A whimsical combination of deism and materialism forms, at present, the most widely diffused system among the unbelieving. They have imagined a God possessing only physical power, and contemplating the movement of his innumerable worlds, alike indifferent to crime and virtue. He beholds with the same carelessness the generations that pass, and those that succeed; and sees deliverers and tyrants alike confounded in their fall.--Admit the truth of such dogmas, and the conceptions of a religious man would possess more expansion and sublimity than the views of the Eternal. Socrates, without the illumination of the gospel, could have taught them better. Surrounded by his weeping disciples, he points them beyond the tomb to the places where the sage at last respires freely; and where the misfortunes and inequalities of earth are redressed. In painting these illusions of hope, if they are vain, the sage has conceived in his dreams an equity superior to that of the infinite Being. Let us dare to maintain that the feeble children of clay have a right to entertain ideas of order and desert, more just than those of the Creator, or admit that the heart, made capable of the desire of another life, is destined to enjoy it. The destiny of all the inferior orders that surround us, appears to terminate upon the earth. Ours alone is evidently not accomplished here. The animals, exempt from vice, incapable of virtue, experience, in ceasing to live, neither hopes nor regrets. They die without the foresight of death. Man, in the course of an agitated life, degrades himself by follies and vices, or honors himself by generous and useful actions. Remembrances, loves, ties, in countless forms, twine about his heart. He is torn, in agony, from beings for whom he has commenced an affection that he feels might be eternal. Persecuted for his virtue, proscribed for his wisdom and courage, calumniated for his most conscientious acts, he turns to heaven a fixed look of confidence and hope. Has he nothing to perform beyond death? Has the author of nature forgotten his justice, only in completing his most perfect work? Our immortality is a necessary consequence of the existence of God. Let us not wander astray in vain discussions, which, with our present faculties, we can never master--such as relate to the nature of the soul. My hopes, my convictions, rest not upon a cloudy, metaphysical argument. Neither can the proud treatise of a sophist weaken, nor the puerile dialectics of a pedant increase it. It is enough for me that there is a God. Virtue in misfortune must have hopes which do not terminate with the tomb. The sublime inculcation of Socrates was, ‘preserve confidence in death.’ But recompense in another existence supposes merit; and merit requires liberty.