shadows never return to darken my soul! May the God whom I trust, preserve me from all their temptations; may his mercy ever protect and guide me, and bring me in the end to that state of incorruption and immortality, which I hope for through the merits and mediation of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. _Amen._ * * * * * _Then |Peter| said, Now know I that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation, he that feareth him and worketh righteousness, is accepted of him._ THIS text is so strong a proof of the unreasonableness and folly of national or religious prejudices, that one would imagine it should intirely banish those odious and pernicious principles, from the whole Christian world. But daily experience too plainly discovers the contrary; and the very people who would be thought to have the greatest zeal for the good of souls, are of all others the readiest to condemn those who dissent from them. ’Tis a common (though false assertion) of libertines, that priests of all religions are the same. But they might truly affirm, that bigots of all religions are the same, equally destructive of the peace of their fellow-creatures, and the laws of civil society. What wild havock, what horrid scenes of blood and slaughter, have been produced by mistaken zeal and blind prejudice? The histories of former times abound with shocking instances of this kind; and, strange inconsistency! the persecuted party have no sooner got the upper hand, but they have, with the power, assumed the spirit of their persecutors, and been guilty of the very acts of injustice they had so loudly exclaimed against. ’Tis true, the degrees and kinds of persecution differ, according to the particular notions of the sects, or the particular law of the states where it is practised. But persecution, in whatever shape or degree, is still persecution, and proceeds from that spirit of prejudice and bigotry, which make us look on God as a respecter of persons, and on all those who differ from us as his enemies, and consequently, deserving nothing at our hands but contempt and cruelty. Thus the furious _Roman Catholic_ brands with the name of heretic, all who are without the pale of his church, pursues them with fire and sword in this world, and sentences them to eternal punishment in the next. And the staunch, sour _Protestant_ devoutly expatiates on the crying sin of idolatry, never thinks of the Pope without joining with him antichrist and the devil, absolutely pronounces the church of _Rome_ to be the whore of _Babylon_, and expects (with great Christian charity) that in a few ages more, she and all her members will be swallowed up in the bottomless pit, the lake of fire and brimstone. Nay, the bigots of (even) the little trifling sects into which the reformed religion is subdivided, all agree to damn each other, and wholly to appropriate to those of their own denomination,