And once (such power to kings is given) I sent my post-boy up to heav'n. (Apart to H.) And soon shalt thou! my yielding fair, (To M.) Stay, Signor, yet one moment, take Sweet angel! with delight I turn TOLERATION. WHO art thou, vain mortal, that darest intrude thyself between my GOD and me? If I have an account to settle with heaven, am I not competent to effect it myself? Can you be more interested than I am! or, if you are, why insult me -why denounce me; why publish me to the world as the vilest animal in existence? May I not, by possibility, be right as well as you? If so, by what grant, either of heaven or earth, can you be justified in assailing the purity of my motives? The great God of heaven suffers me to enjoy the liberty-suffers me to investigate freely and without fear, all subjects my mind may chance to pursue-and informs me, by the eternal laws of my nature, that I can only believe as my understanding directs me. Yet you, you, dust and ashes of the earth, arrogating to yourself Heaven's power, would do what heaven refused to do-you would end all inquiry which did not exactly suit you-you would prostrate me in the eyes of society, and send me headlong to eternal punishment! Away from this land, thou persecuting spirit-Intolerance. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. SUBSCRIPTIONS. An Enemy to Persecution....... Twelfth and Thirteenth Payment of the Weekly J. C. (Monthly)...... THE Deist believes in one God, the Great Cause of all things, Supreme Governor of the Universe, CREATOR! SUPPORTER! DISPENSER! The Deist believes the great attributes of the Deity, is convinced of, and acknowledges his, moral perfections. The Deist, full of gratitude, confides in the justice and mercy of his Creator. His justice, the great stimulus to acts of obedience; his mercy, the great incitement to love. The Deist from the great example of his Creator, extends his love to all mankind. The Deist, in search of the will of God, explores the vast volume of creation,—a volume beyond counterfeit. The devotion of the Deist is gratitude and praise-resigned to the will of his Maker, he presumes not to dictate. His belief in the wisdom and goodness of the Deity teaches him submission to natural laws and events. The Christian believes in Three Gods;-God, the Father; God, the Son; and God, the Holy Ghost. To these he adds a fourth, a sort of demi-god, called the Devil, to whom he ascribes omnipresence, power almost unlimited, and wisdom little inferior to his Triune God, or Three Gods. The Christian divides the attributes among his Three Gods, and denies the moral perfections of Deity, He makes them partial, revengeful, cruel. The Christian, doubtful and wavering, knows not whether he be an object of love or hatred; and as it depends not on his moral conduct, but on the caprice of Deity, he has no stimulus or incitement to moral virtue. The Christian, from the capricious example of his divinities, is proud, revengeful, cruel, fond of persecution, even to the stake or the scaffold. The Christian, in search of the will of his Divinities, ransacks the volume of the Socinians, the volume of the. Arminians, the volume of the Papists, all of which differ materially, and each finds the will of God according to their several modes of education. The prayer of the Christian is dictatorial; he believes his divinities are mutable, and therefore seeks to change the course of natural laws and events by prayer and fastings. Printed by M. A. CARLILE, 55. Fleet Street. No. 1, Vol. 4.] LONDON, FRIDAY, Dec. 15, 1820. [PRICE 6d. HAD George the Fourth possessed even the virtues of Henry the Eighth, he would not for a moment have tolerated that slander which has been five-and-twenty years preying ineffectually upon your character. The religious scruples of Henry the Eighth were as powerful as his lust, and I rather think preponderated, but it cannot be said of him that he made his religion and that of the whole Church subservient to his lust, as can be truly spoken of George the Fourth. Henry the Eighth was despotic, but had George the Fourth lived in that age he would have been more so, and had the former lived in the present age he would have been less so than in the sixteenth century. Your letter to the King was an admirable and most appropriate production, but I cannot desist from saying, that it is above all things important, that the public should be favoured with a complete memoir of your life, written immediately under your dictation and forming a complete exposure of the conduct of the whole of the present Royal Family towards you; in fact, it has become necessary as a more impressive stamp of infamy upon your enemies, and to leave no room for scepticism on the merits of all parties connected with your persecution. This the people of this island have a just claim upon, as a legacy from you to them in remuneration for their support. Every means should be taken to shew them that the object of their support was fully deserving of it, for be you assured, that if unfortunately you should not outlive your enemy, no means will be neglected to blast your character after your death. It is all important, that this exposition should take place at this moment, whilst you are excluded from a palace, and whilst new schemes of annoyance are in contemplation. It cannot well appear at a future period, when your triumph shall be more complete, and your enemies powerless. Then it will have the appearance Vol. IV. No. 16. Printed by M. A. CARLILE, 55, Fleet Street. of revenge, now it would be a just retaliation, and one which your situation imperiously calls for immediately. It is the only necessary blow that you will be individually called upon to strike, and let a humble adviser entreat you not to spura this request. All public proceedings against you have been published, but the proper key and comment upon them are in your hands alone, you alone can do yourself the justice to publish them, and to neglect this object will be doing yourself a manifest injustice. Multifarious as are your virtues and acquirements, I confess myself incompetent to make an arrangement of them, or to give full expression to that portion which passes my recollection; but as the Printing-Press has become the most prominent object in the Temple of Fame, as one of its most humble contributors, I shall beg leave to state my opinion on another point which has been construed into a crime-I mean your general affability with your household. Above all things, I hold it to be a proof of a noble spirit, to see a person, who has the power of employing servants, treat them as creatures of the same and not as animals of an inferior species. It is well known, that there are savages in all aristocracies, who think less of their servants, and feel less for them, than for their dogs, horses, and other cattle. Ignorance of the laws of Nature, combined with wealth, makes them imagine that they are superior beings, and they impiously exclaim that God created rich and poor! The God of Nature creates male and female of the human species, and every other species of animals, but not rich and poorunnatural systems of Government create the extreme of riches and poverty. I am any thing but an advocate for equality in property, my reason rejects the idea, and assures me, that an attempt to establish such a system would be a fatal check to moral virtue and aspiring worth. But equal rights and equal laws are quite a different thing to an equality in property. The extension of moral virtue in society should be the foundation of all law, but this cannot be the case under the Monarchical or Aristocratical system of Government, because, in either instance, the Democratical part of the community is degraded and treated as something inferior to the party in power-a sure prelude to occasional convulsions. It is the same in a family, the greatest degree of moral virtue will be found in that family where an affability and respect is shewn by the head to the inferior branches. Servants who are well treated, and addressed by their employers in mild and becoming, and still dignified, language, will feel their minds elated and a desire to sustain a corresponding degree of respectability: if they know themselves well, they will not take advantage of that affability and kindness to assume unbecoming freedoms, but they will return their answers, or state their ideas, information, or complaint, in an equally corresponding degree of mildness and respect. This produces what is termed amiability-and amiability is the main source of content and happiness, for there is an amiability in servants as well as in masters. It is passing strange, Madam, that your enemies should be so ignorant of the laws of moral virtue and humanity, as to censure your unparalleled kindness in visiting the sick beds of your servants, and to construe the act to criminality! Would they make their own base and brutal ideas the criterion of virtue, of kindness, or of humanity? Thanks to the moral power of the Printing-Press-the People are as alive to the hypocrisy as to the wickedness of your enemies, and will no longer be the dupes of either, nor much longer suffer from the effects of both. In their endeavour to defame you they have exhibited to the world your latent virtues, and whilst they have anxiously sought to attach an infamy to your name, they have been the unintentional heralds of your good qualities. It is thus that virtue will ever triumph over vice-it is a law of nature which bends to neither human laws nor human passions, and is justly considered an attribute of Deity. You have not only visited your servants while sick, but even when there was an avowed danger from that sickness being contagious. Your kindness was more than that of the good Samaritan. Another point has, above all things, given a death blow to the infamous conspiracy which has existed against you, and that is, your voyage to Jerusalem. Your enemies, in endeavouring to draw criminal inferences from inevitable incidents and situations which that voyage occasioned, have published to the world your motives, and have displayed the beauty of that mind they had vainly hoped to have degraded. Every individual who has made the shortest voyage by water in a small vessel, must have felt the im-. possibility of such a situation being selected for scenes of wantouness and amour. Nothing but an ardently virtuous mind could have induced an unprotected woman, and that woman as noble by birth as by nature, past the meridian of life, to have quitted the shores of Italy, and to have explored the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus, of Utica, and of Jerusalem.' Your husband would have sunk under the fatigues and hard-" ships which you encountered in that trip, for it is evident that |