an oak for the purpose of crossing a river, did not build galleys; nor did they who piled up unhewn stones, and laid pieces of wood across them, dream of the pyramids. Every thing is done by degrees, and the glory belongs to no one. of gold and silver, or the Gauls, who had fought for ten years against Cæsar. and Spain, tells us, that in his time the houses were built of a sort of mortar, covered with thatch or oak shingles, and that the people did not make use of tiles. What was the time of Vitruvius? It was that of Augustus. The arts had scarcely All was done in the dark, until philo-yet reached the Spaniards, who had mines sophers, aided by geometry, taught men to proceed with accuracy and safety. It was left for Pythagoras, on his return from his travels, to show workmen the way to make an exact square. He took three rules, one two, one three, one four, and one five feet long, and with these he made a rightangled triangle. Moreover, it was found that the side 5 furnished a square just equal to the two squares produced by the sides 4 and 3; a method of importance in all regular works. This is the famous theorem which he had brought from India, and which, we have elsewhere said, was known in China long before, according to the relation of the Emperor Cam-hi. Long before Plato, the Greeks made use of a single geometrical figure to double the square. Archytas and Erastothenes invented a method of doubling the cube, which was impracticable by ordinary geometry, and which would have done honour to Archimedes. This Archimedes found the method of calculating exactly the quantity of alloy mixed with gold; for gold had been worked for ages before the fraud of the workers could be discovered. Knavery existed long before mathematics. The pyramids, built with the square, and corresponding exactly with the four cardinal points, sufficiently show that geometry was known in Egypt from time immemorial; and yet it is proved that Egypt is quite a new country. Without philosophy, we should be little above the animals, that dig or erect their habitations, prepare their food in them, take care of their little ones in their dwellings, and have besides the good fortune, which we have not, of being born ready clothed. Vitruvius, who had travelled in Gaul The same Vitruvius informs us, that in the opulent and ingenious town of Marseilles, which traded with so many nations, the roofs were only of a kind of clay mixed with straw. He says, that the Phrygians dug themselves habitations in the ground: they stuck poles round the hollow, brought them together at top, and laid earth over them. The Hurons and the Algonquins are better lodged. This gives us no very lofty idea of Troy, built by the gods, and the palace of Priam :- Apparet domas intùs, et atria fonga patescunt; A mighty breach is made; the rooms concealed To be sure, the people are not lodged like kings; huts are to be seen near the Vatican and near Versailles. Besides, industry rises and falls among nations by a thousand revolutions :— Et campos ubi Troja fuit. Now waves the sheaf where Troy once stood. We have our arts; the ancients had theirs. We could not make a galley with three benches of oars; but we can build ships with a hundred pieces of cannon. We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high, in a single piece; but our meridians are more exact. The byssus is unknown to us; but the stuffs of Lyons are more valuable. The Capitol was worthy of admiration; the church of St. Peter is larger and more beautiful. The Louvre is a master-piece when compared with the palace of Persepolis, the situation and ruins of which do but tell of a vast monument of barbaric wealth. Rameau's music is probably better than that of Timotheus; and there is not a picture presented at Paris in the Hall of Apollo (salon d'Apollon), which does not excel the paintings dug out of Hercula neum. APIS. looked forward to this resurrection of the body, why did they take out the brains before embalming them? Were the Egyptians to be resuscitated without brains? APOCALYPSE. SECTION I. JUSTIN the Martyr, who wrote about the year 270 of the Christian era, was the first who spoke of the Apocalypse; he at gelist. In his dialogue with Tryphon, that Jew asks him if he does not believe that Jerusalem is one day to be re-established? Justin answers, that he believes it, as all Christians do who think aright. "There was among us," says he, a certain person named John, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus; he foretold that the faithful shall pass a thousand years in Jerusalem." 66 Was the ox Apis worshipped at Memphis as a God? as a symbol? or as an ox? It is likely that the fanatics regarded him as a god, the wise as merely a symbol, and that the more stupid part of the peo-tributes it to the apostle John the Evanple worshipped the ox. Did Cambyses do right in killing this ox with his own hand? Why not? He showed to the imbecile that their God might be put on the spit without Nature's arming herself to revenge the sacrilege. The Egyptians have been much extolled. I have not heard of a more miserable people. There must always have been in their character, and in their government, some radical vice which has constantly made vile slaves of them. Let it be granted, that in times almost unknown they conquered the earth; but in historical times they have been subjugated by all who have chosen to take the trouble,-by the Assyrians, by the Greeks, by the Romans, by the Arabs, by the Mamelukes, by the Turks, by all, in short, but our crusaders, who were even more ill-advised than the Egyptians were cowardly. It was the Mameluke militia that beat the French under St. Louis. There are, perhaps, but two things tolerable in this nation; the first is, that those who worshipped an ox, never sought to compel those who adored an ape to change their religion; the second, that they have always hatched chickens in ovens. We are told of their pyramids; but they are monuments of an enslaved people. The whole nation must have been set to work on them, or those unsightly masses could never have been raised. } And for what use were they? To preserve in a small chamber the mummy of some prince, or governor, or intendant, which his soul was to re-animate at the end of a thousand years. But if they The belief in this reign of a thousand years was long prevalent among the Christians. This period was also in great credit among the Gentiles. The souls of the Egyptians returned to their bodies at the end of a thousand years; and, according to Virgil, the souls in purgatory were exercised for the same space of time ;— et mille per annos. The New Jerusalem of a thousand years was to have twelve gates, in memory of the twelve apostles; its form was to be square; its length, breadth, and height, were each to be a thousand stadii, i.e. five hundred leagues; so that the houses were to be five hundred leagues high. It would be rather disagreeable to live in the upper story; but we find all this in the 21st chapter of the Apocalypse. If Justin was the first who attributed the Apocalypse to St. John, some persons have rejected his testimony; because in this same dialogue with the Jew Tryphon, he says that, according to the relation of the Apostles, Jesus Christ, when he went into the Jordan, made the water boil,-which, however, is not to be found in any writing of the Apostles. The same St. Justin confidently cites the oracles of Sibyls; he moreover pretends to have seen the remains of the places in which the seventy-two interpreters were confined in the Egyptian pharos, in Herod's time. The testimony of a man who had had the misfortune to see these places, seems to indicate that he might possibly have been confined there himself. did not reckon the Apocalypse among the canonical books. It is very singular that Laodicea, one of the churches to which the Apocalypse was addressed, should have rejected a treasure designed for itself; and that the bishop of Ephesus, who attended the council, should also have rejected this book of St. John, who was buried at Ephesus. It was visible to all eyes that St. John St. Irenæus, who comes afterwards, and who also believed in the reign of a thou-was continually turning about in his grave, sand years, tells us, that he learned from causing a constant rising and falling of the an old man, that St. John wrote the Apo- earth. Yet the same persons who were calypse. But St. Irenæus is reproached sure that St. John was not quite dead, with having written, that there ought to were also sure that he had not written the be but four gospels, because there are but Apocalypse. But those who were for the four quarters of the world, and four car-thousand years' reign, were unshaken in dinal points, and Ezekiel saw but four their opinion. Sulpicius Severus, in his animals He calls this reasoning a de-Sacred History, book xi., treats as mad monstration. It must be confessed, that and impious those who did not receive Ireneus's method of demonstrating is the Apocalypse. At length, after numequite worthy of Justin's power of sight. rous oppositions of council to council, the Clement of Alexandria, in his Electa, opinion of Sulpicius Severus prevailed. mentions only an Apocalypse of St. Peter, The matter having been thus cleared up, to which great importance was attached. the Church came to the decision, from Tertullan, a great partisan of the thou-which there is no appeal, that the Apocasand years' reign, not only assures us that {lypse is incontestably St. John's. St. John foretold this resurrection and reign of a thousand years in the city of Jerusalem, but also asserts that this Jerusalem was already beginning to form itself in the air, where it had been seen by all the Christians of Palestine, and even by the Pagans, at the latter end of the night, for forty nights successively; but, unfortunately, the city always disappeared as soon as it was day-light. Every Christian communion has applied to itself the prophesies contained in this book. The English have found in it the revolutions of Great Britain; the Lutherans, the troubles of Germany; the French reformers, the reign of Charles IX. and the regency of Catherine de Medicis: and they are all equally right. Bossuet and Newton have both commented on the Apocalypse; yet, after all, the eloquent declamations of the one, and the sublime discoveries of the other, have done them greater honour than their commentaries. SECTION II. Origen, in his preface to St. John's Gospel, and in his homilies, quotes the oracles of the Apocalypse; but he likewise quotes the oracles of Sibyls. And St. Dionysius of Alexandria, who wrote about the middle of the third century, says, in one of his fragments preserved by Two great men, but very different in Eusebius, that nearly all the doctors re- their greatness, have commented on the jected the Apocalypse as a book devoid Apocalypse, in the seventeenth century; of reason; and that this book was com--Newton, to whom such a study was posed, not by St. John, but by one Cerinthus, who made use of a great name to give more weight to his reveries. The council of Laodicea, held in 360, very ill suited; and Bossuet, who was better fitted for the undertaking. Both gave additional weapons to their commentaries; and, as has elsewhere been 4 said, the former consoled mankind for his superiority over them, while the latter made his enemies rejoice. It was entitled Apocalypse, because in it he exposed the dangers and defects of the monastic life; and Melito's Apocalypse (Apocalypse de Méliton), because Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in the second century, had passed for a prophet. This bishop's work has none of the obscurities of St. The Catholics and the Protestants have both explained the Apocalypse in their favour, and have each found in it exactly what has accorded with their interests. They have made wonderful commenta-John's Apocalypse. Nothing was ever ries on the great beast with seven heads and ten horns, with the hair of a leopard, the feet of a bear, the throat of a lion, the strength of a dragon; and, to buy and sell, it was necessary to have the character and number of the beast, which num-in his time ninety-eight orders of monks, ber was 666. clearer. The bishop is like a magistrate saying to an attorney, "You are a forger, and a cheat-do you comprehend me?" The Bishop of Bellay computes, in his Apocalypse or Revelations, that there were endowed or mendicant, living at the expense of the people, without employing themselves in the smallest labour. He reckoned six hundred thousand monks in Bossuet finds that this beast was evidently the Emperor Dioclesian, by making an acrostic of his name. Grotius believed that it was Trajan. A curate of St. Sul-Europe. The calculation was a little pice, named La Chétardie, known from strained; but it is certain that the real some strange adventures, proves that the number of the monks was rather too beast was Julian. Jurieu proves that the large. beast is the Pope. One preacher has de- He assures us that the monks are enemonstrated that it was Louis XIV. Amies to the bishops, curates, and magisgood Catholic has demonstrated that it is {tratesWilliam, King of England. It is not easy to make them all agree. There have been warm disputes concerning the stars which fell from heaven to earth, and the sun and moon, which were struck with darkness in their third parts. There are several opinions respecting the book that the angel made the author of the Apocalypse eat, which book was sweet to the mouth and bitter to the stomach. Jurieu asserted that the books of his adversary were designated thereby; and his argument was retorted upon himself. There have been disputes about this verse:-" And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder; and I heard the voice of harpers harping on their harps." It is quite clear, that it would have been better to have respected the Apocalypse, than to have commented upon it. Camus, Bishop of Bellay, printed, in the last century, a large book against the monks, which an unfrocked monk abridged. That, among the privileges granted to the Cordeliers, the sixth privilege is, the certainty of being saved, whatever horrible crime you may have committed, provided you belong to the Order of St. Francis That the monks are like apes; the higher they climb, the plainer you see their posteriors- That the name of monk has become so infamous and execrable, that it is regarded by the monks themselves as a foul reproach, and the most violent insult that can be offered them. My dear reader, whoever you are, minister or magistrate, consider attentively the following short extract from our bishop's book: "Figure to yourself the Convent of the Escurial or of Mount Cassino, where the cœnobites have everything necessary, use{ful, delightful, superfluous, and superabundant-since they have their yearly revenue of a hundred and fifty thousand, four hundred thousand, or five hundred thousand crowns; and judge whether Monsieur l'Abbé has wherewithal to allow himself, and those under him, to sleep after dinner. That to maintain, as the orthodox do, that in the divine essence there are several distinct persons, and that the Eternal is not the only true God, but that the Son and the Holy Ghost must be joined with him, is to introduce into the church of Christ an error the most gross and dangerous, since it is openly to favour poly “Then imagine an artisan or labourer, with no dependence except on the work of his hands, and burdened with a large family, toiling like a slave, every day, and at all seasons, to feed them with the bread of sorrow and the water of tears; and say, which of the two conditions is pre-emi-theismment in poverty." That this distinction, of one in essence, and three in person, was never in Scrip That it is manifestly false; since it is certain that there are no fewer essences than persons. nor persons than essences That it implies a contradiction, to say This is a passage from the Episcopal that there is but one God, and that, neverApocalypse, which needs no commentary.theless, there are three persons, each of There only wants an angel to come and which is truly God— fill his cup with the wine of the monks, to slake the thirst of the labourers who plough, sow, and reap, for the monasteries.tureBut this prelate, instead of writing a useful book, only composed a satire. Consistently with his dignity, he should have stated the good as well as evil. He That the three persons of the Trinity should have acknowledged that the Bene-are, either three different substances, or dictines have produced many good works, and that the Jesuits have rendered great sences to literature. He might have blessed the brethren of La Charité, and those of the Redemption of the Captives. Our first duty is to be just. Camus gave too much scope to his imagination. St. François de Sales advised him to write moral romances; but he abused the ad vice. ANTI-TRINITARIANS. THESE are heretics who might pass for other than Christians. However, they acknowledge Jesus as Saviour and Mediator; but they dare to maintain, that nothing is more contrary to right reason than what is taught among Christians concernmg the Trinity of persons in one only divine essence, of whom the second is begotten by the first, and the third proceeds from the other two accidents of the divine essence, or that essence itself without distinction That, in the first place, you make three Gods That, in the second, God is composed of accidents; you adore accidents, and metamorphose accidents into persons That, in the third, you, unfoundedly and to no purpose, divide an indivisible subject, and distinguish into three that which within itself has no distinction That if it be said, that the three personalities are neither different substances in the divine essence, nor accidents of that essence, it will be difficult to persuade ourselves that they are anything at all— That it must not be believed that the most rigid and decided Trinitarians have {themselves any clear idea of the way in which the three hypostases subsist in God, without dividing his substance, and consequently without multiplying it That this unintelligible doctrine is not to be found in any part of Scripture- That St. Augustin himself, after adThat no passage can be produced which vancing on this subject a thousand reasonauthorises it; or to which, without in any-ings alike dark and false, was forced to wise departing from the spirit of the text, confess that nothing intelligible could be a sense cannot be given more clear, more said about the matter. natural, or more conformable to common They then repeat the passage in this fanotions, and to primitive and immutablether, which is, indeed, a very singular truthsone :-" When," says he, "it is asked |