quent there, repressed the rash conception. Then the natural association of my ideas led me immediately to the rashness and presumption of deists, or natural religion men; who think to find God, by the unassisted eye of human reason.

In passing through thick jungles, full of thorns and briars, poisons, and wild fruits, blended together; abounding with game, and also with beasts of prey, and venemous serpents, scorpions, &c. I beheld in them a lively picture of the world and all its vanities and snares. In the thorns, I saw those over-anxious cares for the good things of this life, which render men selfish and ready to tear one another to pieces, and to snatch something from every one who comes within their reach. In those whose thorns curved inwards, and therefore admitted an ingress, but caught fast hold of those who attempted to retreat, I saw the dangerous nature of worldly pursuits, and worldly society; which freely admitted all comers, and only caused their hooks to be felt, when the palled appetite perceived their bitterness, as well as vanity, and experience warned us to retire. Others, whose blossoms emitted an aromatic, enlivening, or sweet fragrance, and whose straight thorns pointed outwards, appeared to be emblematic of more specious, honourable, and intellectual objects,

which cannot be attained without pain and difficulty, but which, nevertheless, bear no vital fruits: such are the mere human sciences.

The narrowness, curvedness, and multiplicity of the paths made through these woods, by the foot of curiosity, or uncertainty, or caprice, or imaginary brevity, pointed out the various opinions of men, in their search after happiness, through the great wilderness of human life.

The extremely narrow limits of the prospect, bounded on all sides by the surrounding thorns, showed me the equal shortsightedness of those who are the mere men of this world, and have no object in their mind's eye, beyond the vain and selfish cares of this life.

The game, so plentiful and various in the depths of the wilderness, and so alluring to young sportsmen, pointed out the painted pleasures of the world, which are so tempting to youth, and seduce them without reflection so far into the entanglements of the labyrinth, that they are sometimes lost for ever in mazes of error, or in deep pits; or seized, while intent on their sport, by the royal tiger, the king of the wilderness of this world; or perhaps poisoned by the specious, high coloured, but fatal fruits of infidelity and false doctrine, which abound therein...

When, on the other hand, I emerged from

these jungles, and entered into an extensive plain, where the distant horizon was terminated only by the bending skies, I found my own mind expanding in the same manner; and the very reflections which were introduced by the objects before me, showed plainly, in the course of a little comparison and arrangement, what they were ordained to typify, or figure forth.

Thus, when men tired of the vain pursuits, cares, and pleasures of the world, retire for a while into the wide plains of meditation and speculative comparison, their intellectual sphere of vision becomes proportionately enlarged, and is terminated only by the distant view of another world. As they recede farther and farther in thought, from this world, its vanities, which, when they were close at hand, appeared so important and filled their mind's eye, vanish successively into dark, confused, and uninteresting points, which appear all nearly alike, which by their quick recession display their very trifling extent, until the whole mass shortly appears as one indistinct, uninteresting blot of blackness. By a comparison of this with the remote objects, upon the verge of the horizon, and of human existence, which gradually enlarge and open to our view, we discover their relative magnitudes and importance, and learn to make a true estimate of all worldly objects.

Hence I perceived that mankind, particularly such of them as lived altogether to, and in the world, calculated the value of all objects, not by their real, but by their apparent bulk, as seen from the centre of the picture of human life, through the medium of the eye of selflove; that is to say, by their nearness to, or remoteness from, the centre of their own hearts' interest, or pleasure; that is to say, the interest or pleasure of their own hearts. Thus, to a man in a jungle, the bramble bush that fills his eye, is an object of much greater apparent magnitude than the sun, from the rays of whose piercing heat and light he takes shelter under his bush. Thus also, to a man plunged in selfish cares, the pitiful object close to him, which occupies his whole thoughts, or mental eye, is of more importance than the eye of heaven, from the piercing rays of whose convictions in his conscience, he takes a temporary refuge in his worldly business. Hence I saw, that in abstract speculation, mankind made use of the immutable laws of geometry, or right reason ; but that in practice they were necessarily directed by the specious but deceitful rules of a perspective arbitrary, and continually changing with the situation of the spectators, who made their own eye the centre of the picture; that is to say, made the magical delusions of inordinate self-love, the standard of good and evil, of true and false, of great and small, of near

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and remote; and which delusions the flatteries of the old serpent, acting upon their carnal minds and hearts, made them unable to discover, or even to suspect.

This again pointed out in the clearest manner, the insufficiency of the human eye, or human carnal reason, to guide us safely through life, and to salvation; for though we perhaps may sometimes reason rightly, when we reason abstractedly or geometrically, yet the moment we come to act, the opposite scale of our neighbour's good, which ought to balance our own, is imperceptibly dropped and lost sight of in the mists of the heart, raised by the heat of passion*, from a subtilized imagination.

From these reflections of natural things into the mirror of the eye of my mind, I saw plainly, that the heart and imagination were artists of superior genius, consummate landscape painters, whose colours were most vivid and glowing, whose lights and shades were so disposed as to give an effect much beyond the common course

Though the figure is somewhat changed here, yet the moral deduction is precisely the same, as that of actual distance; for actual distance from the eye, means moral distance from carnal reason, or self-love; which by diminishing the angle under which the object is seen, does apparently diminish its magnitude or value; for moral magnitude is value or importance. Hence, it is demonstrated, that every thought, word, and deed of the natural man, in moral life, is false.