This is an unfortunate exposure of the cloven foot of Hierarchy. It was not the wish to detect error or to establish truth--it was not from anxiety to fix upon a firm footing, some great and leading principle of christianity--it was not the benevolent design of communicating useful information on a litigated topic of speculative theology--it was not the meek and gentle spirit of sincere and patient enquiry that dictated those animadversions--all these motives would not only have borne with patience, but would have welcomed and exulted in a temperate discussion of unsettled opinions, before the tribunal of the public; for by such discussions alone, can the cause of truth be permanently and essentially promoted. No: these were not the motives that influenced the Archdeacon of St. Albans. It was the nefarious and unpardonable attempt to unsettle the faith of established creeds; however founded that faith might be, on ignorance or prejudice, on pardonable misapprehension, or culpable misrepresentation, on fallacy, on falsehood, or on fraud. These “Animadversions,” proceeded from the morbid irritability of an expectant ecclesiastic; from a prudent and a prescient indulgence of the _esprit de corps_; from a dread too perhaps, lest the tottering structure of church establishment, with all its envied accompaniments of sees and benefices, of deaconries and archdeaconries, and canonries, and prebendaries, and all the pomp and pride of artificial rank, and all the pleasures of temporal authority, and lucrative sinecure connected with it, might be too rudely shaken by sectarian attacks. But enough for the present, respecting these learned labours of the Archdeacon of St. Albans; which like those of Archdeacon Travis may well be considered as having sufficiently answered the _main_ purpose of their respective authors, in spite of the wicked replies of Priestley and Porson. Let us say with the public, _requiescant in pace_. To return however to the more immediate subject of the present section. Hobbes seems to have been the first writer of repute (in England at least) who denied the doctrine of an immaterial and naturally immortal soul. This was a necessary consequence of his faith being apparently confined to corporeal existence, an opinion deducible in fact from the old maxim of the antients and of the schools, _nil unquam fuit in Intellectu, quod non prius erat in Sensu_. Hobbes’s Leviathan was published about 1650 or 1651. Spinosa who published after Hobbes was rather an Atheist than a Materialist, a character to which though Hobbes’s opinions might lead, he does not assume. In 1678 Blount sent forward to the public his “_Anima Mundi_”, or an historical narration of the “opinions of the antients concerning man’s soul after this life according to unenlightened nature,” which met with much opposition and some persecution; as was likely, for it is by no means destitute of merit.