a preceptor of virtue, and the refuge of hope, religion
would be thus made an engine of publick oppression and
private fraud.
Atheism forbids men to look into the book of nature for God, and asserts its fluctuating fables to be better evidence of his existence, than his own permanent creation. And it forces men to see God, not in the sun's light, but in some dark tenet, adapted to a temporary market.
It is to this hour unknown, whether established or legal religions have ever carried a single soul into heaven; but there is no doubt of their having carried millions out of this world. Yet it is under pretence of making men extremely happy, after they are dead, that these religions make them extremely miserable, whilst they are alive; and the compensation for the promised happiness, is always estimated upon the supposition of its being as certain, as the suffered misery. Can honesty or virtue have contrived a lottery, from which men draw oppression in this world, and blanks in the next; or can impiety exceed the presumption of selling or bestowing heaven? The polytheism of tenets, or a political patronage of the whole tribe of fanatical follies, en- tangles men more inextricably in this lottery, than the establishment of a single religion; one may be true; many, contrary to each other, must all be false except one. To be oppressed by the whole tribe, to pay the whole tribe, and to strengthen a government against a nation, by recruiting its power with the patronage of the whole tribe, merely to take the chance of being jostled into that, which really bestows what they all promise, is the speculation proposed by a polytheism of tenets.
Warburton is the only bishop who has disclosed a religious candour, equal to Mr. Adams's political honesty. In the first volume of his Divine Legation, he defines an estab lished religion to be "a league between a civil and religious society for mutual defence and support; to secure the obedience of the people to the government, in which it is so efficacions as to gain reverence and respects for
