question, Whether five unintelligible propositions be in a book which nobody reads? Tormented, imprisoned, exiled for these vain disputes, and employed perpetually in defending so futile a cause, how many years of their lives have philosophy and letters to regret as lost! What lights would they not have added to those with which they had already illumined their age, if they had not been carried away by these unhappy and pitiful distractions, so unworthy of taking up the thoughts of men like them! May we venture to say a little more of this, at the risk of deviating one moment from our subject? Can reason withhold shedding bitter tears, when she sees how many useful talents the quarrels, so often excited in the bosom of Christianity, have buried? how many ages these wretched and scandalous contests have destroyed to the human understanding? and how many geniuses, formed for discovering new truths, have employed (to the great regret of true religion) all their sagacity and abilities, in supporting or giving reputation to ancient absurdities? When we run through, in the vast royal library, the first apartment, of an immense extent, and find it destined, for the greatest part, to a collection, without number, of the most visionary commentators on the scriptures, of polemical writers on, questions the most void of meaning, of school divines of every sort; in short, of so many works from whence there is no drawing one single page of truth, can we refrain crying out with sorrow (_ad quid perditio hæc?_) “To what end all this loss?” Again, human nature would have been in no very great degree to be pitied, if all these frivolous and absurd objects, these _holy trifles_, as a celebrated magistrate calls them[11], had ended in ill language only, and had not occasioned the shedding of torrents of blood. But let us shut our eyes on these dismal objects, and make only one other reflexion, as consolatory as it is humiliating to the human mind. How is it possible, that the same species of beings which invented the art of writing, arithmetic, astronomy, algebra, chemistry, watch-work, the art of weaving, so many things in short worthy of admiration in the mechanical and liberal arts, should have invented the philosophy and divinity of the schools, judicial astrology, the concomitant concourse, versatile and congruous grace, the victorious delectation, absolute accidents, and so many other fooleries, as would occasion the suspending, by authority of justice, the person who should first broach them now-a-days? Plato defined man, “an animal with two feet without feathers.” How ridiculous soever this definition may appear, it was perhaps difficult (the lights of religion set aside) to characterise otherwise the indefinable human species; which on one side seems, by master-pieces of genius, to have approached the heavenly beings, and on the other, by a thousand incredible marks of folly and cruelty, to have set itself on a level with the most