e Jewish poets, and phrases and expressions now rendered obscure by
our not being acquainted with the local circumstances to which they
applied at the time they were used, have been erected into prophecies,
and made to bend explanations at the will and whimsical conceits of
sectaries, expounders, and commentators. Everything unintelligible was
prophetical.

_V.--DEISM_

Fom the time I was capable of conceiving an idea, and acting upon it by
reflection, I either doubted the truth of the Christian system or
thought it to be a strange affair. It seems as if parents of the
Christian profession were ashamed to tell their children anything about
the principles of their religion. They sometimes instruct them in
morals, and talk to them of the goodness of what they call Providence.
But the Christian story of what they call God the Father putting his son
to death, or employing people to do it--for that is the plain language
of the story--cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him it
was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still
worse; and to tell him that all this is a mystery is only making an
excuse for the incredibility of it.

How different is this from the pure and simple profession of deism! The
true deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating
the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in
endeavouring to imitate him in everything moral, scientific, and
mechanical.

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in
the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers; but
they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out
of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help
smiling at the conceit, that if the taste of the Quaker could have been
consulted at the creation what a silent and drab-coloured creation it
would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, not a
bird been permitted to sing.

Quitting these reflections, I proceed to other matters. Our ideas, not
only of the almightiness of the Creator, but of His wisdom and His
beneficence, become enlarged as we contemplate the extent and structure
of the universe. The solitary idea of a solitary world rolling or at
rest in the immense ocean of space gives place to the cheerful idea of a
society of worlds, so happily contrived as to administer, even by their
motion, instruction to man. We