ing pages be true, then their speedy and universal propagation and adoption must advance the interests of Christianity:-should they be false, the same Volume whence the arguments in their support are mainly drawn, will unquestionably furnish ample means of proving

them to be so.

CHAPTER I.

rise to,

and

Statement of the probable Causes which gave have continued to the present time, the commonlyreceived Opinion of Human Nature.

MAN, according to the metaphysicians, is a being composed of a material body, furnished with various organs, and fitted for innumerable functions, but subject, sooner or later, to inevitable dissolution; which body is directed by an immaterial soul, that shall survive it, and which is in its essence eternal.

As this notion of two natures in man is not only of very high antiquity, but has been, and is, almost universal, it may seem strange at a first view, that if it be a wrong one, it should so long have retained its hold; but when we consider how small a portion of mankind thinks at all, and of that small portion how very few will undergo the labour of minute and rigid investigation, and even of those few who are willing to submit to that labour, how rare it is for one to be found who can, in addition, divest himself of prejudices implanted in his mind with

the first dawnings of reason, and ever since reverenced as holy truths, which it would be impiety to question, it is not, perhaps, a very unreasonable conclusion to come to, that moral science, as well as physical, may have had its ages of darkness, and may be as deficient of the only true mode of reasoning-namely, from facts instead of assumptions as physical science was before the time of Bacon.

This much, however, is certain, that the metaphysicians, from Plato down to the present day, have gone on each successively demolishing, very satisfactorily and completely, the works of his predecessor, and erecting his own airy fabric on the ruins, to be itself succeeded by a structure equally unstable. Now is it not a fair deduction, from the constant mutability to which the supposed science of metaphysics is liable, that the whole is a delusion, founded on the assumption of certain data which have no real existence? Surely, had their theories been founded on truth, such men as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Reid, and the like, must have established some incontrovertible positions; must have ascertained some undeniable truths; and have discovered some unchangeable principles, in which all men could not fail to agree, and concerning which there could be no dispute.

In order that a clearer insight into the subject may be had, it will be necessary to take a brief

view of the causes which probably led to the, so far as we know, universal adoption, by the ancient Heathens, of the opinions, which, under various modifications, they held as to the existence and immortality of a human principle distinct from the body; then to shew how those opinions in all likelihood crept in amongst the Jews; and, lastly, to point out the circumstances which occasioned their being received as established facts by the Christian world of modern times.

It is not, perhaps, an improbable conjecture to suppose, that, when the first death had afforded a practical illustration of the effects produced on man by the reception into his system of that deadly poison, the forbidden fruit, however Adam, and the small portion of his antediluvian posterity who continued to worship God as well as their fallen nature would permit, might wait for his promise of the restoration of immortality to mankind, through the instrumentality of the Seed of the Woman,-yet that the descendants of Cain, aware of their original undying nature, but seeing on all sides of them proofs of inevitable mortality, might, with that fond clinging to conscious existence inseparable from animal life, have flattered themselves into the pleasing delusion, that though the organs through which they had received their ideas did crumble into dust, yet that the ideas themselves might

survive and continue to exist in some indefinable state (which was afterwards called the soul :) in fact, to use the beautiful language of the Preacher, (Eccl. vii. 29), "that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions." At all events, if such a notion did not prevail before the Flood, it became very general soon after that event; for the divine honours paid to Ninus, after his death, necessarily suppose a conscious portion of him surviving. The belief also of the Egyptians, that the soul would exist so long as the body could be preserved, (whence their embalming, and dry cemeteries for the general population, and their indestructible pyramids to hold the bodies of their kings)-the metempsychosis of India, the Hades of the Greeks and other Western nations, and, in short, all the ancient Pagan theories of the double nature of man-can be traced to so very high an antiquity, that if not antediluvian, they became the tenets of the whole Gentile world very shortly after the Deluge.

But these tenets, though so universal throughout the Gentile world, were still EXCLUSIVELY Gentile, until after the destruction of the Temple and the captivity of Judah in Babylon and Persia.

The writings of Moses, unless very fanciful interpretations be put on various parts of the simplest narrative ever penned by the hand of