time, imagination will represent the bodies to which these colours appear attached to all alike. This prompt and summary judgment once attained, will be of use to you during your life; for if to estimate the distances, magnitudes, and situations of all that surrounds you, it were necessary to examine the visual angles and rays, you would be dead before you had ascertained whether the things of which you have need were ten paces from you or a hundred thousand leagues, and whether they were of the size of a worm or of a mountain. It would be better to be born blind.

We are then, perhaps, very wrong, when we say that our senses deceive us. Every one of our senses per-' forms the function to which it was destined by nature. They mutually aid one another to convey to our minds, through the medium of experience, the measure of knowledge that our being allows. We ask from our senses what they are not made to give us. We would have our eyes acquaint us with solidity, dimension, distance, &c. but it is necessary for the touch to agree for that purpose with the sight, and that experience should second both. If father Mallebranche had looked at this side of nature, he would perhaps have attributed fewer errors to our senses, which are the only sources of all our ideas.

We should not, however, extend this species of metaphysics to every case before us. We should only call it to our aid when the mathematics are insufficient.*

DIVINITY OF JESUS.

THE Socinians, who are regarded as blasphemers, do not recognise the divinity of Jesus Christ. They dare to pretend, with the philosophers of antiquity, with the Jews, the Mahometans, and most other nations, that the idea of a god-man is monstrous; that the distance from God to man is infinite; and that it

We retain this argument, because popularly illustrative, although scarcely necessary at present, except probably to prevent credulity now and then, in respect to the supernatural preten sions of some future Misses M'Avoy.-T.

is impossible for a perishable body to be infinite, immense, or eternal.

They have the confidence to quote Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, in their favour, who, in his Ecclesiastical History, book i. chap. 9, declares that it is absurd to imagine the uncreated and unchangeable nature of Almighty God taking the form of a man. They cite the fathers of the church, Justin and Tertullian, who have said the same thing: Justin, in his Dialogue with Triphonius, and Tertullian, in his Discourse against Praxeas.

They quote St. Paul, who never calls Jesus Christ God, and who calls him man very often. They carry their audacity so far as to affirm, that the christians passed three entire ages in forming by degrees the apotheosis of Jesus; and that they only raised this astonishing edifice by the example of the pagans, who had deified mortals. At first, according to them, Jesus was only regarded as a man inspired by God, and then as a creature more perfect than others. They gave him some time after a place above the angels, as St. Paul tells us. Every day added to his greatness. He in time became an emanation, proceeding from God. This was not enough; he was even born before time. At last he was made God consubstantial with God. Crellius, Voquelsius, Natalis Alexander, and Hornbeck, have supported all these blasphemies by arguments, which astonish the wise and mislead the weak. Above all, Faustus Socinus spread the seeds of this doctrine in Europe; and at the end of the sixteenth century, a new species of christianity was established.* There were already more than three hundred.

DIVORCE.

IN the article DIVORCE, in the Encyclopædia, it is said that the custom of divorce having been brought into Gaul by the Romans, it was therefore that

* Not in common law, says a great legal character; but what says common sense?-T,

Bissine, or Bazine, quitted the king of Thuringia, her husband, in order to follow Childeric, who married her. Why not say, that because the Trojans established the custom of divorce in Sparta, Helen repudiated Menelaus according to law, to run away with Paris into Phrygia?

The agreeable fable of Paris, and the ridiculous one of Childeric, who never was king of France, and who it is pretended carried off Bazine, the wife of Bazin, have nothing to do with the law of divorce.

They all quote Cheribert, ruler of the little town of Luctetia, near Issy-Lutetia Parisiorum-who repudiated his wife. The abbé Velli, in his History of France, says, that this Cheribert, or Caribert, divorced his wife Ingoberg to espouse Mirefleur, the daughter of an artisan; and afterwards Theudegild, the daughter of a shepherd, who was raised to the first throne of the French empire.

There was at that time neither first nor second throne among these barbarians, whom the Roman empire never recognised as kings. There was no French empire.

The empire of the French only commenced with Charlemagne. It is very doubtful whether the word mirefleur was in use either in the Welch or Gallic languages, which were a patois of the Celtic jargon. This patois had no expressions so soft.

It is also said that the ruler or governor Chilperic, lord of the province of Soissonnais, whom they call king of France, divorced his queen Andovere or Andove; and here follows the reason of this divorce.

This Andovere, after having given three male children to the lord of Soissons, brought forth a daughter. The Franks having been in some manner christians since the time of Clovis, Andovere, after her recovery, presented her daughter to be baptised. Chilperic of Soissons, who was apparently very tired of her, declared that it was an unpardonable crime in her to be the godmother of her infant, and that she could no longer be his wife by the laws of the church. He therefore married Fredegond, whom he subsequently

put away also, and espoused a Visigoth. To conclude, this scrupulous husband ended by taking Fredegonde back again.

There was nothing legal in all this, and it ought no more to be quoted than anything which passed in Ireland or the Orcades.

The Justinian code, which we have adopted in several points, authorises divorce; but the canonical law, which the catholics have placed before it, does not permit it.

The author of the article says that divorce is practiced in the states of Germany, of the Confession of Augsbourg.

He might have added, that this custom is established in all the countries of the north, among the reformed of all professions, and among all the followers of the Greek church.

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks more ancient; that is to say, men quarrelled with their wives at the end of five days, beat them at the end of a month, and separated from them after six weeks' cohabitation.

Justinian, who collected all the laws made before him, to which he added his own, not only confirms that of divorce, but he extends it still further; so that every woman, whose husband is not a slave, but simply a prisoner of war during five years, may, after the five years have expired, contract another marriage.

Justinian was a christian, and even a theologian; how is it then that the church derogates from his laws? It was when the church became the sovereign and the legislator. The popes had not much trouble to substitute their decretals instead of the civil code in the west, which was plunged in ignorance and barbarism. They took, indeed, so much advantage of the prevailing ignorance, that Honorius III. Gregory IX. and Innocent III. by their bulls, forbade the civil law to be taught. It may be said of this audacity, that it is not credible, but true.

As the church alone took cognizance of marriages, so

it alone judged of divorce. No prince effected a divorce and married a second wife, without previously obtain→ ing the consent of the pope. Henry VIII. king of England, did not marry without his consent, until after having a long time solicited his divorce in the court of Rome in vain.

This custom, established in ignorant times, is perpetuated in enlightened ones only because it exists. All abuse eternises itself; it is an Augean stable, and requires an Hercules to cleanse it.

Henry IV. could not be the father of a king of France without the permission of the pope; which must have been given, as has already been remarked, not by pronouncing a divorce, but a lie; that is to say, by pretending that there had not been previous marriage* with Margaret de Valois.+

DOG.

It seems as if nature had given the dog to man for his defence and pleasure; it is of all animals the most faithful; it is the best possible friend of man.

It appears that there are several species absolutely different. How can we believe that a greyhound comes originally from a spaniel? it has neither its hair, legs, shape, ears, voice, scent, nor instinct. A man

who had never seen any dogs but barbets or spaniels, and who saw a greyhound for the first time, would take it rather for a dwarf horse than for an animal of the spaniel race. It is very likely that each race was always what it now is, with the exception of the mixture of a small number of them.

It is astonishing that, in the Jewish law, the dog was considered unclean as well as the griffin, the hare, the pig, and the eel; there must have been some moral or physical reason for it, which we have not yet discovered.

See ADULTERY.

+ Napoleon managed his divorce from Josephine with infinitely more dignity.-T.

We apprehend that the dogs themselves decide the point the other way.-T.