a nerve-the voluntary movement of a limb-from thence to the exertion of any one faculty of the mind? When and where was this spirit created: Where was its residence before the formation of the body to which it gives life and thought? At what period, and how, did it enter into and animate that body? Does it grow with the body's growth, and strengthen with its strength; or, is it unprogressive in its nature? How is it affected by sleep-by the phenomenon of dreaming— by bodily wounds-by insanity-by swooning? and by what deductions of reason or of philosophy can such " Advocates" explain the union in one being of "two principles, distinct from, and possessed of no property in common with, each other?" If, indeed, they persist in their doctrines they must reverse the principles of Newton, by admitting more causes than are sufficient to explain appearances, and by assigning similar effects to dissimilar causes.

The succeeding Essays will be occupied with a review of the controversy upon matter and spirit; and an explanation of those passages in the scriptures supposed to favour the doctrine of the immaterialist, from the whole of which an endeavour will be made to establish the following conclusións: First, That, seeing the gross absurdities advocated by the most eminent heathens, man required the Divine interference to correct and inform his mind upon the subject of futurity. Secondly, That the doctrine of the immateriality and immortality of the soul is inconsistent with, and destructive of, those hopes peculiar to the gospel. And thirdly, That the scriptures, from the commencement of the Old to the termination of the New Testament, do not support the doctrine of an immortal soul.