tions, founded on neither data nor
evidence; some of its supporters believe in some kind of a God, while some
deny every God; some few believe in the immortality of the soul, while a
majority, with the French infidels, write over the gates of their
cemeteries, "Death is eternal sleep."

In looking over the various infidel productions I think of the old saying,
"Be sure you are right, and then go ahead." There is no certainty in their
speculations. They do not agree even in their so-called moral code, nor,
as yet, in their doctrinal speculations.

Lord Herbert and the Earl of Shaftesbury thought that the light of nature
would teach all men, without the aid of revelation, to observe the
morality of the Bible. Spinosa and Hobbes, one believing in a God, and the
other an Atheist, agreed that there was nothing that was either right or
wrong in its own nature; and also agreed "that every man had a right to
obtain, either by force or fraud, everything which either his reason or
his passions prompted him to believe was useful to himself--duties to the
State were his only duties."

Blount, another Freethinker, supposed "that the moral law of nature
justified self-murder." Lord Bolingbroke claimed that it enjoined
polygamy; and neither Blount nor Bolingbroke prohibited fornication, or
adultery, or incest, except between parents and children.

But the vagueness and uncertainty of the doctrinal speculations of
infidelity, and the looseness and immorality of its rules of life, are not
the only objections to it. Its tendency, wherever it has been introduced
in the history of our world, has been evil, and _only_ evil. France, at
the commencement of her revolution in 1789, was an infidel nation. The
profligacy of the Catholic priesthood, and the demoralizing example of the
Regent, Duke of Orleans, and the infidel publications of Voltaire and his
associates, had produced a contempt for religion through every rank of
society. The people of France were taught by their literati that the Bible
was at war with their liberties; and that they could never expect to
overturn the throne till they had, first, broken down the "altar." HERE
THE TIGER WAS UNCHAINED!

The lusts and passions of man were set free from the restraints of
Christianity, and the bloody history of that nation, in its devotion to
infidelity, should convince every man that infidelity only "_unchained the
tiger_"! It did France no good, _but much evil_. In this state of thin