After two or three preparatory hums, like the tap of the first fiddle, as a signal for attention, De Lancaster commenced his harangue, as follows--Mr. Edward Wilson, I address myself to you in particular, because what you remarked at the close of our late conversation is perfectly in my recollection, and convinces me, that my opinions can only tend to confirm what your own judgment and observation have pointed out. I am now assured, that when you commit your pupil to the reading of those heathen authors, whose writings yet exist, though their languages be dead, you will not suffer his principles to come into collision with theirs, till they are fundamentally and firmly established upon faith in revelation; for where that does not reach, all must be error, seeing that the human understanding, how acute so ever, cannot upon mere conjecture account for the operations of divine wisdom unless by the aid of a divine communication. All, who without that aid have attempted to discuss the question of _first causes_, have puzzled and perplexed themselves and others. A sound scholar can readily confute their systems; a shallow one, as you well observed, may be entangled by their subtilties. In short, they are at the best but blind guides; most of them are mischievous logicians, and many of them systematic atheists; for collect their several tenets, and I am warranted to say you shall find they are all to be classed, either amongst those, who hold the world to be eternal both as to matter and form, or those, who hold the matter to be eternal, whilst the form is not. You are no doubt aware, that neither Aristotle nor Plato admit a creation of the world, or acknowledge any time when it was not: Aristotle maintaining that it was an eternal and necessary emanation from the divine nature; Plato, that it was an eternal and voluntary effect. Now if what God must have willed from all time he must from all time have done, where is the distinction betwixt Plato’s volition and Aristotle’s necessity? In these opinions are to be found all the component parts of modern atheism. The monstrous system of Spinosa is principally to be traced in the doctrines of the Eleatic school, of which Xenophanes was the founder; he was succeeded by Parmenides, Melissus and Zeno of Elea: his doctrines, which were delivered in verse and with great obscurity, were adopted by Hilpo and the Megaric philosophers, and these were supposed to be the eternity and immutability of the world. Strato of Lampsacus, whom Plutarch calls the greatest of the Peripatetics, made nature inanimate, and at the same time owned no God but nature. The Stoics had their dogma of the soul of the world; the Epicureans held that God is matter, or not distinct from matter; that all things are essentially God, that forms are imaginary accidents, which have no real existence, and that all things are substantially the same. I believe I need go no further with the Greek