truths by thousands, whose adherence to tradition and authority, and whose indolence and credulity, prevent them from inquiring, with a manly independence, into the true state and nature of things.

Such are a few, and but a very few, of the superstitious notions and vain fears by which the great majority of the human race, in every age and country, has been enslaved. To have attempted a complete enumeration of such hallucinations of the human intellect would have been vain, and could only have produced satiety and disgust. That such absurd notions should ever have prevailed is a most grating and humiliating thought, when we consider the noble faculties with which man is endowed. That they still prevail in a great measure, even in our own country, is a striking proof that we are, as yet, but just emerging from the gloom of intellectual darkness. The prevalence of such opinions is to be regretted, not only on account of the groundless alarms they create, but chiefly on account of the false ideas they inspire with regard to the nature of the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and of his arrangements in the gov ernment of the world. While a man whose mind is enlightened with true science perceives throughout all nature the most striking evidences of benevolent design, and rejoices in the benignity of the Great Parent of the universe, -while he perceives nothing in the arrangements of the Creator, in any department of his works, which has a direct tendency to produce pain to any intelligent or sensitive existence, the superstitious man, on the contrary, contemplates the sky, the air, the waters, and the earth as filled with malicious beings ever ready to haunt him with terror, or to plot his destruction. The one contemplates the Deity directing the movements of the material world by fixed and invariable laws, which none but himself can counteract or suspend; the other views them as continually liable to be controlled by capricious and malignant beings, to gratify the most trivial and unworthy passions. How very different, of course, must be their conceptions and feelings respecting the attributes and government of the Supreme Being! While the one views Him as an infinitely wise and benevolent Father, whose paternal care and goodness inspire confidence and affection; the other must regard

him, in a certain degree, as a capricious being, and offer up his adorations under the influence of fear.

Such notions have likewise an evident tendency to habituate the mind to false principles and processes of reasoning, which unfit it for forming legitimate conclusions in its researches after truth. They chain down the understanding, and sink it into the most abject and sordid state; and prevent it from rising to those noble and enlarged views which revelation and modern science exhibit, of the order, the extent, and the economy of the universe. It is lamentable to reflect, that so many thousands of beings endowed with the faculty of reason, who cannot by any means be persuaded of the motion of the earth, and the distances and magnitudes of the celestial bodies, should swallow, without the least hesitation, opinions ten thousand times more improbable; and find no difficulty in believing that an old woman can transform herself into a hare, and wing her way through the air on a broomstick.

But, what is worst of all, such notions almost invariably lead to the perpetration of deeds of cruelty and injustice. Of the truth of this position the history of almost every nation affords the most ample proof. Many of the barbarities committed in pagan countries, both in their religious worship and their civil polity, and most of the cruelties inflicted on the victims of the Romish Inquisition, have flowed from this source.* Nor are the annals of our own country deficient in examples of this kind. The belief attached to the doctrine of witchcraft led our ancestors, little more than a century ago, to condemn and to burn at the stake hundreds of unhappy women, accused of crimes of which they could not possibly have been guilty. In New-England,

In the duchy of Lorraine, 900 females were delivered over to the flames, for being witches, by one inquisitor alone. Under this accusation, it is reckoned that upwards of thirty thousand women have perished by the hands of the Inquisition." Inquisition Unmasked," by Puigblanch.

†The Scots appear to have displayed a more than ordinary zeal against witches, and it is said that more deranged old women were condemned for this imaginary crime in Scotland than in any other country. So late as 1722, a poor woman was burnt for witchcraft, which was among the last executions in Scotland. A variety of curious particulars in relation to the

about the year 1692, a witchcraft phrensy rose to such excess as to produce commotions and calamities more dreadful than the scourge of war or the destroying pestilence. There lived in the town of Salem, in that country, two young women who were subject to convulsions, accompanied with extraordinary symptoms. Their father, minister of the church, supposing they were bewitched, cast his suspicions upon an Indian girl who lived in the house, whom he compelled, by harsh treatment, to confess that she was a witch. Other women, on hearing this, immediately believed that the convulsions, which proceeded only from the nature of their sex, were owing to the same cause. Three citizens casually named, were immediately thrown into prison, accused of witchcraft, hanged, and their bodies left exposed to wild beasts and birds of prey. A few days after, sixteen other persons, together with a counsellor, who, because he refused to plead against them, was supposed to share in their guilt, suffered in the same manner. From this instant, the imagination of the multitude was inflamed with these horrid and gloomy scenes. Children of ten years of age were put to death, young girls were stripped naked, and the marks of witchcraft searched for upon their bodies with the most indecent curiosity; and those spots of the scurvy which age impresses upon the bodies of old men were taken for evident signs of infernal power. In default of these, torments were employed to extort confessions, dictated by the executioners themselves. For such fancied crimes, the offspring of superstition alone, they were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and their bodies devoured by the beasts of prey. If the magistrates, tired out with executions, refused to punish, they were themselves accused of the crimes they tolerated; the very ministers of religion raised false witnesses against them, who made them forfeit with their lives the tardy remorse excited in them by humanity. Dreams, apparitions, terror, and consternation of every kind increased these prodigies of folly and horror. The prisons were filled, the gibbets left standing, and all the citizens

trials of witches may be seen in Pitcairn's "Criminal Trials, and other proceedings before the High Court of Justiciary in Scotland."-Part II. lately published. See also Appendix, No. V.

involved in gloomy apprehensions. So that superstitious notions, so far from being innocent and harmless speculations, lead to the most deplorable results; and, therefore, ought to be undermined and eradicated by every one who wishes to promote the happiness and the good order of general society.

Such, then, is the evil we find existing among mankind -false opinions, which produce vain fears, which debase the understanding, exhibit distorted views of the Deity, and lead to deeds of cruelty and injustice. Let us now consider the remedy to be applied for its removal.

I have all along taken it for granted, that ignorance of the laws and economy of nature is the great source of the absurd opinions to which I have adverted,- -a_position which, I presume, will not be called in question. For such opinions cannot be deduced from an attentive survey of the phenomena of nature, or from an induction of well authenticated facts; and they are equally repugnant to the dictates of revelation. Nay, so far are they from having any foundation in nature or experience, that in proportion as we advance in our researches into nature's economy and laws, in the same proportion we perceive their futility and absurdity. As in most other cases, so in this, a knowledge of the cause of the evil leads to the proper remedy. Let us take away the cause, and the effect of course will be removed. Let the exercise of the rational faculties be directed into a proper channel, and the mind furnished with a few fundamental and incontrovertible principles of reasoning-let the proper sources of information be laid open-let striking and interesting facts be presented to view, and a taste for rational investigation be encouraged and promoted-let habits of accurate observation be induced, and the mind directed to draw proper conclusions from the various objects which present themselves to view,-and then we may confidently expect that superstitious opinions, with all their usual accompaniments, will gradually vanish, as the shades of night before the rising sun.

But here it may be inquired, What kind of knowledge is it that will produce this effect? It is not merely an acquaintance with a number of dead languages, with Roman and Grecian antiquities, with the subtleties of metaphysics,

with pagan mythology, with politics or poetry: these, however important in other points of view, will not, in the present case, produce the desired effect; for we have already seen that many who were conversant in such subjects were not proof against the admission of superstitious opinions. In order to produce the desired effect, the mind must be directed to the study of material nature,-to contemplate the various appearances it presents, and to mark the uniform results of those invariable laws by which the universe is governed. In particular, the attention should be directed to those discoveries which have been made by philosophers in the different departments of nature and art during the two last centuries. For this purpose, the study of natural history, as recording the various facts respecting the atmosphere, the waters, the earth, and animated beings, combined with the study of natural philosophy and astronomy, as explaining the causes of the phenomena of nature, will have a happy tendency to eradicate from the mind those false notions, and, at the same time, will present to view objects of delightful contemplation. Let a person be once thoroughly convinced that nature is uniform in her operations, and governed by regular laws, impressed by an all-wise and benevolent Being, he will soon be inspired with confidence, and will not easily be alarmed at any occasional phenomena which at first sight might appear as exceptions to the general rule.

For example,-let persons be taught that eclipses are occasioned merely by the shadow of one opaque body falling upon another-that they are the necessary result of the inclination of the moon's orbit to that of the earth-that the times when they take place depend on the new or full moon happening at or near the points of intersection--and that other planets which have moons experience eclipses of a similar nature—that the comets are regular bodies belonging to our system, which finish their revolutions, and appear and disappear in stated periods of time-that the northern lights, though seldom seen in southern climes, are frequent in the regions of the north, and supply the inhabitants with light in the absence of the sun, and have probably a relation to the magnetic and electric fluids-that the ignes fatui are harmless lights, formed by the ignition of a certain species of gas produced in the soils above which they hover-that