"Sir--Your long expected performance has at length made its appearance. If the work tended to promote the happiness of society, to animate our hopes, to subdue our passions, to instruct man in the happy science of purifying the polluted recesses of a vitiated heart, to confirm him in his exalted notion of the dignity of his nature, and thereby to inspire him with sentiments averse to whatever may debase the excellence of his origin, the public would be indebted to you; your name would be recorded amongst the assertors of morality and religion; and I myself, though brought up in a different persuasion from yours, would be the first to offer my incense at the shrine of merit. But the tendency of your performance is to deny the divinity of Christ and the immortality of the soul. In denying the first, you sap the foundations of religion; you cut off at one blow the merit of our faith, the comfort of our hope, and the motives of our charity. In denying the immortality of the soul, you degrade human nature, and confound man with the vile and perishable insect. In denying both, you overturn the whole system of religion, whether natural or revealed; and in denying religion, you deprive the poor of the only comfort which supports them under their distresses and afflictions; you wrest from the hands of the powerful and rich the only bridle to their injustices and passions, and pluck from the hearts of the guilty the greatest check to their crimes--I mean this remorse of conscience which can never be the result of a handful of organized matter; this interior monitor, which makes us blush in the morning at the disorders of the foregoing night; which erects in the breast of the tyrant a tribunal superior to his power; and whose importunate voice upbraids a Cain in the wilderness with the murder of his brother, and a Nero in his palace with that of his mother."
Deploring the folly of him who thinks "his soul is no more than a subtile vapor, which in death is to be breathed out in the air," he holds that such a person should "conceal his horrid belief with more secrecy than the Druids concealed their mysteries. * * In doing otherwise, the infidel only brings disgrace on himself; for the notion of religion is so deeply impressed on our minds, that the bold champions who would fain destroy it, are considered by the generality of mankind as public pests, spreading disorder and mortality wherever they appear; and in our feelings we discover the delusions of cheating philosophy, which can never introduce a religion more pure than that of the Christian, nor confer a more glorious privilege on man than that of an immortal soul."