pilgrim warriors are said to have assumed the red cross: yet doubtless a large proportion of these never reached the Holy Land, and many returned in safety. Bernard, whose enthusiastic eloquence chiefly aroused Europe to the second crusade, boasts, that throughout the whole continent, when the expedition marched forth, "scarcely one man was left for the consolation of seven widows." We are doubtless far below the truth, then, in assuming the loss of life during these religious wars at five millions!

But one yet bloodier record remains! Las Casas, bishop of Chiapa, estimates, in his work on the Destruction of the Indians, (the materials for which he collected during a residence of fifty years in America,) that TWELVE MILLIONS of the unoffending aborigines were immolated to the Christian religion throughout this Western Continent!!! I check my pen. EIGHTEEN MILLIONS of human beings sacrificed in religious contention! And how little, even by such a frightful total, do we express the suffering experienced! the fears and anxieties of those who escaped; the mental agony of the survivors; the millions of widows-the tens of millions of orphans-who lived on, to drink, perhaps, even a bitterer cup than his who perished at once by the sword or at the stake! I can yet recollect the burning feeling of indignation, (more natural perhaps than rational,) with which, as a child, I perused in Richardson's History of the Discovery of America, the deeds of Cortez, of the bloodier Pizarro, and of their priestly associates and abettors; and how the conviction was stamped on my mind, in characters indelible, that the tree whence fruit so poisonous sprung, was the deadliest curse that ever afflicted the human race!*

And this is the tree whose fruit is declared to be "peace on earth and good-will to man!" Peace when it has kindled more of war, and abetted more of massacre, than all other sources put together. Good-will! when its feuds have penetrated even to the domestic hearth, severed the closest friend

The spirit in which the missionary soldiers who acted the leading characters in the American tragedy thought and spoke, is aptly illustrated by the following characteristic extract from a letter written by a reverend Spanish father to his superior in Spain, and quoted in Irving's "History of New York." "Can any one have the presumption to say these savage pagans have yielded any thing more than an inconsiderable recompense to their benefactors; in surrendering to them a little pitiful tract of this dirty ublunary planet, in exchange for a glorious inheritance in the kingdom of heaven!"

If it be objected to my calculation regarding the Indians, that it was avarice, not religion, that overturned the empire of Montezuma, and buried the poor natives in gold mines, there to labour and to die, I reply that these expeditions and these oppressions, whencesoever originating, received, on ail occasions, the ecclesiastical sanction; that the Spanish settlers were uniformly accompanied and encouraged in this bloody work by priests; and that the whole religious influence of Spain was exerted to hasten the catastrophe which deprived twelve millions of innocent individuals of happiness and life, to add to the glory of a merciful God!

ships, and split up the whole human race into discordant sects and schisms, hateful and hating one another!*

It matters not to tell me what supernatural belief and religious restraint ought to have done; I show you what they have done; and what they found precedent enough in the Pentateuch to justify their doing. When massacres more bloody than these shall be proved to have been committed by heathen nations, it will be time enough to thank God that we are not as other men are, and "that our lot is cast in a land of Bibles " Space permits me not, till next week, to advert to your argument regarding the immoral influence of scepticism, drawn from the French Revolution; that bug-a-boo, which is set up in England to frighten republicans, and in America to terrify free inquirers after truth.

ROBERT DALE OWEN.

SIR,

TO ROBERT DALE OWEN.

LETTER II.

New-York, June 25, 1831.

A sceptic can very well dispense with having the last word. If his system is true, 'tis of very little consequence to prove it; 'twill be just as well hereafter for those who now reject it, as for those who receive it. Not so with the Bible. If that is true, "he that believeth not shall be damned." Hence there is great propriety in the exercise of the deepest solicitude on the part of the adherents of that, to bring men to its belief;-which, by the way, is not a belief in the books of "Esdras," or any other books of the Apocrypha. The Bible, sir, is the Old and New Testaments, and not the Apocrypha. That the Apocrypha is sometimes bound up within the same lids with the Bible, is no more an evidence that it is a part of the Bible, than that the family registers inserted in some Bibles are a part of the same. It is very important that this should be remembered, seeing we are discussing the question of the authenticity of the Bible. Surely I am not to be understood as pledged to defend the Apocrypha in this discussion; and this alone is sufficient to show, that that collection of writings is no part of the Bible.

It is quite amusing to observe the tortuous course of the abettors f error, and the facility with which they adopt and discard con

* I speak here of religion as by law or by public opinion established, and by salaried priests and written creeds sustained. Religion, when suffered quietly to spring up or to die away at the dictate of unbiased conscience alone-when understood to be a private not a public concern-is comparatively harmless.

tradictory propositions to serve their turn. In his last letter but one, my opponent, to defend scepticism from the objection sometimes urged against it, that it is of a demoralizing tendency, took the ground, that the "light within" exists independent of all creeds, and in spite of all creeds, exerting an influence which no faith, nor any want of faith, can either create or destroy. Who then would have imagined, that the principal part of his last letter would be devoted to the attempt to show, that religious belief has been the cause of incalculable evil?

But admitting all he says to be true; admitting that eighteen millions of human beings have been sacrificed in contentions denominated religious; it does not hence follow that religion itself has been the cause. To see what is to be attributed to religion, we are to examine its injunctions, not the conduct of its professors. Suppose a member of a Temperance Society were to get intoxicated with ardent spirits, how unfair would it be to attribute his intoxication to the Temperance Institution, which utterly prohibits the use thereof. So of Christianity. How unfair to attribute the wars and crusades of Christendom to that religion, when its whole tenor, both in letter and spirit, is directly the reverse. Christianity says, Resist not evil; overcome evil with good; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you. 'Tis unfair then, I say, to attribute the abuses which have obtained in Christendom, to this religion. Nor are those abuses attributable to the Pentateuch. The command of God to exterminate certain nations by him designated, could be no license even to the Israelites, much less to others, to exterminate other nations. Yet, after all, what are the Crusades, what are all the religious wars from the time of Constantine to the present, compared with what would have been, had scepticism all this time borne sway? The ten short years she did bear sway in one nation, she presented the world with such a scene of carnage and abomination as was before unknown and unimagined. An eye witness of that great tragedy, and an actor in some of its parts, (Gregoire,) thus describes it. "Multiplied cases of suicide, prisons crowded with innocent persons, permanent guillotines, perjuries of all classes, parental authority set at nought, de. bauchery encouraged by an allowance to those called unmarried mothers, nearly six thousand divorces within the single city of Paris, within a little more than two years after the law authorized them in a word, whatever is most obscene in vice, and dreadful in ferocity." Their thirst for blood not satiated by the destruction of the objects of their hate, they gorged themselves with the blood of one another. But the reign of the sanguinary monster was necessarily short, devouring as she did herself; and no argument was requisite to bring the atheistic nation to their senses, and make them realize that the revelation which they had rejected was necessary, not only for the safety of their souls, but of their bodies. And if in ten years, and in one nation, scepticism accomplished so fearful a work, what would she not have

C

done, had she, instead of Christianity, been ascendant during the last eighteen hundred years? Why, sir, the human race would long ere this have become extinct, and nought but the tread of wild beasts, less ferocious, would be seen in places now thronged by men, and echoing with the hum and bustle of industry. I admit, that men are bad enough, with all the restraints of religion; and for this very reason would I object to the removal of those restraints. In the words of Franklin to Paine I would say: "if men are so bad with religion, what would they be without it?" Even Mercier, a professed deist, and a zealous advocate of the French Revolution, speaking of that event, says, "We have, in proscribing superstition, destroyed all religious sentiment; but this is not the way to regenerate the world." What though there is here and there a philosopher, one of a thousand, who, void of religious restraint, would not run to the excesses of the multitude? What though a Socrates would only barter his wife's chastity for gain, and a Hume excuse only secret adultery? It should not be forgotten, that mankind in general are not philosophers, and that they would therefore do much worse even than this, were the restraints of religion removed. What though the good man needs not the fear of hell, nor even the penalties of law, to drive him to his duty; is this a reason why the retributions of eternity and the retributions of the law should not be presented to the consideration of bad men? Sir, this hue and cry against the restraining terrors of religion, might just as well be raised against the restraints of law; and, to be consistent, those who raise it in the one case should do it in the other. Let them do it, and people will then begin to see whither this disorganizing principle is tending.

In my introductory letter, I had barely room to introduce in a very brief manner the first of a series of arguments which I intend to adduce in the course of this discussion, viz., that revelation is necessary. I will now somewhat expand, in further establishing this position. Indeed, the whole bearing of my present letter thus far, has tended directly to this point. The horrors of infidelity at the close of the last century, are a demonstration of the necessity of revelation which will not soon be forgotten. But I will now present some additional considerations, in continuance of what I presented in my last.

I argue the necessity of revelation, then, from the state of the pagan world, both ancient and modern. Among the Romans, the very masters of the world, men were made to fight with wild beasts, and to slaughter one another, for the entertainment of the public. In this manner, twenty thousand lives have been sacrified in a month! Slaves were slaughtered for amusement, or thrown into fish ponds as food for lampreys! In many heathen nations, parents were permitted to destroy infants in embryo, or to strangle, or drown, or expose them, especially if sickly or deformed; yea, they were even enjoined thus to do by some of their most distinguished legislators and sages, as a wise

means of ridding the community of burthensome members! This practice continues to this day, even among the refined and enlightened Hindoos and Chinese! Human sacrifices formerly prevailed throughout the heathen world; and they still prevail in many heathen countries. Even Greece and Rome had recourse thereto on great occasions. The same practice existed among the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Phenicians, and the various nations of the East, together with the Scythians, the Thracians, the Gauls, and the Germans; and ancient Britain under her Druids was likewise stained with the same bloody abomination. In barbarian Ashantee, and other countries of Western Africa, their altars annually reek with the blood of thousands; and in India, of tens of thousands. And America, our own America, had formerly her Montezuma, offering up his twenty thousand human victims annually to the sun! A similar practice has likewise been found to prevail throughout the vast Pacific. Nor was their religion less impure than sanguinary. Their rites and mysteries were polluted with all manner of obscenities; and the imaginary practices of their gods were cited to sanction and sanctify the same. Idolatry every where abounded, and the most ridiculous and demoralizing legends obtained for divine truths and those legends had, as might be expected, their full and legitimate effect. Paul's description of them is true to the letter, as confirmed by their own poets and historians. They "became vain in their imaginations; they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things; they dishonoured their own bodies between themselves: even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one towards another. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient, being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful."

Such, sir, was the state of the heathen world, when the sun of righteousness arose, to dispel their spiritual darkness, and pour upon them the glorious beams of the gospel day. Philosophy, science, and the arts, carried to the highest degree of improve. ment, had done what they could for mankind, and this was the result. The precepts of philosophy, being of human origin, wanted authority to secure obedience, as must always be the case with the maxims of mere human wisdom, (a most important reason, by the way, for the necessity of revelation ;) and some of those very precepts themselves were faulty, containing false principles, and sanctioning vicious practices. Nothing, then,