them nourish it with the care which I have watched over it for nine years past, and I predict their recompençe will not only be immense in the economy of blood and treasure, but as lasting as this continent, which it will make our own.

DEFENCE OF NEW-YORK.

THE fortifications within the harbour mount at present 106 guns, and when completed will contain 304 guns and ten mortars, besides travelling pieces. The works at the Narrows are ready, or nearly so, to receive 119 guns; and when the plan is completed will present 400-200 on each side of the Narrows.

At Boston-In addition to the guns already on the batteries, 100 of the largest calibre will soon be mounted on stationary carriages, and 30 heavy and 20 light guns on travelling carriages.

MISCELLANEOUS.

I never knew but one person who interfered between man and wife either with safety or success. Upon a domestic pro and con once between the parties, that was rising even to blows, a friend of mine, who happened to be by, hit the husband a stroke with his right hand, crying, "Be quiet, you brute;" and struck the woman at the same time with his left, saying, "Hold your tongue, you vixen." Then repeating his moral admonitions and friendly buffets, with a "Peace, you monsterHave done, you termagant-Hands off, you coward-Retire, you virago"-a fit of shame and laughing seised them both at the same time, at such extraordinary and impartial an umpirism; they shook hands immediately, and became good friends for the rest of their lives. STERNE.

I take the errors and absurdities of the Roman catholic tenets and doctrines to have arisen merely from this that as soon as the Christian religion came to make its way in the world, to be established in governments, and endowed with lands, benefices, jurisdictions, and other temporal emoluments, certain deists, or moral heathen, began to attack the church, as a mere political institution, framed to overturn states and kingdoms-urging, that there appeared to have been no sort of necessity for a revelation, which had advanced nothing new, or unknown to mankind before, from the pure light of nature and philosophy.

Upon which the councils of priests, in those days, alarmed for their temporal estates, power, and dominion, began to convene themselves together, in the devil's name, and put every text of scripture on the rack, to confess articles of faith and practice, of such extraordinary natures as the light of reason could never have dictated, and which were directly contrary to whatever its logic could ever have submitted to—such as infallibility, transubstantiation, supererogation, absolution, indulgence, dissolving of allegiance, temporal jurisdiction, inquisition, corporal penances, and propagating the gospel of peace and mercy by the arguments of fire and sword. The infidels were nonsuited upon this.

Ib.

There was a book lately published, styled, "Of the future lives of brutes," which gave great offence to your divines. I cannot see why. The only fault I found with it was, that it was but poorly written.

Is there only sush a proportion of salvation in the gift of Providence, that parsons need be jealous of the participation? To suppose the inferior animals of the creation to be endowed with souls, must presuppose our own to be out of all dispute.

There is certainly a remarkable difference in the morals of all the domestic animals, even of the same species. The beasts of the desart we will suppose to be uniformly vicious. We will suppose also, that these are to be the devils of brutes in the fourfooted Tartarus.

Ib.

THEOPHILANTHROPIST,

No. 4... April, 1810.

"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
"But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.-POPE.

SIR,

LETTER III.

ON NATURAL EVILS.

BY SOAME JENYNS.

[Continued from page 87.]

I SHALL now lay before you my free sentiments concerning the origin of natural evils, by which I understand the sufferings of sensitive beings only; for tempests, inundations and earthquakes, with all the disorders of the material world, are no farther evils than they affect the sensitive; so that under this head can be only comprehended pains of body, and inquietudes of mind. That these are real evils, I readily acknowledge; and if any one is philosopher enough to doubt it, I shall only beg leave to refer him to a severe fit of sickness, or a tedious lawsuit, for farther satisfaction.

The production of happiness seems to be the only motive that could induce infinite goodness to exert infinite power to create all things; for, to say truth, happiness is the only thing of real value in existence; neither riches, nor power, nor wisdom, nor learning, nor strength, nor beauty, nor virtue, nor religion,

nor even life itself, being of any importance but as they contribute to its production. All these are in themselves neither good nor evil; happiness alone is their great end, and they desirable only as they tend to promote it. Most astonishing therefore, it must appear to every one who looks round him, to observe all creatures blessed with life and sensation, that is, all creatures made capable of happiness, at the same time by their own natures condemned to immumerable and unavoidable miseries. Whence can it proceed, that Providence should thus seem to counteract his own benevolent intentions? To what strange and invisible cause are all these numerous and invinsible evils indebted for their existence? If God is a good and benevolent being, what end could he propose from creation, but the propagation of happiness? And if happiness is the end of all existence, why are not all creatures that do exist happy?

The true solution of this important question, so long and so vainly searched for by the philosophers of all ages and all countries, I take to be at last no more than this, that these real evils proceed from the same source as those imaginary ones of imperfection before treated of, namely, from that subordination, without which no created system can subsist; all subordination implying imperfection, all imperfection evil, and all evil some kind of inconvenience or suffering; so that there must be particular inconveniences and sufferings annexed to every particular rank of created beings by the circumstances of things, and their modes of existence. Most of those to which we ourselves are liable may be easily shown to be of this kind, the effects only of human nature, and the station man occupies in the universe: and therefore their origin is plainly deducible from necessity; that · is, they could not have been prevented without the loss of greater good, or the admission of greater evils than themselves; or by not creating any such creatures as men at all. And though this, upon a general view of things, does not so forcibly strike us; yet, on a more minute inspection into every grievance attendant on human nature, it will most evidently appear. Most of these, I

think, may be comprehended under the following heads: poverty, labour, inquietudes of mind, pains of body, and death; from none of which, we may venture to affirm, man could ever have been exempted, so long as he continued to be man. God indeed might have made us quite other creatures, and placed us in a world quite otherwise constituted; but then we had been no longer men; and whatever beings had occupied our stations in the universal system, they must have been liable to the same inconveniences.

Poverty, for example, is what all could not possibly have been exempted from, not only by reason of the fluctuating nature of human possessions, but because the world could not subsist without it; for had all been rich, none would have submitted to the commands of another, or the drudgeries of life; thence all governments must have been dissolved, arts neglected, and lands uncultivated, and so an universal penury have overwhelmed all, instead of now and then pinching a few. Hence by the bye, appears the great excellence of charity, by which men are enabled by a particular distribution of the blessings and enjoyments of life, on proper occasions, to prevent that poverty which, by a general one, Omnipotence itself could never have prevented: so that, by enforcing this duty, God, as it were, demands our assistance to promote universal happiness, and to shut out misery at every door, where it strives to intrude itself.

Labour, indeed, God might easily have excused us from, since at his command the earth would readily have poured forth all her treasures without our inconsiderable assistance: but if the severest labour cannot sufficiently subdue the malignity of human nature, what plots and machinations, what wars, rapine, and devastation, what profligacy, and licentiousness, must have been the consequence of universal idleness! So that labour ought only to be looked upon as a task kindly imposed upon us by our indulgent creator, necessary to preserve our health, our safety, and our innocence.