Charles Cassedy, of Tennessee, writes to Mr. Campbell:

      RESPECTED SIR:--The importance of vital religion to the happiness of mankind, not only as regards the present, but a future existence, is a theme which requires no comment with reflecting minds. Take from man his belief in a SUPREME BEING; divest him of all sublime veneration and reverential awe for the infinite wisdom, power, glory, and beneficence displayed in the beauties and visible splendors of the universe around him; let him conceive that he is without accountability to a superior Being, from whom he must have derived the nobility and elevation of his intellectual existence; strip him of the fond and grateful conception that this great and beneficent Being exercises a general and particular superintendency over the destinies of mankind and the universe; extinguish in his bosom the divine impulse that leads him to hope and faith in the immortality of his own existence; let him come to the definitive conclusion that these affections for parents, offspring, relatives, friends, and fellow-beings, which Bulwer calls immortal, are not to survive the tomb, and overleap the boundaries of time--and language, sir, has no powers of expression adequate to the dreadful condition, moral and intellectual, into which such deadly scepticism would plunge the human race.

      There can be no better test, sir, of the wisdom or folly--or the truth or falsehood of any creed or system or belief than the simple process of admitting it for a moment to be correct, and then tracing the consequences to which it must inevitably lead. Say the Atheists: "There is no God; we do not believe in such a Being, because we can not comprehend his essence, and the modes of his existence. Would you have us believe in a Being we can not comprehend?" [501]

      Does not man believe in his own identity? Has he any doubts of the reality of his own existence? Would it not be infinitely more difficult and absurd to disbelieve in his own identity and existence, than to admit the fact of his belief--from the simple consciousness of his susceptibility, physically, morally, and mentally, to the action and influence of every thing around him in the universe? Can his want of comprehension of his own essence and modes of existence, by any possible process of reasoning, preclude his believing in the reality of that existence? Is not man susceptible of the sensible influence of heat and cold, and of the action of the elements upon his system? And will he deny this influence, and the action of these elements, because he can not analyze their essence and define their modes of operation? If man is to disbelieve in every thing for which he can not account, his case must be deplorable indeed, and his ignorance fatally incurable! Who that is endued with vision, will deny the unclouded splendors of the rising sun, merely because he can not analyze the great luminary of day, and define the action of light upon the human eye? Who that is invested with the sense of hearing, will deny the existence of that sense, and the impression of sounds upon the auditory nerves, merely because he can not analyze and define either? The Scriptures inform us that God created man in his own image: the misfortune of these irrational reasoners is, that they attempt to mould an infinite and incomprehensible God in the image of man; and, utterly failing in the attempt to reduce an infinite Being to finite conceptions and human models, they affect to disbelieve in the existence of a God they can not comprehend. This I believe to be something like a solution of the absurd and contradictory enigma of Atheism.

      But let us admit for a moment that there is no God; and what sort of a spectacle, to the perceptive and reasoning faculties of man, would the universe present? In fact, my dear sir, what sort of an inscrutable enigma would man present to himself? Here, he would say, is a visible universe, which is not the effect of wisdom, beneficence, and design, but merely the result of chance. The order I observe in the vast assemblage of objects around me, from the regular and unvarying movements of the great planetary system, down to the minutest subject of impulsive motion in nature, is the result of disorder and accident. There is neither wisdom nor power visible to man in the universe:--these apparent and seeming attributes of a Being which the Christians call God, are the offspring of folly and weakness. Inert, lifeless, shapeless, and unintelligent masses of mere matter, imparted to themselves motion, animation, form, organization, intelligence--and produced the great and wonderful phenomenon of [502] animated nature, from the minutest insect, upward to man, the lord of all. In other words, dead and inert matter imparted to itself what it did not originally possess--motion, life, form, organization, and intelligence.

      Unintelligent as is brute matter, says the Atheist, it gave to man an exquisitely organized brain, presumed to be the intelligence; a heart, which is probably the seat of vitality, and a nervous system, so keenly sensitive as to animate with feeling and susceptibility of impression, the whole human frame;--it organized the eye to see and the ear to hear; accident and chance alone prevents the eye from hearing and the ear from seeing! There are in man no indications of a superior Being, or of the predominance of wisdom and design. The feet and legs were not designed to support the body, nor have their organizations any reference to the power or functions of locomotion; chance alone prevented the hands and arms from performing pedestrian evolutions. Chance gave consistence, form, and expression to the human head and face; it placed the eye in front and in a superior position, that it might not distinguish objects dangerous to self-preservation, and facilitate the performance of duties auxiliary to the same end; and it also organized the ear, and placed it on either side of the head, that it might not concentrate the impulsions of sound, and throw them with adequate force within the labyrinths of the auditory nerves.

      Brute matter and chance, again says the Atheist, formed man with intellectual powers, passions, and emotions, unknown to and infinitely superior to such creators, and gave him dominion over all the inferior orders of nature. These blind and undesigning causes have given birth to a being exquisitely organized, replete with the light of intelligence and understanding, and capable of appreciating, in an astonishing degree, the infinite wisdom and power displayed in the great movements, order, and harmony of the universe! These unintelligent and designing parents have endowed their offspring with perception, memory, understanding, judgment; they have taught him to refer his knowledge of particular facts to the discovery of general principles, by which he has unfolded the elements of science; they have taught him to analyze the chemical compounds of inanimate matter (one of his parents)--and to demonstrate conclusively that chance (his other atheistic progenitor) denotes the agency of some power not appertaining to mere matter; they have taught him the arts of design in architecture, and shown him that the ideas of structure, material, coaptation, and form, exist in the contemplative faculties of man, before such conceptions have been operated on by human hands. They have done more; they have enabled him to construct machines [503] of unerring exactness, by which to mark the lapses of time, which are abstracts of his conceptions of eternity; and of the graduations of space, which are abstracts of his perceptions of Infinity--which, as they have not a merely material being, but exist only in the regions of thought, lose him forever in endless labyrinths of conjecture and doubt:--

      These are some of the absurd doctrines of Atheism, carried out in their applications to what we know of man and the universe; these are some of the consolations which flow from the irrational reasonings of reasonable beings. Deny the existence of a God, says Doctor Young, and all is mystery; admit his existence, and all the enigmas of time and eternity are solved! As I have said before, if man is to disbelieve in every thing for which he can not account, his ignorance must not only be deplorable, but fatally incurable. He would see the light of day, and disbelieve in its existence; he would hear the deafening reverberations of the thunders, and fancy them delusions; he would witness the destructive powers of the lightnings, when they rive in atoms the gnarled and lofty oak, and deny their blasting and desolating energies; he would view, with incurable apathy, the visible beauties and splendors of nature, and believe them to be shadows and unrealities. Take away our ideas of the existence and superintendency of an Infinite Being, clothed with wisdom, omnipotence, and omnipresence, from the universe, and man immediately imbibes a sentiment of solitary and utter abandonment, and ceases to feel an interest in the objects around him. His ties on life immediately become attenuated and feeble; feeling none of the ennobling pride of an elevated and imperishable destiny, he would soon experience the degradations of a moral and intellectual decay; the bonds which unite his loves, affections, friendships, and social emotions with those of his fellow-beings, would become extinct; no polar star of light, and hope, and faith, would illuminate the dark vista of futurity--or shed even a dim and twilight splendor round the precincts of the tomb; all nature would become to him a barren and solitary waste, with which as an intellectual being he would cease to hold kindred sympathy; in fine, death would present him with nothing but the gloomy and appalling spectacles of a dreamless and unconscious tranquility, a sleep that never ends:--for, sir, abstract from man his faith in the existence of a creating and superintending God, and the lofty and ennobling sentiment of immortality dies within him. [504]

      Atheism seems to me to be produced and sustained by the pride and ignorance of man; a pride and ignorance which lead him to doubt and disregard the obvious and visible proofs of a supreme Being, and to torture his inventive follies and visionary reasonings for demonstrations of atheism, infinitely less conclusive than those which support the contrary doctrines. Ask him to account for the visible phenomena of the universe, and he will tell you the whole is the result of chance. Ask him to account for the order and regular movements of all the objects in nature, and their known fidelity to fixed and invariable laws, and, instead of referring these phenomena to a supreme and intelligent God, which would rationally solve the problem, he will tell you that they resulted from mere accident--accident which chanced to hit upon order, and the observance of steadfast and unvarying laws from the dawn of eternity. Atheists seem to me to take a perverse and inverted view of all the objects of Creation and Providence; and to perpetuate their obduracy in error, by their own struggles for voluntary blindness. They can distinguish no providential economy, no superior wisdom, no regular connection between causes and consequences, no perfection of design in the universe!

      Ask them why the earth does not present a plain and even surface; and they can not distinguish the supreme wisdom and perfection of design, which heaved the primitive mountains into the clouds; clothed them with eternal snows; undulated, gradually, the inferior mountains and hills downward to the shores of the great oceans, that we might be supplied with fountains of pure water from the rains, the dews, and the fusion of the snows on those mountains--that the courses of the rivulets, creeks, and rivers, in their meanders from the distant "cloud-capp'd" mountains in the interior of vast continents, might irrigate and fertilize whole countries for the convenience and habitation of man--and find their way into the "fountains of the great deep," whence are drawn up, by evaporations unceasing in their agency, the waters which again descend in dews and rains, to moisten, enrich, and clothe with verdure the whole face of nature! Suppose the waters to descend from the clouds, unbroken into an infinity of particles by the resistance of the atmosphere--and would not the habitations of man, and all his works, be swept from their foundations and destroyed, in the impetuous rush of these resistless cataracts? There is nothing, my dear sir, in the aspect and economy of nature, that does not speak supreme wisdom and perfection of design, to the intelligence of the man who knows how to interrogate the great objects which surround him. The earth, the air, the great oceans of the globe, sustained myriads of inhabitants suited to these different elements. Who does not see, in the shape [505] and conformation of the fish, a singular and wise adaptation to the element in which he lives--and to no other? The moment it is exposed to the air, on the dry land, it ceases to live. Do not the figure, the feathery plumage, and the wings of the bird, denote him the inhabitant of the air, the companion of the clouds? Will any man deny that the feet, the limbs, the stomach and intestines--in fact, the whole conformation and organic structure of land animals, denote the spheres in which they are to live and move, and even the particular climates to which they are consigned by nature? Are the fins and lungs of the fish adapted to locomotion and respiration on the dry land? Can the eagle and all other volant animals, fitted to wing the atmosphere and float on the pure mountain breeze, exist in the suffocating medium of a surging and tumultuous ocean, and find subsistence among the monsters of the deep? Atheist-skeptic-blind idolater of chance; you who deny the visibility of wisdom and design in the universe--where is thy blush? The configuration of man and his organic structure; the coaptation or adjustment of each portion of his frame to the others and to the whole structure of that frame; the uses and designs of the limbs; the articulations and ligaments of the joints; the convolutions and dispositions of the muscles which move those joints; the pulsific muscular energies of the heart, which unceasingly, through the period of a long life, propel the vital fluid through the entire human frame; the foraminous character of the otherwise solid bones, which affords passages for the exquisitely sensitive and tender nerves, that are given off in pairs from the great nervous spinal column, and impart feeling and sensibility to the whole human structure; are not all these intelligible arrangements, conclusive proofs of the existence of a supremely intelligent and superintending power above us?

      Contemplate the wonderful attributes inherent in what physicians and metaphysicians denominate the human sensorium, the focal point on which are made all impressions derived through the medium of the senses, and in which seems more especially to reside the intellectual powers of man! Did the blind and unintelligent operations of mere matter connect this sensorium and these mental energies with the grand spectacle of the astronomical heavens, and with all other objects perceptible in the universe? Have the operations of blind and inert matter given perceptions, emotions, passions to the rock, or mental and reasoning energies to the clods of the valley? Did matter impose laws upon itself, by which the intelligible and wisely arranged order of the universe is regulated and sustained? Another great difficulty with Atheists seems to be, that, as they have attempted to model a God after human archetypes and in human molds, [506] they utterly fail in finding in the infinitude of space, a sensorium--a central point, whence can emanate the supreme intelligence and power displayed in the universe; in other words, they can not find in their God the organization and modes of existence and operation found in man, and they reject a belief in the Supreme Being altogether! Can a finite being, circumscribed in wisdom, power, and modes of existence, comprehend the infinite intelligence, omnipotence, and illimitable modes of existence, rationally attributable to a supreme and infinite Being? Does the astronomer who predicts the return of a comet, from calculations of a small portion of the ellipsis of its orbit, require to be bound to the tail of that comet, and whirled through the infinitude of space, before he can believe in the truth of his own demonstrations? Does the man who can calculate, with mathematical certainty, the future occurrence of an eclipse, reject all faith in his calculations and the event, merely because he can not accompany the heavenly bodies through their orbicular revolutions? It is but a small part we see and know of every thing--and not the whole; this circumscribed view of things is itself evidence of the existence of supreme wisdom. It is by the configuration and exterior that we distinguish a human being; and the probability is, that could man detect by a piercing flash of vision, the whole complicated and exquisite phenomena of the human frame, the discovery would be so overwhelming as to destroy life. The eye is susceptible of the grateful influence of light, but where is the vision that would not be destroyed by an exposure of the eye to the unclouded brilliancy of the sun? The wisdom and beneficence of a superintending Providence are as visible in what has been secluded from human view, as in what has been disclosed to mankind. In fine, every thing in nature demonstrates the existence of a God, whose attributes are supreme wisdom, beneficence, and power; and I find it much less difficult to admit the existence of such a Being, than to close the eyes of my understanding against palpable demonstrations of the important truth.

[CHARLES CASSEDY.]      
Vol. 1836, pages 498-504.      

      Without a belief in the immortality of the soul, admissible alone on the sublime conception of a supreme, superintending, and self-existent God, man is lost in a maze of conjecture and uncertainty, which renders life valueless; blots out human existence, as connected with the past and future; and subverts the very foundations of religious veneration and moral virtue--the two great principles of human happiness. The hope, the desire, the noble and ennobling sentiment of immortality, seem to be instinctive in man alone, of all the orders of animated nature. He alone, of all created existences, enjoys with rationality, devotion, and enthusiasm, the wisdom and [507] splendor diffused through the universe, and experiences a thrill of unspeakable horror at the idea of his own annihilation. There is in man a natural and invincible desire to live, as it were, in the past and future; to contemplate the great events of antiquity, and the fate of his progenitors in the long lapse of ages gone by; and to carry his hopes and anticipations forward into the dark vista of futurity. He contemplates with awful and intense interest, the stupendous monumental ruins of past ages; develops in their time-struck vestiges and decaying inscriptions, the characters of generations long since mouldered into dust; recognizes with sublime, yet gloomy and awful emotions, the progressive desolation impressed on everything that is the work of human hands, by the gradual and resistless march of time--and he asks himself, Are these scarcely legible inscriptions, these vague and empty remembrancers, these mouldering and silent walls, and the doubtful and uncertain records of profane and fictitious history, all that remain of the myriads of human beings, like myself, who have lived their short hour on the stage, and gone down to oblivion! Mankind, in all grades and conditions of life, from the untutored savage to the man of high intellectual culture and scientific refinement, have ever considered the present stage of existence as a mere prelude to the great drama of limitless being. This doctrine is inculcated not merely by revelation, but by the very disposition, nature and mental capacities of man; in truth, without admitting its authenticity, this state of being seems without adequate aim or object, and the great enigmas of futurity become absolutely insolvable.

      Unlike those of the brute, the affections and passions of man overleap the boundaries of time, and survive even the repulsive horrors of the tomb; the provident affection of the brute for its offspring merely extends to the period of its maturity and competency to provide for itself, while that of man for his posterity extends to the latest ages and generations. The fact is that the unquenchable desire in man to be remembered with gratitude and admiration by posterity, is but an emanation of the great sentiment of immortality, implanted in the human bosom. It is visible in the untutored savage, who accompanies the body of his deceased relative or friend, with trophies of former achievements and glory; it is seen in the school-boy, who inscribes his name and explicits on a tree or a rock; it is witnessed in the headlong career of conquerors, who have overthrown kingdoms and empires that their names might be perpetuated; it is observable in the patriotic statesman, who benefits his country that his name may be inscribed on the records of history and descend to future times; in truth, it is plainly demonstrable on the decaying inscriptions and monumental ruins of antiquity, intended to perpetuate the [508] glory and renown of anterior generations to future ages! Do the instinctive capacities and circumscribed views of the brutal creation present any such lofty and ennobling sentiment as that of immortality in man? The brute can not reason on appearances of death; his views do not even extend to the extinction of life--much less to any consequences that are to supervene: his dread and evasion of injury are merely instinctive, and nearly involuntary impulses to self-preservation. With the brute the origin, the progress, the maturity, and the extinction of life, are neither objects of contemplation, nor solicitude; the present embraces its whole scope of vision--its whole horizon of life--its sole view of existence! It is essentially different with man; in proportion to his superiority in wisdom and intellectual strength, he lives in the past and future. From the intellectual elevation of the present, on which he stands conspicuous and alone, he looks backward on anterior ages, and forward into futurity. His mental vision spans the whole scope of the history of his species from the earliest periods; embodies and contemplates the passing events of his own times; embraces with rational, philosophic, and comprehensive energy, the great aspect of nature as it presents itself to his mind; and begets an unspeakable solicitude to obtain a knowledge of the future destinies of his race. With these broad, lofty, profound, and comprehensive views; feeling that he himself is not self-created and self-endowed; and believing, from visible data and rational induction, that blind and undesigning chance alone could never have produced so exquisitely organized and mentally endowed a being as himself--or so vast, complicated, beautiful, and harmoniously arranged a universe as he beholds, he comes to the only conclusion that can not lead him to absurdity--and refers the origin of all things to the creative power of a Being whose attributes and essence are the incomprehensible fountains of all the wisdom, beneficence, and omnipotent energy displayed in the spectacle of the universe.

      This sentiment of an overruling and indefinable Power must have darkly pervaded the human bosom even from the dawn and commencement of time. It must have been derived, originally, from revelations rationally and intellectually visible on the whole face of nature. Man, from the earliest ages, must have felt himself a measureably weak and defenceless being; and that his destinies were regulated by some supreme and mysterious Power equally beyond his under standing and control. He saw indications of its desolating energies in the destructive flashes of the lightnings; he heard its voice in the deeply reverberating thunders that seemed to shake the pillars of creation; he saw its omnipotence in the movements of the great [509] planetary system; and became conscious of its beneficence and wisdom, in the fruitful sources every where presented for his subsistence, comfort, enjoyment, and happiness! In the absence of data, facts and realities, especially in the dawn and infancy of intellect, man invariably resorts to fancy and fiction for the solution of every enigma. It was this original and crude idea of a DEITY, darkly shadowed forth to uncultured human intellect, that furnished the pagan with his idol gods of wood and stone--in the likeness of elephants, serpents, bulls, and bears; it was this same crude conception that produced the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, and peopled the air, the waters, the firmament, and even the volcanic caverns of the earth, with innumerable gods and goddesses in human shape--and endowed with human vices and passions; and it is this same crude and horrid idea of a Divinity, that now pervades the vast regions of Asia, and furnishes the idol Juggernaut with temples of absurd idolatry, and a car of triumph to crush the ignorant and trembling victims of his worship! But have not these numerous and idolatrous nations, with all their ignorance and superstition, done more for the honor of human intellect, in endowing their idol and imaginary gods with wisdom, power, beneficence, and even passions, than has the solitary, bereft, abandoned, and parentless Atheist, with his "cultured soul and sapient eye serene," and his Deity of brute, unconscious, unintelligent, and undesigning matter? Human nature, in all its stages of improvement or retrogradation, elevation or decline, fashions a God according to the weakness or strength, the shallowness or profundity of the human intellect. The pagan, the polytheist, the theist, and the atheist, without the aid of Scriptural revelation, merely conceive of the existence and supremacy of Gods, which are the creation of their reason or fancy. The savage sees his deity in the sun, the moon, or the clouds of the firmament; and hears him in the whistling of the winds, the echo of the wild and solitary mountains, in the tumultuous thunders of the cataract, or in the deep and solemn roar of the ocean. But the man of expanded, highly cultivated, and powerful intellect--who knows how little can be accurately known by a being of merely finite perceptions and mental capacities, respecting an infinite and incomprehensible God--comes to the irresistible conclusion, enforced by the whole aspect of nature and its unspeakable sublimities, that there exists in the very essence of all things a SPIRIT of wisdom, intelligence, power, beneficence, and design, infinitely beyond human conception, or understanding, that created and superintends the mysterious destinies of the visible and invisible universe!

      The very power that formed man of the physical elements, that breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, that imparted such an [510] unerring co-aptation and organic structure to his frame, that indued his mind with moral intelligence, and mental capacities which seem unending in improvable progress, must have implanted an instinctive and rational presentiment of immortality in his very nature. Such a sentiment, connected with faith in the being and existence of a God, rationality points out as essential to the moral government of mankind. Intellectual man would degenerate into a barbarian, and forever continue a savage, were he not susceptible of the conscientious approbation or censure of a superior Being. Man is rendered joyful and happy by the approving smiles of his own conscience; but infinitely more so by what he believes with deep sincerity to be the approving smiles of HEAVEN on his conduct. On the contrary, remorse, "the worm that dieth not," for the commission of crimes and outrages, even where no testimonials of delinquency exist--a remorse which frequently destroys the health of the victim, and sends him to an early grave, of which innumerable instances can be produced, sufficiently attests man's accountability to a supreme, invisible, and secret witness of his guilt. In the moral and even political government of mankind, what would be merely human laws and punishments in the restrainment of vice and injustice? How many secret murders would be committed, of which no vestiges of proof would remain--and how many outrages against justice and humanity would be perpetrated, were it not for the deep and awful sentiment of accountability to God, and the apprehensions of the future inflictions of divine punishment? Do we not see that human laws become cobwebs where these sentiments of future accountability and punishment have become extinct in the human breast? What a dreadful spectacle of horror and sanguinary outrage did the French Revolution exhibit when the great nation degenerated into Atheism; affixed over the gates of their graveyards, the terrible inscription--"Death and Eternal Sleep"--and instituted revolutionary tribunals, to legalize by mere mockeries of justice, the perpetuation of the most atrocious, indiscriminate, and tumultuous murders! What earthly tribunal could sit in judgment here? What human hands adjust the scales of retributive justice, in scenes of such sanguinary outrages on humanity as these? The fact is, and it is worthy of the deepest consideration, admitting the immortality of man, and his accountability to a supreme Being, the very foundations of society would be broken up, and present nothing but a bottomless vortex of degeneracy and crime!

      But, apart from these important and weighty considerations, what would be the probable influences on the great mass of human beings, of universal infidelity respecting the immortality of man? By immortality I here mean the consciousness of identity and existence beyond [511] the grave and beyond the limited sphere of our present state of being. Except to the mere sensualist, he who despicably lives to luxuriate and revel in the debaucheries of the senses, the idea of entire disconnection with any future state of existence, must be unspeakably dreadful. In truth, under the appalling anticipation of utter oblivion, in the words of Shakespeare, "the worst penalty that age, poverty, pain, and imprisonment could lay on life, would be a paradise to what we would fear of death." Take from man the moral sublimity of a belief in his future existence, and the visible beauties and splendors of creation would darken around him; even "night, in the zenith of her dark domain, would be sunshine" to the gloom and despair involved in anticipations of so dreadful and horrid a destiny. With what sentiments would such a being look on his parents, his offspring, his relatives, his friends, and on society? With the certain prospect of oblivion before him, what to such a man would be all the warm affections and tender sensibilities of existence? Would he not vegetate in frozen and incurable apathy, or become a monster of outrage and iniquity? Would he not say to himself, "What to me, the ephemeral being of an hour, are the affections of parentage and offspring; what interest have I in the social sympathies of humanity--or in the performance of duties attached to the moral regulation, or political government of mankind? I can reap no benefit from sacrifices to duty, patriotism, or virtue; they are empty names--words without meaning. I have no prospect of a future life, in which virtue will be regarded and vice punished. The murderer of millions, for the achievement of conquest--and the patriot who rescues hundreds of millions from the sword of the assassin, will meet the same fate! Before the setting of tomorrow's sun I will probably be no more. I will suffer nothing--lose nothing by the total extinction of life. The character I may leave behind me, good, bad, or indifferent, will have no influence on an unconscious and dreamless sleep of eternity; and as to the effect of my posthumous reputation on my offspring, it can be of little moment to beings of an hour, who will soon follow me to darkness and oblivion. I will live for myself alone; doomed in a short time to close my eyes in entire forgetfulness, I will make the most of life and its enjoyments. All the penalties of human law shall not restrain or curtail these enjoyments--they can but reduce me to nothing. The lapse of time will soon bring my life to a close, and it matters not whether a little sooner or later; the event will be the same. My life has no adequate end or aim; these intellectual powers, the boast and pride of my race, with the horrid prospect before my mind, serve but to embitter the short remnant of my existence. The noble and ennobling ambition of benefiting mankind by the [512] magnanimity of my conduct, and of being remembered with admiration and gratitude by posterity, has become extinct in my bosom; the deepest and loudest echoes of renown will fall senseless on the dull, cold ear of death and oblivion!"

      This, sir, is no threadbare dream of fancy--no visionary picture of the horrid misgivings of infidelity. The delineation embraces no more than has been experienced by thousands--I will add by millions, who have run to self-abandonment and ruin, merely from their desponding hopes of immortality. Perhaps it may be said that I have overcharged this picture respecting the consequences of scepticism and infidelity to society and mankind. Christians may possibly question my correctness of deducting results; they can never experience the horrors of scepticism; they are secure in a faith, and consciousness of immortality, from Divine Revelation, which bids defiance to the sophistries of scepticism and infidelity; but I am confident that both the Sceptic and Infidel will acknowledge the dreadful infidelity of the portrait, and reflect deeply on the truth and correctness of its sombre shades.

      To act up to my professions of candor, which few have dared to do while living, while many have left behind them, in their writings, testimonials of opinions injurious to society, as well as proofs of their moral cowardice, I am compelled to admit that I know both from experience and observation, much of the truth and correctness of the foregoing delineations. There is a sameness of identity in the operations of the human intellect, and the generation of human opinions, hopes, and fears on the great subject of life, death, and immortality, which leads me to presume that all men of common rationality feel a deep and vital interest in forming correct estimates respecting them; and it was measurably with the intention of engaging both your mind and pen on investigations deeply interesting to mankind, and vital to the happiness of thousands, that I have called your attention to these subjects. The being and governing providence of a God, and the immortality of the human soul, constitute, in my estimation, the very basis of the Christian religion. It would probably be in vain were you to adduce miracles in support of the doctrines of a God and immortality; however well and sufficiently attested they might be in the minds of Christians, they would have little weight with men who acknowledge no revelation but that which is visible in the constitution, aspect, and operations of nature. These men and their opinions are to be confounded and overcome on the grounds they themselves assume; and the ridiculousness and fallacy of their dogmas demonstrated by the palpable absurdity of their results. Could you effectuate these great objects--objects I have but inefficiently [513] attempted to achieve in the above communication, you will entitle yourself to the gratitude of a most unfortunate portion of mankind, who would not fail to acknowledge the greatness of the obligation. No rational being can possibly be so obstinate in error as to volunteer his own damnation, and the sacrifice of his own present and future happiness; and I am convinced that very many who now profess both scepticism and infidelity, would most willingly abandon their errors--errors, sir, which have mainly sprung from the abuses of vital religion; which, if I comprehend any thing of the tenor of your life, you are endeavoring to correct.

Sources:

1. Charles Cassedy. "Atheism." The Millennial Harbinger 7 (November 1836): 498-504.

2. ----------. "Atheism" (Continued). The Millennial Harbinger 7 (December 1836): 529-535.

[MHA2 501-514]