one Supreme Being, is a proof that this idea is innate in all men, or universally proportioned to the conceptions of all men, and to deny that the almost universal consent of mankind, in the acknowledgement of several gods, is a proof of the contrary. If you are not very well satisfied with these theological reasonings, as I think you are not, you will be no better satisfied with the manner in which our archbishop attempts to prove that the world had a beginning. The question which is commonly put to those who maintain the eternity of it would be trifling, as well as trite, if it did not oblige the atheist to give an answer which implies, in his mouth, the greatest absurdity, and makes him pronounce, in effect, his own condemnation. Tillotson takes this advantage, as I have done; but he throws it away, when he has taken it, by applying it against those who make the world more antient than the theological æra makes it to be, though they do not believe it eternal. He asserts that the most antient histories were writ long after this æra, and quotes to prove it some verses of Lucretius, finely writ, but very little to the purpose, because of no authority in this case. -Si nulla fuit genitalis origo "Terrarum et cœli, semperque eterna fuêre ; "Cur supra bellum Thebanum, et funera Troja, "Non alias alii quoque res cecinêre poëtæ ?" Men Men have been always fond, not only to carry the originals of their several nations as far back as they could, and to represent them, sometimes, as coæval with the world itself, but to establish their own, or the traditions which had come to them, as the most ancient of all traditions. Thus the Roman poet employed those of Greece to prove that the world had not begun very long before the wars of Thebes and of Troy. The world had a beginning, says the Jew; for there is neither history nor tradition more ancient than Moses; and we know by his writings how, and how long ago, the world was created. If we bring a Chinese into the scene, he will assure us that the world. had a beginning; because the cycles, of threescore years each, in the chronological tables of his nation, do not rise any higher than Hoam-Ti, who reigned about four thousand four hundred years before our æra; that from him to Xin-num, the succcessor of Fohi, there are not more than three hundred and eighty years, and that Fohi was the first that civilised mankind., It was he, will the Chinese continue to say, who left us the adorable and hitherto incomprehensible Yekin, in the explication of which our learned men have laboured these two thousand six hundred years. It was Fohi and Xin-num who taught men the use of the plough, who invented letters, and to whom all arts and sciences owe their original. Let a learned Mexican come forward next, and he will assure you, not only, that the world began, but that the time when it began is known; for we we had but nine kings before Montezuma, will this great chronologer say. Tenuch was the first of them, and the founder of our monarchy; our hieroglyphical annals rise no higher; we know nothing beyond him; this calculation is confirmed by that of our neighbours, whose traditions place the destruction of the last sun, and the beginning of this, but a little before our ́æra. Let a Peruvian follow the Mexican, he will assure us, that the inca Manco-Capac preceded Atahualpa about four hundred years; that he and his sister Coya-Mama-Oella-Huaco were sent, at that time, by their father, the sun, to civilise mankind, who could not have been long in being, since they had neither polity nor religion, since they knew neither how to build houses, spin wool or cotton to cover their nakedness, nor to till their lands. These are the traditions of the east and of the west. The former make the world more ancient than those of the Jews, as they stand in the Hebrew, at least; the latter place the commencement of it about the beginning of the twelfth century of the christian æra, that is about the time of your king Louis le Gros, and of our first Norman princes. Our learned Europeans may laugh, as much as they please, at these learned Americans but they must not be offended, if they are laughed at, in their turn, by those who think, that if Cadmus, the cook of a certain king of Sidon, carried the use of letters, and his son, or his grandson, Bacchus, the culture of the vine, to the Greeks three thousand years before Manco very Manco-Capac civilised the Peruvians, it may well be, that the Atlantic, or some other nation still more unknown to us, had made all these improvements, by a long experience, three thousand years before the Greeks, or even their mas ters, who boasted of a much greater antiquity, the Egyptians. A crowd of reflections presents itself; but these may serve to show how ridiculous it is, while we receive on the faith of universal tradition this fact, "the world had a beginning," to go about to fix the æra of it according to those of any particular nations. The negative argument, "we have no memorials beyond such a time," proves nothing but our ignorance; and the positive argument, that "we have relations of the beginning of arts " and sciences in several countries," proves nothing more than what it is very needless to prove; I mean that there was a time, when every one of these nations began to be civilised. Neither of these arguments is of weight against the atheist who asserts the eternity of the world. But they give him an advantage, such as it is, which bad arguments give frequently in polemical writings; and having refuted these, he may triumph, as if he had refuted all the rest, which is a practice very common among his adversaries the divines. If the divine had not more at heart to establish the credit of Jewish traditions than the commencement of the world, he would not proceed as he does. He would not neglect the universal tradi tion of a naked fact, such as tradition may prẻserve, to insist on particular traditions of a fact so complicated with circumstances, that no tradition could preserve it. These circumstances might make the fact doubtful; the fact will never make them probable. Even that of the time, when the present system of things began, has been supported weakly, I will not, though, I think, I might say fraudulently, by Jewish Rabbins and by Christian doctors, from Julius Africanus, and Eusebius, and George the monk, down to Stillingfleet, whom I mention, particularly, because Tillotson ventures to assert, that he has proved, in his Origines Sacræ, the chronological traditions of the Egyptians and the Chaldæans to agree with those of the Bible. If he had proved this, which he has not, most certainly he would have proved nothing more than what the Mexicans assert, that the traditions of two or three neighbouring nations, all derived probably enough from one original, are conformable to one another. But it is, indeed, too, bold an imposition to pretend to prove, by descending into particulars of facts and dates, any thing of this kind. Our learned antiquaries have no other materials than a certain number of broken, incoherent, and precarious traditions. These they make to cohere, for the most part, by guess, and then drag them to a seeming conformity with the Mosaical system, which they assume, all along, to be true, while they pretend to prove it to be so by collateral evidence. I will only add, to show how |