How happily have you removed that dire impedient to rational faith, the doctrine of original sin, which the revived Calvinistic school, of which Mr Wilberforce is the head, so injudiciously presses upon the attention of the public. Its mystical tenets are read and extolled (in preference to those of the authors who represent Christianity as a system of consistent justice, mercy, benevolence, and happiness) from the same disposition, which makes children delight more in perceiving objects of terror presented to their imagination, than those of beauty and pleasure; but no mischievous or obstinate child is rendered gentle or docile by the dread of spectres; neither have the fanatic tenets any tendency to reclaim from vice or irreligious thoughtlessness. The licentious, or giddy votaries of fashion, wish to have an excuse for persisting in their career, and think they have found it in the dark and cruel difficulties in which resumed Calvinism involves Christianity. They say to themselves, "We cannot, in the high-day of our youth and passions, feel all this prescribed misery, which, we are told, is essential to appease our Maker for having created us full of cursedness and sin; we cannot sacrifice all our amusements, even those which are generally allowed to be innocent; and since less sacrifices are fruitless; since the Rock of Salvation is too steep and rug ged for our strength, we may as well strew all the sensual flowers over the paths which lead to our destruction; if, indeed, the Deity is this hard taskmaster, and if he created so large a part of mankind vessels of wrath; if all are obnoxious to punishment ere yet they know the nature of crime." Such is the certain mischief of Mr W.'s doctrine, and that of his coadjutors. They transfer the hairy mantle, the tedious pilgrimage, and the voluntary scourge, and all the dark train of monkish self-inflictions, from the body to the mind. If voluntary wretchedness for less than atrocious sin, for the curse of our nature, not self-incurred, be indeed a duty, what, alas! must be the nature of that Power who enjoins it? O that your volume, in which righteousness shines as a sun, in the pure beams of justice, of mercy, and of earthly happiness, may so gild the gentler ascent from the gulfs of impiety, that its hapless votaries may not despair of attaining the pure summit! LETTER XLIII. MRS STOKES. High Lake, Aug. 23, 1799. I CAME hither on the 22d of last month, and shall make it six weeks ere I quit this lawny and cheerful shore, and its peopled seas, covered with the sails of commerce. Visits, on my return home, to Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby, in their beauteous vale, and to Mr and Mrs Roberts, on their grandly scenic mountain, will probably make it at least the middle of September ere I sit down quiet in my own pleasant and embowered mansion at Lichfield. Our society here is not disagreeable. It consists of several cheerful and well-bred, and some apparently amiable people. For the sympathy of attachment; for kindred spirits to my own; for much that is intellectual, I look not. If they present themselves amongst the stranger tribes of a public place, my heart and my imagination instantly feel their magnetism, and gladly welcome them. Miss Charlotte Lister, of our city, accompanied me hither, entrusted by her mother to my chaperonship. She is a pretty blooming Hebe of nineteen, modest and very sweet temper-. ed-smiles with complacency, and dances admirably. What a rapid reverse in the tide of military conquest on the continent! The poignant joy inspired by events, of which there was so little rational expectation, in the minds of those who judged of the future by the past, must be extreme in the breast of all who love their country, and the common interests of Europe; but, alas! I perceive, from the papers, that it has rekindled the mania of coercing France into monarchy; of planting the standards of the allied powers in the centre of Paris; and it is deemed Jacobinism to doubt the possibility or wisdom of the attempt. If the status quo ante bellum is not to be the resting-mark of the sword, the war must prove, not a war of restoration, but of extermination; and the woes of Europe will be, to the present generation at least, interminable. Curious are the articles of impeachment which the French are bringing forward against their late rulers. Deeply humiliating is it to all the partizans of the baneful democratic system here, and in every other country, to see the tyranny and injustice, which it has produced, confessed at full by the nation with whom it originated. It must appal the unfortunate Bonaparte, when, in additional affliction to the blast of his hopes in Egypt, he sees the plan of that expedition, which, if not his, had his eager support and eager adoption, considered as treason to his country; to know that French philippics are thundered out against the baseness and impolicy of invading the neutral state of Switzerland, and of forcing the Ottoman empire to an alliance with the foes of France! Such denunciations reduce his destiny to that of perishing on the banks of the Nile; or, if he can return to his native conntry, there, probably, to bleed, by the mandate of a directory, on the borders of the Seine; or, at best, "to gnaw his heart in the obscurity of exile." Thus wither his luxuriant laurels; thus perish the boundless hopes of giant ambition, which, in him, there is every probability, as in the great Charles of Sweden, "Will leave a name, at which the world grew pale, Adieu, |