ritings; and a great
deal more of it is mentioned in notes and sermons which many have read
or heard. Until, therefore, I become surer of neither invading the
provinces of others, nor of detracting from their wisdom, let those
ill-written fancies still lie dormant in my desk.

A fifth tractate on things theological, still in the egg state, was to
have been indued with the rather startling appellation of

AN APOLOGY FOR HEATHENISM;

especially as contrasted with practical atheism, which, truth to tell,
is the contradictory sort of religion most universally professed among
the moderns: working out the idea, that any-how it is better to have
many objects of veneration than none, and that, although idol-worship is
a dreadful sin, still it is not so utterly hopeless as actual
ungodliness. That, among the heathens, temporal judgment ever vindicated
the true Divinity; whereas the consummation of the more modern
unworshiping world will be an eternal one: so, by the difference in
punishments comparing that of their criminalities. Showing also that,
however corrupted afterwards by impure rites and fatuous iniquities,
heathenism was, in its most ancient form, little more than the
hieroglyphic dress of truth: this exemplified by Moses and the brazen
serpent, by interpretations of Grecian mythology, shown, after the
manner of perhaps too ingenious Lord Bacon, to be consistent with
philosophy and religion; by the way, in which Egyptian priests satisfied
so good and shrewd, though credulous, a mind as that of Herodotus; by
Hesiod's '_Theogony_;' by the practical testimony of the whole educated
world in earliest times to the deep meaning involved in idolatrous
rites; by the mysteries of Eleusis in particular; by the characters of
all most enlightened heathens--as Cicero, Socrates, and
Plato--(half-convinced of the Godhead's unity, and still afraid to
disavow His plurality,) contrasted with those of the school of Pyrrho,
and Lucretius, and the later Epicureans. The possibility of early
allusions to the Trinity, as "Let us make man," _etc._, having led to
the idea of more than one God; and if so, in some sort, its veniality.

All the above might be applied with some force, and, if so, with no
little value, to modern false semblances of religion, and non-religion;
to Roman Catholicism, with its images, its services in an unknown
tongue, its symbols, its adoption of heathen festivals, its actual
placing of many Gods in the thro