along as swift as Achilles, for there was In short, a subtle philosopher, observno such thing as motion: they discussed ing that a picture was made of ingrea hundred other questions equally im-dients of which no single ingredient was portant. Most of the Greeks made phi-a picture, and a house of materials of losophy a juggle; and they transmitted which no one material was a house, imatheir art to our schoolmen. Bayle him-gined that bodies are composed of an inself was occasionally one of the set, and finity of small things which are not bodies, embroidered cobwebs like the rest. In and these are called monades. This syshis article Zeno, against the divisible ex- tem is not without its merits; and, were tent of matter and the contiguity of bo- it revealed, I should think it very possidies, he ventures to say what would not ble. These little beings would be so be tolerated in any six month's geome- many mathematical points, a sort of trician. souls, waiting only for a tenement: here would be a continual metempsychosis. This system is as good as another: I like it quite as well as the declination of atoms, the substantial forms, the versatile grace, or the vampires.

It is worth knowing how Berkeley was drawn into this paradox. A long while ago, I had some conversation with him; and he told me that his opinion originated in our being unable to conceive what the subject of this extension is; and certainly, in his book, he triumphs, when he asks Hylas what this subject, this substratum, this substance, is? It is the extended body, answers Hylas. Then the bishop, under the name of Philonous, laughs at him and poor Hylas, finding that he has said that extension is the subject of extension, and has therefore talked nonsense, remains quite confused, acknowledges that he understands nothing at all of the matter, that there is no such thing as body, that the natural world does not exist, and that there is none but an intellectual world.

:

BOOKS.

SECTION J.

You despise books; you, whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. All Africa, to the limits of Ethiopia and Nigritia, obeys the book of the Koran, after bowing to the book of the Gospel. China is ruled by the moral book of Confucius, and a great part of India by the Vedah. Persia was governed for ages by the books of one of the

In a law-suit, or criminal process, your property, your honour, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read.

Hylas should only have said to Fhi-Zoroasters. lonous :-We know nothing of the subject of this extension, solidity, divisibility, mobility, figure, &c. ; I know no more of it than I do of the subject of thought, feeling, and will; but the subject does It is, however, with books as with not the less exist, for it has essential pro-men: a very small number play a great perties of which it cannot be deprived. part; the rest are confounded with the multitude.

We all resemble the greater part of the Parisian ladies, who live well without knowing what is put in their ragoûts: just so do we enjoy bodies without knowing of what they are composed. Of what does a body consist? Of parts; and these parts resolve themselves into other parts. What are these last parts? They, too, are bodies; you divide incessantly, without making any progress.

By whom are mankind led, in all civilized countries? By those who can read and write. You are acquainted with neither Hippocrates, nor Boerhaave, nor Sydenham; but you place your body in the hands of those who can read them. You leave your soul entirely to the care of those who are paid for reading the Bible; although there are not fifty of

tention.

them who have read it through with at- { correctly in Greek and Latin the works of Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and all the other writers called Fathers!

The world is now so entirely governed by books, that they who command in the eity of the Scipios and the Catos, have resolved that the books of their law shall be for themselves alone; they are their sceptre, which they have made it high treason in their subjects to touch without an express permission. In other countries it has been forbidden to think in print without letters-patent.

There are nations in which thought is considered merely as an article of commerce, the operations of the human understanding being valued only at so much per sheet. If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandize, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book.

In another country, the liberty of explaining yourself by books is one of the most inviolable prerogatives. There you may print whatever you please, on pain of being tiresome, and of being punished if you have too much abused your natural right.

Before the admirable invention of printing, books were scarcer and dearer than jewels. There were scarcely any books in our barbarous nations, either before Charlemagne or after him, until the time of Charles V. King of France, called the Wise; and from this time to Francis I. the scarcity was extreme.

The Arabs alone had them, from the eighth to the thirteenth century of our era. China was full of them, when we could neither read nor write.

St. Hieronymos, or Hieronymus, whom we call Jerome, says, in one of his satirical letters against Rufinus, that he has ruined himself with buying the works of Origen, against whom he wrote with so much bitterness and violence. "Yes," says he, "I have read Origen: if it be a crime, I confess that I am guilty, and that I exhausted my purse in buying his works at Alexandria."

The Christian societies of the three first centuries had fifty-four gospels, of which, until Dioclesian's time, scarcely two or three copies found their way among the Romans of the old religion.

Among the Christians, it was an unpardonable crime to show the gospels to the Gentiles; they did not even lend them to the catechumens.

66

When Lucian (insulting our religion, of which he knew very little), relates that a troop of beggars took him up into a fourth story, where they were invoking the Father through the Son, and foretelling misfortunes to the emperor and the empire," he does not say that they showed him a single book. No Roman historian, no Roman author whomsoever, ma .es mention of the gospels.

When a Christian, who was unfortunately rash and unworthy of his holy religion, had publicly torn in pieces and trampled under foot an edict of the Emperor Dioclesian, and had thus drawn down upon Christianity that persecution which succeeded the greatest toleration, the Christians were then obliged to give up their gospels and written authors to the magistrates, which before then had never been done. Those who gave up their books through fear of imprisonment, or even of death, were held by the rest of This was a very ungrateful employ- the Christians to be sacrilegious apostates: ment. The dealers always paid authors they received the surname of traditores, and copyists very ill. It required two whence we have the word traitor; and years of assiduous labour for a copyist to several bishops asserted that they should transcribe the whole Bible well on vel-be rebaptised, which occasioned a dreadJurn; and what time and trouble to copy

Copyists were much employed in the Roman empire, from the time of the Scipios until the irruption of the barbarians.

ful schism.

The poems of Homer were long so little { the Memoirs, in which the author of the known, that Pisistratus was the first who Pentateuch might have found all the astoput them in order, and had them tran-nishing things which happened so long scribed at Athens, about five hundred before his time. years before the Christian era.

Perhaps there was not at this time in all the East a dozen copies of the Vedah and the Zendah-Vestah.

In 1700, you would not have found a single book in all Rome, excepting the missals, and a few Bibles in the hands of papas drunk with brandy.

{

The very day that Silhouète came into office, some good friend of his sought out a copy of each of these books by the father-in-law and son-in-law, in order to denounce them to the parliament, and Lave them condemned to the flames, according to custom. They immediately bought up all the copies in the kingdom; whence it is that they are now extremely

rare.

There is hardly a single philosophical or theological book, in which heresies and impieties may not be found by misinterpreting, or adding to, or subtracting from, the sense.

The complaint now is of their too great abundance. But it is not for readers to complain the remedy is in their own hands; nothing forces them to read. Nor for authors: they who make the multitude of books have not to complain of being pressed. Notwithstanding this enormous quantity, how few people read! But if they read, and read with advant-call age, should we have to witness the deplorable infatuations to which the vulgar are still every day a prey?

The reason that books are multiplied in spite of the general law, that beings shall not be multiplied without necessity, is, that books are made from books. A new history of France or Spain is manufactured from several volumes already printed, without adding anything new. All dictionaries are made from dictionaries; almost all new geographical books are made from other books of geography; St. Thomas's dream has brought forth two thousand large volumes of divinity; and the same race of little worms that have devoured the parent are now gnawing the children.

Eerive qui voudra, chacun a son métier

Peut perdre impunément de l'encre et du papier
Write, write away; each writer at his pleasure
May squander ink and paper without measure.

SECTION II.

Theodore of Mopsuestes ventured to

the Canticle of Canticles "e collection of impurities." Grotius pulls it in pieces, and represents it as horrid; and Chatillon speaks of it as a scandalous production."

66

Perhaps it will hardly be believed, that Dr. Tamponet one day said to several others :-"I would engage to find a multitude of heresies in the Lord's Prayer, if this prayer, which we know to have come from the divine mouth, were now for the { first time published by a Jesuit." 1 would proceed thus:

"Our Father who art in heaven-"

A proposition inclining to heresy; since God is everywhere. Nay, we find in this expression the leaven of Socinianism; for here is nothing at all said of the Trinity. "Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven-"

Another proposition tainted with heresy; for it said again and again in the Scriptures, that God reigns eternally. Moreover, it is very rash to ask that his will It is sometimes very dangerous to make may be done; since nothing is or can be a book. Silhouète, before he could sus-done but by the will of God. pect that he should one day be comptrolfor-general of the finances, published a translation of Warburton's Alliance of Church and State; and his father-in-law, Astuce the physician, gave to the public

"Give us this day our daily bread—” A proposition directly contrary to what Jesus Christ uttered on another occasion: "Take no thought, saying what shall we eat? or what shall we drink?.... for after

all these things do the Gentiles seek.... which we ought to have been corrected :But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

"And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors-"

A rash proposition, which compares man to God, destroys gratuitous predestination, and teaches that God is bound to do to us as we do to others. Besides, how can the author say that we forgive our debtors? We have never forgiven them a single crown. No convent in Europe ever remitted to its farmers the payment of a sous. To dare to say the contrary is a formal heresy.

"Lead us not into temptation-"

A proposition scandalous and manifestly heretical; for there is no tempter but the devil; and it is expressly said, in St. James's Epistle:"God is no tempter { of the wicked; he tempts no man.' "Deus enim intentator malorum est; ipse autem neminem tentat."

You see, then, said doctor Tamponet, that there is nothing, though ever so venerable, to which a bad sense may not be given. What book, then, shall not be liable to human censure, when even the Lord's Prayer may be attacked, by giving a diabolical interpretation to all the divine words that compose it. As for me, I tremble at the thought of making a book. Thank God, I have never published any thing; I have not even-like brothers La Rue, Du Ceveau, aud Folard-had any of my theatrical pieces played: it would be too dangerous.

Tout ce fatras fut du chanvre en son temps,
Linge il devint par l'art des tisserands;
Pais en lambeaux des pilons le pressérent
Il fut papier. Cent cerveaux à l'envers
De visions à l envi le chargerent;
Puis on le brûle: il vole dans les airs,
Il est fumée aussi-bien que la gloire.
De nos travaux voilà quelle est l'histoire.
Tout est fumée, et tout nous fait sentir
Ce grand néant qui doit nous engloutir
This miscellaneous rubbish once was flar,
Till made soft linen by the honest weaver;
But when at length it dropped from peoples' backs,"
'Twas turned to paper, and became receiver
Of all that fifty motley brains could fashion;
So now 'tis burn d without the least compassion:
It now, like glory, terminates in smoke;
Thus all our toils are nothing but a joke-
All ends in smoke; each nothing that we follow
Tells of the nothing that must all things swallow,

SECTION III.

Books are now multiplied to such a degree, that it is impossible not only to read them all, but even to know their number and their titles. Happily, one is not obliged to read all that is published; and Caramuel's plan for writing a hundred folio volumes, and employing the spiritual and temporal power of princes to compel their subjects to read them, has not been put in execution. Ringelburg, too, had formed the design of composing about a thousand different volumes; but, even had he lived long enough to publish them, he would have fallen far short of Hermes Trismegistus, who, according to Jamblicus, composed thirty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-five books. Supposing the truth of this fact, the ancients had no less reason than the moderns to complain of the multitude of books.

It is, indeed, generally agreed, that a small number of choice books is suffiIf you publish, a parish curate accuses you of heresy; a stupid collegian de- cient. Some propose that we should connounces you; a fellow that cannot read { fine ourselves to the Bible or Holy Scripcondemns you; the public laugh at you;tures, as the Turks limit themselves to your bookseller abandons you; and your the Koran. But there is a great difference between the feelings of reverence wine-merchant gives you no more credit. I always add to my Pater Noster, "De-entertained by the Mahometans for their liver me, O God, from the itch of book- Koran, and those of the Christians for the making." Scriptures. The veneration testified by the former, when speaking of the Koran, cannot be exceeded. It is, say they, the greatest of all miracles; nor are all the men in existence put together, capable of

O ye who, like myself, lay black on white, and make clean paper dirty! call to mind the following verses which I remember to have read, and by

anything at all approaching it; it is still more wonderful, that the author had never studie, nor read any book. The Koran alone is worth sixty thousand miracles (the number of its verses, or thereabouts); one rising from the dead would not be a stronger proof of the truth of a religion than the composition of the Koran. It is so perfect, that it ought not to be regarded as a work of creation.

the Scriptures, in the hands of the u learned, were a two-edged knife, which might wound them; to avoid which, it was better that they should hear them from the mouth of the church, with the solutions and interpretations of such passages as appear to the senses to be full of absurdity and contradiction, than that they should read them by themselves, without any solution or interpretation. He afterwards made a long enumeration of these absurdities, in terms so unqualified, tha* Jurieu was not afraid to declare that he did not remember to have read anything so frightful or so scandalous in any Christian author.

The Christians do indeed say, that their Scriptures were inspired by the Holy Ghost; yet not only is it acknowledged by Cardinal Cajetan and Bellarmine, that errors have found their way into them, through the negligence and ignorance of the booksellers, and the Rabbis, who Jurieu, who was so violent in his inadded the points-but they are considered {vectives against Cardinal Du Perron, had as a book too dangerous for the hands of himself to sustain similar reproaches from the majority of the faithful. This is ex- the Catholics. "I heard that minister," pressed by the fifth rule of the Index, a says Pap, in speaking of him, “teaching congregation at Rome, whose office it is the public that all the characteristics of to examine what books are to be forbidden. the Holy Scriptures, on which those preIt is as follows:tended reformers had founded their per"Since it is evident that if the readingsnasion of their divinity, did not appear of the Bible, translated into the vulgar to him to be sufficient. Let it not be intongue, were permitted to every one in-ferred (said Jurieu), that I wish to take discriminately, the temerity of mankind from the light and strength of the characwould cause more evil than good to ariseteristics of Scripture; but I will venture therefrom-we will that it be referred to the judgment of the bishop or inquisitor, who, with the advice of the curate or confessor, shall have power to grant permission to read the Bible rendered in the vulgar tongue by Catholic writers, to those to whom they shall judge that such reading will do no harm: they must have this permission in writing, and shall not be absolved until they have returned their Bible into the hands of the ordinary. As for such booksellers as shall sell Bibles in the vulgar tongue to those who have not this written permissior, or in any other way put them into their hands, they shall lose the price of the books (which the bishop shall employ for pious purposes), and shall moreover be punished by arbitrary penalties. Nor shall regulars read or buy these books without the permission of their superiors."

Cardinal Du Perron also asserted that

to affirm, that there is not one of them which may not be eluded by the profane. There is not one of them that amounts to a proof-not one to which something may not be said in answer; and, considered altogether, although they have greater power than separately to work a moral conviction—that is, a proof on which to found a certainty excluding every doubtI own that nothing seems to me to be more opposed to reason, than to say that these characteristics are of themselves capable of producing such a certainty.""

It is not then astonishing, that the Jews and the first Christians, who, we find in the Acts of the Apostles, confined themselves in their meetings to the reading of the Bible, were, as will be seen in the article HERESY, divided into different sects. For this reading was afterwards substituted that of various apocryphal works, or at least of extracts from them.