subjects capable of demonstration, many indeed which the
ingenuity of one man can go farther to illustrate than that of another.
The force of high authority is greater in the three former sciences
than in the latter. Theism and Atheism I hold to be neither of them
strictly demonstrable. You, Dr. Priestley, agree with me in that. Still
I hold the question capable of being illustrated by argument, and I
should hold the authority of great men's names to be of more weight in
this subject, were I not necessarily forced to consider that all
education is strongly calculated to support the idea of a Deity; by
this education prejudice is introduced, and prejudice is nothing else
than a corruption of the understanding. Certain principles, call them,
if you please, data, must be agreed upon before any reasoning can take
place. Disputants must at least agree in the ideas which they annex to
the language they use. But when prejudice has made a stand,
argumentation is set at so wide a distance, through a want of fixt data
to proceed upon, that attention is in vain applied to the dispute.
Besides, the nature of the subject upon which this prejudice takes
place, is such, that the finest genius is nearly equally liable to an
undue bias with the most vulgar. To question with boldness and
indifference, whether an individual, all-forming, all-seeing and
all-governing Being exists, to whom, if he exists, we may possibly be
responsible for our actions, whose intelligence and power must be
infinitely superior to our own, requires a great conquest of former
habitude, a firmness of nerves, as well as of understanding; it will
therefore be no great wonder, if such men as Locke and Newton can be
named among the believers in a Deity. They were christians as well as
theists, so that their authority goes as far in one respect as in the
other. But if the opinions of men of great genius are to have weight,
what is to be said of modern men of genius? You, Sir, are of opinion
that the world is getting wiser as well as better. There is all the
reason in the world it should get wiser at least, since wisdom is only
a collection of experience, and there must be more experience as the
world is older. Modern Philosophers are nearly all atheists. I take the
term atheist here in the popular sense. Hume, Helvetius, Diderot,
D'Alembert. Can they not weigh against Locke and Newton, and even more
than Locke and Newton, since their store of knowledge and learning was