stomach for dominion, but sweetens it with a soft name, and calls it discipline, which she exercises with little tenderness upon such as offend her, or gainsay her; and towards all other churches and opinions, her looks are sour and unforgiving. She talks much of the Lord, and contends that nothing is to be done by any man without God's grace moving in him, and assisting him, which is in no man's power. But for all that, if you want that grace, of which she is judge, or if you do not learn it from her, and submit implicitly to her, though she be not the giver of grace, you will find that she asserts a claim, as well as his holiness, to chastise wrong faith and obstinacy; for though the Pope, being the man of sin, has no such right, yet she who is the daughter of Zion, is entitled to it.

The Chinese cries, that here is much loud and warm zeal, very long prayers, a world of bitterness, but no charity. In England, says he, there is more knowledge and freedom: I will try England. In it be finds great and free liberty of conscience, and rejoices in it, but sees those who should be most for it, most implacable against it. He sees churchmen nobly provided for, but many of them not satisfied; on the contrary, claiming ten times more, and wildly supporting those claims by the gospel, and by the example of cheating and usurping Popish monks; sees them railing at private conscience, damning all that have it, and calling for the temporal sword to destroy them. He sees great part of the dissenters, who, after much suffering, enjoy this precious liberty, not contented with it, nor mended by their sufferings, but setting up for this same anti-christian spiritual domination, and taking as far as they can, the blessing and protection of the merciful law from one another. The Chinese applauds the wisdom, gentleness, and Christian spirit of the legislature, and finds the chief human security for the gospel in an act of Parliament, by which every man has the natural and Christian privilege to read, understand, and apply it bis own way. "This," says he, "is Christianity according to the gospel, which, by observation, I find can only subsist where all sorts of consciences, the wise and the weak, are entirely unmolested, where no sort of power is exercised over the soul, and where every man understands and interprets with security the words of Christ, and of Paul, as he judges Christ and Paul meant them. No two things, not heaven and hell, not good and evil, are more opposite than force and faith. The one is only from the good God, the other only from the worst passions of the worst men."

NUMBER 65.

Of the strange Force of Education, especially in Matters of Religion.

How far the force of example influences nature, and enlarges or restrains the human passions and appetites, is evident to all who compare different nations, and the several ranks of men in the same nation.

Custom, which is a continued succession of examples, warps the understanding; and as it is observed or neglected, becomes the standard of wisdom or folly. Men cannot bear to see what they themselves reverence, ridiculed by others; nor what they ridicule, reverenced by others. It is a common thing to breed up men in a veneration for one sort of folly, and in a contempt for another not worse, nor so bad; in a high esteem for one kind of science, and in aversion to another, full as good; to love some men merely because they have good names, and to hate others for their best qualities; to adore some objects for a bad reason, to detest others against all reason.

In Turkey they have as good natural understanding as other people; and yet by their education are taught to believe that there is a sort of divinity in the utter absence of all understanding: they esteem idiots and lunaticks as prophets. They think their raving to be celestial, because it is nonsense; and their stupidity instructive, because unintelligible. If upon the article of religion you offer or expect common sense, they revile you, and knock you on the head; but if you be a natural fool, your words are oracles, and phrenzy is saintship.

A Papist laughs and shakes his head at this religious sottishness and fury of the Turks, but burns you if you laugh at him for doing the same things. There never were greater sots and madmen than many of the Roman saints; nor are they the less worshipped for that, but the more. As they were enthusiasts in proportion to their lunacy, they are adored in proportion to their folly. St. Francis, for instance, was an errant changeling; St. Antony was distracted: yet who is of more consequence in the Roman breviaries, than those two saints? They are daily invoked by many devout catholics who never prayed to God in their lives.

That all this wild and astonishing bigotry is the pure effect of example, or of education, which is the same thing, (being only some men setting examples to other men,) may be learnt from hence, that no man bred without superstition, or in any particular way of it, can be brought into the vanities of any strange devotion at once, and rarely ever. People must be seasoned in it by time, by steps, and reiterations; after certain periods in life, examples come too late, or with small force. A grown Spaniard can hardly ever be a Frenchman; nor a Frenchman be a Spaniard. We see men will fight and die for certain practices and opinions, and even for follies and fopperies, which, bad they been bred to others, they would have despised, and perhaps have died for such as they now despise.

It is plain from the accounts, even the partial and disguised accounts, given by the missionaries, of the progress which they make in converting the natives of the East and West Indies, that their proselytes are very few, and those few fickle, not half made, and lukewarm; still fond of their old superstitions, and upon every terror er temptation, ready to revolt to Paganism, which they had scarce forsaken. I believe this is almost universally true of the elder sort: I doubt they are almost all like father Heynepin's old woman, who, when all other arguments were unconvincing, yielded to be baptized for a pipe of tobacco, and having smoaked it, offered to be baptized again for another. It is certain that the Chineses have converted the Jesuits, who have at least civilly met these obstinate heathens half way, and

gone roundly into Paganism, to make the Pagans good Catholics: an union not unnatural; only I am sorry that the peaceable heathenism of Confucius should be debauched by the barbarous spirit of Popery, which has not only from the beginning adopted the ancient Gentile Idolatry, but disgraced it by cruelty.

I am satisfied that the famous doctor in Holbourn,* is a very sincere keen Churchman; but I am equally satisfied, that had he been educated in the Mosaic way, he would have been as fierce a Jew; or bred at Athens, in the days of Socrates, as clamorous as the rest of the rabble against that wise and moderate man, who was doubtless a heretic as to the doctrine and discipline of the Athenian priests. If in this conjecture I have offended the doctor, who, they say, is a man of warm spirit, I will give him competent revenge, by declaring my equal belief that many a stern Calvinist, zealous in his way, would with different breeding have been as zealous in a different way. I could wish that from this consideration both sorts would learn to bear with one another, and with all men; that at least they would be as angry at Mahomet, as at Dr. Clarke, and learn not to attack heresy through the sides of charity. But in this very thing the force of example, of which I am talking, is against me.

By this force men may be brought to renounce every glimmering of common sense, every impulse of pity, and be transported with every degree of madness and inhumanity. In many countries the death of a snake will cost you your life; and those people who would murder a man and eat him, would tremble at the thought of hurting a serpent, for which pernicious reptile they have a religious regard. The unnatural mercy which superstition teaches them, is the only mercy that they have, and exercised upon a creature that is a known enemy to human life.

The Iroquois not satisfied with putting their enemies to death in cold blood, burn them alive, after other tortures, cut off peices of their raw flesh, and eat them, and give the children the blood to drink, to season their young minds with the like sanguinary spirit. Thus the cruelty is continued by example from father to son, and grows natural by habit. Their enemies serve them the same way; but this consideration reclaims neither. It is heroism to be barbarous, and the fiercest cannibal is the bravest warrior. Yet these savages are, in their own clans, merciful and good natured to one another, and live together, in remarkable innocence, simplicity and union.

As these American nations, who thus destroy one another, are very thin, there is more than territory enough for them all; nor is husbandry any of their arts; and there are woods large enough for many more to hunt in, and rivers to fish in and all living from hand to mouth, they do not much mind property. But inveterate quarrels, handed down from generation to generation, and daily inflamed, perpetuate their mutual ferocity and rage. They often watch many days in hunger and cold, to circumvent their enemy, though nothing is to be expected at last but blood, lost or got: but blood, on whatever side shed, is glory.

* Dr. Sacheverel, minister of St. Andrew's Holbourn, when these papers were written.

F

In some parts of Peru this savageness is still improved. Their chief ambition in war is to make women captives. These they make their slaves in a strange way they breed out of them, and eat the children so bred at the age of ten or twelve having first well-fatted them; and the women, when they can breed no longer, are eaten last. Amongst these people the sense of shame seems entirely extinguished, or rather never known. Their prostitutions natural and unnatural, are as public as their eating and drinking. Some of them account virginity a great blemish, and the young women must be beholden to their friends and relations to get rid of it, before they can get husbands. Their women ran openly after the Spaniards, in all the transports of female rage, begging the gratifications of gallantry. But, what is still most monstrous and incredible, there are of those people, who have public temples for the practice of sodomy, as an act of religion: for, with all these abominations, they have a religion, which is part of them; and we see in them into what excesses mistakes in religion can run. They believe the immortality of the soul; they have offices for the dead; they worship the sun; they believe a creator of all things; they offer sacrifices to their idols, and sometimes human sacrifices. Will any of our casuists say, that it were not better they had no religion, than one that teaches them such hideous crimes and barbarities? I wish that these brutal heathens were the only instances, where reason and humanity are made victims to religion. But customs of religion and honour, right or wrong, (as both are commonly vilely mistaken and abused,) are apt to take an inveterate hold of the human soul, and to master every natural faculty.

It would be a hard, if not an impossible thing to convert these Peruvian savages. There is no weaning them from their horrible and delicious banquets of human flesh, alive or dead and while they themselves have such a relish of man's blood, they will always think it acceptable to the gods. For men every where imagine that the deity loves and hates just as they do; and their common way of going fo God, is to bring God to them.

It is as easy to bring an Englishman into the way and life of a Hottentot, or Greenlander, as to bring them into his. Both are impossible; the Hottentot is nasty and naked, and lives or starves upon filth; the Greenlander lives in piercing and unhospitable regions of snow in a country made desolate by nature, where no comfortable thing appears, but all covered with darkness, or the rage of the elements. Yet both these miserable barbarians, miserable in our eyes, are inveterately fond of their own caves and miseries; nor could all the delicacies and allurements of Europe ever reclaim one of them. Their captivity, in the midst of plenty, conveniencies, and kind usage, either broke their hearts, or attached them more violently to their own more amiable barbarity, indigence, and garbage, when they returned.

What shall we say to all these strange fondnesses, strange but natural? they are effects of habit and prepossession, from which no man is wholly free; by which almost all men are wholly governed; and from all this a good lesson is to be learned, how men ought to use one another.

NUMBER 66.

The extravagant Notions and Practice of Penance, how generally prevailing as a necessary Part of Religion, even amongst such as know not, or neglect all the other and real Penalties.

My last was concerning the power of example and education. I shall in this pursue the same subject as far as it relates to penance, or the undergoing voluntary miseries for God's sake. At what time it came into the world, I do not know; but the universal esteem and influence which it has gained in it amongst the Gentiles, Christians, and Mahometans, is surprising to consider. It is probable that it was begun by melancholy enthusiasts, who supposing the Deity to be like themselves a gloomy and sorrowful being, believed that he delighted, as they did, in splenetic and mortifying actions; and having no revelation but what they took for such, their own dreams and vapours, thought that their religious worship ought to be as wild and horrid as their imaginations were. Thus it is likely, that men first cheated themselves, and were afterwards the more easily cheated by others, and fraud improved what phrenzy began.

But, whatever was the original of penance, its progress has been prodigious, and it has gained strange and invincible strength. It has run out into such numerous branches, and into such extravagant excesses, that there is no room left for any new device or improvement. To it have been sacrificed ease, health, and convenience; the necessary appetites of nature; the faculties of the soul; self-pity and tenderness; all the pleasures of life, and life itself. People have been brought to vie with one another in famine, thirst and torture, and to engage with zeal in a combat for misery.

As great a mummery as penance is made in the Roman church, and as easily as it is dispensed with, there are still many amongst them who afflict themselves with great cruelty, and even kill themselves by it. It is for the glory of the church that numbers should shew themselves in earnest in this savage devotion; and therefore on their penitential days so many are seen vehemently bruising and scarifying their own flesh, and covering themselves, and the ground which they go on, with their own blood. Some actually die under this inhuman discipline; some soon after. One would think that these self-murderers considered themselves as martyrs.

The men of galantry amongst these devout Catholics, especially in Spain and Portugal, are actuated by a carnal, as well as spiritual devotion on these occasions; and make love to God and their mistresses by one and the same religious feat of barbarity. It is plain from hence, that they believe the merciful God to have the cruel heart of a coquet; and that both his and hers are to be won by pitiless stripes, and the loss of blood. I wonder that they have not for this double end made a holy exercise of their bull feasts, in which so many lovers do such desperate things, and expose their lives. For their mistresses