WHO GOES TO HELL?

(From the New York Correspondent.)

It is supposed that there are at this time on the earth 10 million Jews, 170 ditto nominal Christians, 140 ditto Mahometans, 480 ditto Pagans, making in all 800 millions of souls, all of which must pass from time to eternity, in the course of at least a century, and something like the same number, or perhaps less, have passed on in like manner for many centuries past, and a number equally great, if not greater, will so continue to pass on, till time shall be no more. The great question which all the world cannot solve, and which has caused so much uneasy commotion, is-whence came they, whither bound, and to what final end? Now, sir, who, of all the wiseacres in the world, and this highly gifted town-women and all, who profess to know all things, both on earth and in heaven, as also in hell, can tell how many of the human family have, from the creation up to the present time, passed through this, on their pilgrimage to the eternal world; and what disposition Almighty God has made of them? The drops of water in the sea, and grains of sand on its shores, would bear no comparison with their numbers; yet it is no less true, that they have lived, died, and have gone -God only knows where. If the doctrine of partial salvation, as taught by the orthodox of the present and past ages, be true, what portion of the afore named 800 millions of souls may we conclude go to heaven in the course of a century, (albeit the present,) and what portion are consigned by the avowed sanction of orthodoxy to the torments of a never ending hell? Does one half of those pious souls, whose faces outvie the elongation of the Pharisees, escape this hell, by means of their own goodness and piety, when tried by the square of their own doctrine? Any one acquainted with their doctrines will readily join me in saying, not one fourth!! But, for the sake of the cause of orthodoxy, let us allow half, and then see what will be the product of a century, to the parties thus contending for mankind, like vultures for the fallen beasts of the field. By the doctrine of orthodoxy, taking it in its greatest plenitude

Ask orthodoxy if this be true-1 say, if it be true, that my statement is likewise true; if not, my statement is false, and only so, because the ground on which it is based is not tenable.

This view of the subject, however near it approach to the true state of orthodoxy, will be objected to by its greatest sticklers-but how will they prove the statement false, without doing violence to the tottering edifice of

their doctrine? Will they pretend to say that Christ came to save the world? If so, did he do it? If he did my statement is really false, and just as every good man would have it-nobody goes to hell. But stop, say they; this will not do; he came to save only those who believe in church creeds, make long prayers, and give the reverend clergy a fourth of their earnings, (the starvation of servants to the contrary notwithstanding,) and those who do not these things must go to hell, for so say the clergy; and who can dare gainsay it? But men died before Christ made his appearance on the earth, and three-fourths of the human family, even at this day, die without a knowledge of him. What is to be done in this case? They could not believe in that of which they knew nothing; and because they believed not these things, which were out of their power, will Almighty God consign them to endless punishment merely for the gratification of a few orthodox sticklers ? No, no-this is not the character of that God that created all things after his own liking, with which I trust he is well pleased. Othodoxy is here brought to her final subterfuge; and to close, as well as possible, the rents in the clerical garments and creed habilament, they admit that those who know nothing of the light of the gospel may possibly go to heaven, but those who know it and improve it not, must be beaten with many stripes and go to hell in the bargain. But again—If this be true, is it not something near the commission of an unpardonable sin, to propagate the knowledge of the gospel throughout the heathen world? as nothing but the knowledge of it can fairly justify the entailment of hell on the ignorant heathens. Justice will surely induce the propagators of this diabolical knowledge, to withold their efforts for some better purpose, as the heathens, and all those who are unacquainted with gospel light, go to heaven only because they are such fools that they cannot obtain or understand the means by which they can be gospelized to hell.

Look out, all ye that know these things, and do them not. Obadiah's curse of curses, in all its plenitude, must ever rest on your heads, and, ere long, ye shall be found like water snakes and amphibious animals, swimming in the burning floods and sulphurous lakes of the eternally damned. For you can never take passage direct to heaven by the orthodoxical route of churches, and connecting lines of Bible and hack character societies. No, you must go even wild in the very bosom of society, only because you think not of Almighty God as does the most servile empiric in the GREAT EMPIRE of orthodoxy. If a man would court popularity he must do it as he would a female that he might desire to make the partner of his life, but only through the church-and he who presumes to follow a contrary course may rest assured that success can never attend his efforts.-The Liberalist.

EXTRACTS FROM THE CABINET OF ANCIENT WISDOM.

They who educate children well, are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well. -Aristotle.

We ought to teach children that which will be most useful to them when they become men.-Agesilaus.

The young should learn what they ought to practice when they arrive at maturity.-Aristippus.

LETTER 23.-FROM THE REV. ROBERT TAYLOR.

ANSWER TO AN ANONYMOUS ATTACK ON THE SYNTAGMA, Which appeared in "The Lion" of July 4th.

DEAR MR. CARLILE.-Nothing but my strong confidence in the impregnable truth of the propositions I have maintained, and my willingness to sacrifice all but every thing to elicit and engage the severest criticism, could oblige or justify me in answering the anonymous attack of so unjust and ungenerous a disputant as he who occupies thirteen pages of your valuable first number of your second volume. There are a sort of men whose minds labour under a disease which renders them hostile to every thing and every person guilty of the offence of being their superiors, and who would rather sink the ship in which they sail, than see it saved by any skill but theirs: and there is a perversity of ingenuity, which while it could never produce a rational argument of its own, can pester us with hypothetical objections against the accuracy of the multiplication table. When such an unhappiness of disposition is stimulated by the added incitement (it may be) of some old grudge to be paid off, under shelter of an anonymous criticism, it requires no powers of foresight to anticipate, and no extraordinary shrewdness to understand the drift and cogency of the objections it will be likely to originate. To have deserved the respect of your readers, this origination should have been better concealed. But apparent and egregious as it is, I shall not avail myself of it, to evade answering any thing that the vanity of your correspondent might by any possibility make him mistake for argument.

In order to prove the invalidity of my arguments in favour of the Manifesto, contained in the Syntagma, he avowedly begins by attacking my 44th Oration, published two or three years ago, which very few of the readers of the Syntagma are likely to have at hand, and which therefore enables him to shelter his egregious misrepresentations from discovery, and to produce that confusion so convenient to the purpose of one whose apparent object is anything rather than to give a fair representation: and who when he should be confronted with proofs that I have said no such thing, as he has charged me with saying, has ready his means of flying from pillar to post, with the quibble,-If he has not said it here, he has said it there, and if neither here nor there-why,(as on page 19,) Mr. T. has somewhere said it.

This tricky anonymous asserts roundly that Mr. Taylor rejects as forgeries :

1. The celebrated passage in Tacitus.

2. Paul's Epistles.

3. Luke's Acts of the Apostles, and 4. The fragments of Celsus in Origen. No. 3.-VOL. 2.

The reader of the Syntagma has only to turn to page 78, and he will see, that this writer's assertions are not measured by any respect for what was there to be observed, "Granted then be the genuineness of the passage, &c. it is fully and fairly probable, though not wholly incontestible."

From my 44th Oration, he breaks off the head of the sentence, "I call the concession of Gibbon in this passage ironical," from the reasons immediately subjoined, in order that he may charge me with having put forth that opinion without a reason. To show reasons which render the claims of a passage to authenticity doubtful, is surely not outright rejecting it as a forgery; and all I have contended for against the passage of Tacitus is, that its claims are DOUBTFUL. Nothing was so easy as to have no mind to see the difference, and then charge Mr. Taylor, with dogmatizing; and sure 'tis something like a reason why a passage may be at least suspected,-I. When it is such in its own nature as thatin can hardly be conceived how the Fathers could possibly have failed of quoting it. 2. When they have quoted the very book in which it is contained for innumerable other passages, not one of which would serve their purpose in a thousandth part of the efficacy of this. 3. And THIS,-they have not quoted; nor can it in any shape be shown to have been brought before the world before the year 1468. I admit all the might-be's and suppositions of its having been contained in other than that only one manuscript in that dark age, on which its authenticity rests. I do not therefore reject it as forgery, while I Do maintain that its claims are in the highest degree questionable, and such as in no other case would be held sufficient for the support of such a stress as has been laid thereon.

It is from internal evidence contained in Paul's Epistles, and the Acts of the Apostles, that I have in my Syntagma argued the utter forgery of the four Gospels, and therefore could hardly have intended to destroy the grounds of my own argument. It was sworn in evidence against me upon my trial, and very justly, that I had maintained that the authority of St. Paul is fatal to the Christians, (Trial, p. 9.) The fragment of Celsus, as contained in Origen, admits not of the predication of forgery. It may be true that Origen tells us, what Celsus said, though it be not true that Celsus ever said so.

Your correspondent however throws himself sheer out of all keeping, in his bold untruth, in saying that there is not the least trace that the thought of forging writings to prove the existence of Jesus, ever entered into their heads-when for this very purpose and none other they forged all the books of Porphyry concerning oracles; for this specific purpose and none other, they forged the pretended Epistle of Pilate, and were willing to represent their adversaries as having branded their Jesus as all the impostors and cheats imaginable, so they could but buckle

Such

them into an admisssion that such a man had at all existed. an admission was all they wanted as basis enough for their whole fabric; and well I know that the Unitarian craftsmen, if your correspondent himself be not one of that quibbling fraternity, can well tease the sciolist in this argument, who should yield them that pregnant admission. I see not how he could evade the perplexity that the origination of such a religion as Christianity from such a man as Jesus is admitted to be, must necessarily involve. For this would savour as strongly of the marvellous as miracles themselves. So call in a God where there is no occasion for one, and to seek for recondite and out-of-the-way hypothesis, to account for phenomena that speak for themselves, and whose whole history is almost intuitive, may show our ingenuity; but shows nothing that would be better worth showing. Such pains are expended, not to discover truth; but to avoid discovering it. Just such arguments, and not one of greater plausibility or more probable evidence, for the existence of Jesus as a man, might be banded to all eternity, to prove the existence of his prototypes Hercules, Adonis, or Esculapius, whose priests never wanted more than such an admission, as no unbeliever, who has thoroughly studied the subject will ever yield in favour of Jesus. Certainly his existence stands not on better proof than theirs, that is, it is wholly unproven.

But admitting the authenticity of the passage of Tacitus, (as when its authenticity is not the subject of litigation for argument sake, it may fairly be admitted.) Surely it involves no such inferences, as your correspondent and other illogical and inconsecutive reasoners would attach to it. It is not Tacitus himself giving us his account of what he himself believed, still less of any thing that he knew but it is his account merely, of what the Christians had said of themselves, put into the language in which their adversary would report upon their testimony, what might or might not be true.

Now for Paul's Epistles.-The original and total forgery of the whole of these, is surely a charge involving almost a contradiction in terms to my whole argument, which professes to prove against them their having been altered and renovated from time to time: and your correspondent has no right nor reason to make it seem that I had charged the church with having forged and supposed such writings altogether, which in such a case, it would be absurd to have spoken of as altered or renovated. The existence of the original type is necessarily assumed in the argument which aims to show that such extensive and indefinite alterations have been made in the copies from time to time, as to leave it no longer in our power to know what the original type was. There is every apparent presumption that the Epistles of Paul and the epistolary parts of the New Testament generally, have been less altered and revised than the Gospels; of which indeed there is very strong internal