Were it possible for the departed soul of Newton to feel pain, he would surely recollect with regret that unhappy hour, when provoked by Dr. Hooke's charge of plagiarism, he first threw out his whim of a vibrating ether, to shew what might be made of an hypothesis.--For Sir Isaac Newton must be allowed to have paved the way for much of the atomical philosophy of the moderns. Newton's æther is assumed as a _fac totum_ by every precipitate sciolist, who, in despite of logic, and in contradiction to all the principles of mechanics, gives us theories of muscular motion, of animal sensation, and even of intelligence and volition, by the undulations of ætherial fluids. Not one of a hundred of these theorists can go through the fundamental theorem of all this doctrine, the 47th prop. of the 2d book of the Principia, and not one in a thousand know that Newton's investigation is inconclusive.--Yet they talk of the effects and modifications of those undulations as familiarly and confidently as if they could demonstrate the propositions in Euclid's Elements. Yet such is the reason that satisfies Dr. Priestly.--But I do not suppose that he has yet attained his acme of Illumination. His genius has been cramped by British prejudices.--These need not sway his mind any longer. He is now in that "_rara temporis (et loci) felicitate, ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ sentias dicere licet_,"--in the country which was honoured by giving the world the first avowed edition of the _Age of Reason_, with the name of the shop and publisher. I make no doubt but that his mind will now take a higher flight,--and we may expect to see him fire "that train by which he boasted that he would blow up the religious establishment of his stupid and enslaved native country."--Peace be with him.--But I grieve that he has left any of his friends and abettors among us, who declaim, in the most violent and unqualified terms, against all national Establishments of Religion, and in no friendly terms of any establishments which maintain or allow any privileged Orders. Discanting much on such topics increases the dissatisfaction of the less fortunate part of mankind, who naturally repine at advantages which do not arise from the personal merit of the possessor, although they are the natural and necessary fruits of merit in their ancestors, and of the justice and security of our happy Constitution. No well informed and sensible man will deny that the greatest injury was done to pure Religion when Constantine declared Christianity to be the Religion of the Empire, and vested the Church with all the riches and power of the Heathen Priesthood. But it is false that this was the source of all or of the worst corruptions of Christianity. The merest novice in Church History knows that the errors of the Gnostics, of the Cerinthians, and others, long preceded this event, and that thousands lost their lives in those metaphysical disputes. But I cannot help thinking