innate, which to the ancient poet Simonides, in proportion as he urged his enquiries, seemed the more to elude them*, is a presumption equally contrary to reafon and experience, and deserves to be branded as the grossest enthusiasm.

The first step to true wisdom is to feel the want of it, and the next is a willingness to bestow the pains which are necessary to obtain it; without these previous dispositions, no outward advantages are fufficient to secure the acquisition. A man, thus unqualified, may retire into the country, but he will grow no wifer there than he was before in town. If he happens to be a philosopher, he will proceed, in his ufual manner, to amuse himself with the effects, without prosecuting his enquiries to their just issue in the knowledge and adoration of the first caufe; if he is a man of activity, he will betake himself to his sports or his husbandry; and if an indolent epicure, he will

* Vide Cic. de Nat. Deor. lib. i. § 22.

sink down into a life of low indulgence. There is no magical virtue in fields or groves, no local inspiration, which will elevate an unprepared mind from things natural to moral, from matter to spirit, and from the creature to the Creator.

For although it is true that God is sometimes found of them who seek him not, it is only to those who diligently seek him, that a promise is made of finding him *. To the former it is commonly in vain that the heavens declare his glory, and the firmament sheweth his handy work; they have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, and their hearts do not understand: while to the latter, the most familiar scenes of nature, and every object around them, yields a divine attestation; they find

Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in ftones, and good in every thing.

It is to these, and such as these, whose minds are in some degree awake to religion,

* Prov. ii. 3-5.

who are serious and earnest in their search after Him with whom they are most concerned to be acquainted, and who, at the same time, are not without some tincture of general literature, that I would address the subsequent reflections; as it is to them only that they can be supposed to prove either useful or acceptable.

But before we proceed to the enquiry now before us, it is proper to apprize the reader, that it is not by dint of reason only, and by heaping one argument upon another, that we expect to climb to heaven, and there to pry into the divine nature and will; an attempt which, as it would bear some resemblance to that of the fabled giants of old, would be sure to resemble it in its issue:

Ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam,

Scilicet, atque Ossæ frondosum involvere Olympum : Ter pater extructos disjecit fulmine montes

* On Pelion, thrice to heave they all essay'd Ossa, and thrice on Ossa's tow'ring head To roll Olympus up with all his shade :

VIRGIL.

}

To check such a presumption, it might be sufficient to consider how much the greatest sages of paganism miscarried in their speculations on this most important subject. Some of them fell into,the grossest atheism, as Democritus and Strato, and their followers, who vainly endeavoured to resolve all things into chance or necessity. Others were bewildered in a multiplicity of deities. And those who asserted one universal intelligent nature, generally supposed it to be nothing more than the soul of the world, or its nobler constituent part, and made it to consist of an exquisitely subtle matter, such as fire or æther. Even Anaxagoras and Plato, who soared much higher, seem to have had no proper idea of creation, but to have considered matter as an eternal and independent principle, out of which a divine mind (first introduced, as is said, by the former of these philosophers) made as

Thrice hurl'd th' Omnipotent his thunder round,
And dash'd the pil'd-up mountains to the ground.

DRYDEN.

perfect a world, as the contumacious qualities of the subject to be wrought upon would permit. Nor was the author of the universe better known in the character of supreme Lord and Ruler. Cicero, speaking of the Greek philosophers, who were probably as enlightened as those of any other country, declares it to have been their common opinion, that the gods were never angry, nor did harm to any one*: whence we may at least collect that the doctrine of punitive justice, or of that unalterable displicency and resentment of sin, which is represented to us in scripture as an essential perfection of the divine nature, held scarcely a place in their theology. And for what little they advanced rightly concerning the true God, they appear to have been more indebted to the Hebrew records, or to some

* Hoc quidem commune est omnium philosophorum, non eorum modo, qui deum nihil habere ipsum negotii dicunt, et nihil exhibere alteri; sed eorum etiam qui deum semper agere aliquid, et moliri volunt, nunquam nec irasci deum, nec nocere. Cic. de Off. 28. $