Our native proneness to sensuality; to commit injustice to man, and disobedience to God, through the prevalence of worldly selfishness, or the temptations to which we may be exposed by penury; these bad propensities are the alloy in our nature, which constitutes our trial. Our first parents received their trial from the same alloy in their nature. They had but one precept to obey, but one temptation to repel, and yet they sinned. We have various temptations to resist, various commands to observe. That our trials are complicated and harder to resist, is not our fault. We have, as they had, competent powers of resistance, if we will exert them; and that our nature is not worse than theirs, the facility with which they committed wickedness, on the first temptation, demonstrates.

Where guilt is incurred, or the wish of incurring it has been indulged, notwithstanding the opposition of our virtuous propensities, our power of renouncing the evil depends on the grace of God, obtained by our prayers; and to procure such assistance, together with pardon for past crimes, we learn from revelation that a Redeemer was necessary. The belief in his expiatory power commits no outrage on our innate sense of justice.

The violent passions, and tendency to evil, often

apparent in the infant-state, are no proofs of a nature more corrupt than Adam's. They are but the prevalence of the bad tendencies which may be expected to prevail before reason acquires strength to resist them, and revelation extends its aid. Till then the human being is no more accountable for its errors, no more obnoxious to just condemnation, than the brute, the idiot, the luna

tic.

It is only by this simple, plain construction, that the justice of God can be ascertained, the free-agency of man established, and the Scriptures be rendered consistent with themselves.

The doctrine of original sin, while it is contrary to the doctrine of Christ, is inimical to the practice of virtue, and leads to nothing good. So far from it, that misery and despair are its natural fruits. Under such belief those fruits cannot be avoided, except by the superstitious presumptuous credulity of having obtained, from a partial Deity, preternatural grace, and individual acceptance, granted only to a few; not as the reward of our endeavours to be virtuous, but from the influence of arbitrary favour.

Jeremy Taylor asserts, that the groundless doctrine of original sin was first made by the fierce uncharitable St Austin. Till then the fathers of the Christian church had abstained from wresting

a few unaccountable texts of St Paul, repugnant wholly to the tenets of his Master, and which, so wrested, disgrace Christianity. I confess I think, and shall always think, there must be something wrong in the head or heart of those who build the edifice of their faith on such a dismal foundation, pervious to the floods of despondence, while the Rock of Christ is at hand, on which the beams of hope and mercy shine.

Sincerely and warmly do I join your expressed delight, that the morning-star of peace at length arises on our long, our stormy, sanguinary night. Yet does it seem to me most strange, that you, my friend, together with almost all the rest of Mr Pitt's disciples, should exult in the peace, considering the terms on which it is obtained; while you refuse to confess the war to have been irrationally and wantonly prolonged, ill-conducted, and most disastrous in its consequences to this country, and to Europe in general.

Reasonless, surely, is it to vindicate Mr Pitt's late system, yet approve and triumph in peace, beneath the inevitable recollection, that if his desperate efforts had prevailed at Vienna, it had not now been ours. If there was any reality in those dangers to our constitution, which were, of late years, held out as the motives for continuing the baffled contest, then has Lord Grenville truly, as

forcibly stated, the certain and great augmenta-
tion of those dangers in the terms of its cessation.
However, the sad truth, that peace could not be
obtained on better terms, and that every year the
war continued, increased, and must still farther
increase, the sacrifices of this nation to procure
peace, amply justifies our present ministers in re-
nouncing the guilt of their predecessors. Yet
Lord Grenville, and his dark-spirited colleague,
the heir to a portion of Burke's eloquence, and to
all his apostasy, are, in their opposition to re-
concilement with France, consistent with their
late belligerent principles. Those principles led,
as Lord G. and Mr W.'s arguments now lead, to
eternal war with France, while she retains her
revolutionary principles, her republican form of
government, and that menacing command of coast,
the fatal present of the war. To that eternity of
contest, the system of the late ministry led, if it
led to any thing for which a reason could be given,
especially under the avowed dread of the English
populace imbibing the contagion of French prin-
ciples, from the facility of association with French-
men, which peace must bring, come when it
might.

I am glad you think with me, that the continuance
of Buonaparte's life is an highly desirable circum-
stance to us, since, if he is not genuinely good, he
D d

VOL. V.

is wise enough to see that, next to the reality, the semblance of virtue is the soundest policy in states as in individuals; that justice and friendship towards other nations, best secure the prosperity of his own.

And for England, I hope and trust, that, oppressed as she is, and must long remain, by the grievous burdens of this wasteful war, and with her populace much more alienated by misery than they ever could have been by tenets, which the populace never examine, will find this blessed, though humbling peace, balmy to her wounds, and Lethéan to her wrongs; and that many years she may remain undisturbed by farther conflicts, external or internal !

Pray present to your venerable mother, now, with unimpaired faculties, in the last year of her century, my best regards; to your beloved wife, and to the charming Magdalene, to whom my wish of being known returns with her restored power of contributing to your and Mrs Whalley's happiness. I am conscious that your future peace is in her keeping ;-may gratitude for the almost unexampled goodness she has received from you both, render the deposit sacred! Adieu!