Empire, the expiatory sacrifice of the Messiah, the fear of death destroyed by the blessed hopes of immortality established by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, and the triumphs of Christianity over paganism in the time of Constantine, can I think, hardly fail to acknowledge the reasonableness of the truth of revealed religion as founded upon the early history of man; and whoever acknowledges this reasonableness and this truth, must I think be dissatisfied with the view which Philalethes or his genius has given of the progress of society, and will find in it one instance, amongst many others that might be discovered, of the vague and erring results of his so much boasted human reason. _Onu_.--I fear I shall shock Ambrosio, but I cannot help vindicating a little the philosophical results of human reason, which it must be allowed are entirely hostile to his ideas. I agree with Philalethes that it is the noblest gift of God to man; and I cannot think that Ambrosio's view of the paradisaical condition and the fall of man and the progress of society is at all in conformity with the ideas we ought to form of the institutions of an infinitely wise and powerful Being. Besides, Ambrosio speaks of the reasonableness of his own opinions; of course his notions of reason must be different from mine, or we have adopted different forms of logic. I do not find in the biblical history any idea of the supreme Intelligence conformable to those of the Greek philosophers; on the contrary, I find Jehovah everywhere described as a powerful material being, endowed with organs, feelings, and passions similar to those of a great and exalted human agent. He is described as making man in His own image, as walking in the garden in the cool of the evening, as being pleased with sacrificial offerings, as angry with Adam and Eve, as personally cursing Cain for his crime of fratricide, and even as providing our first parents with garments to hide their nakedness; then He appears a material form in the midst of flames, thunder and lightning, and was regarded by the Levites as having a fixed residence in the Ark. He is contrasted throughout the whole of the Old Testament with the gods of the heathens, only as being more powerful; and in the strange scene which took place in Pharaoh's court He seemed to have measured His abilities with those of certain seers or magicians, and to have proved His superiority only by producing greater and more tremendous plagues. In all the early history of the Jewish nation there is no conception approaching to the sublimity of that of Anaxagoras, who called God the Intelligence or [Greek text]. He appears always, on the contrary, like the genii of Arabian romance, living in clouds, descending on mountains, urging His chosen people to commit the most atrocious crimes, to destroy all the races not professing the same worship, and to exterminate even the child and the unborn infant.