PREFACE.

WHAT a hallowed and important crisis is that, when a glimpse of the intellectual or moral world breaks in upon the mind-what complicated reflections of regret and astonishment arise, while it strives to arrange and disclose its conceptions and ideas! The mind, according to history, tradition and astronomical calculation, has been operating for 5000 years, with a ratio of improvemert equal to its experience in knowledge, and yet has been so confined by the narrow boundaries of the animal and physical world, that the existence of an intellectual world has never suggested itself even to the imaginationWhat an inexplicable problem! Through the same long epoch, the whole power of the mind has been employed to preserve existence by means that renders it miserable. What a grievous and melancholy reflection!

How shall we attempt the solution of this problembow offer consolation to afflicted thought?

"Truth is dangerous to be displayed."

This is the detestable axiom whose exposed falsehood will produce the solution of the problem, and the consolation of human sorrows.

The vanity of erudition and the cowardice of animal sensibility, labor to propagate this false doctrine.

To indolent and weak minds memory is made the sub

stitute for judgment, and the facts and chronology of ancient history become its criterion for the present conduct and counsel of nations. To minds of great animal sensibility, and little judgment, every reformation or change portends danger and destruction, as the patient racked and tortured with the disease of the stone, sees, in the relief of lithotomy, all the horror of instantaneous death.

Men of great animal knowledge and ingenuity, in a comparative view of nations, fear the progress of truth, lest it produce wisdom and virtue to humanize their own country, which losing in consequence its ferocity, would be invaded and enslaved by the vice and folly of their neighbors. They do not reflect upon the irresistible force of truth, which, whenever it appears, will remain fixed as a sun, and all the powers of error, aided by art, can never force it below the moral horizon, though they may cause occasional fogs and mists, to interrupt, like passing clouds, its meridian splendor. Animal sensibility would find an asylum in its congenial rays, which could not fail to bring all humanized matter into the happy state of universal sympathy, and, rising above the horizon of humanity, would mark the aurora of intellectual existence, or well-being of all sensitive Nature.

All mankind are agreed in their lamentations for the miseries of human nature, and all do, or must agree, that the only remedy is to be found in the intellectual faculties of man. Under what diabolical fascination, or spell of the demon Error, must he act, who consents to chain those faculties, lest their operations should produce the increase instead of the remedy of those miseries.

In the primitive state of society, men removed many physical ills by the power of intellect; and those ills which may be called moral, or ignorant institutions, shall they be perpetuated by prohibiting the use of intellect or exposition of thought, at the very time humanity stands in most need of it? It may be the interest of priests and kings to maintain such a doctrine, to persuade men, like the sheep, to suffer the aggregation of the fold; but when, by the increase of intellect, arising from the free communication of thought, they shall find that the accidental evil of the wolves is to be preferred to the confirmed treachery and tyranny of shepherds, who, for their own personal advantage tear off their fleeces, and perpetuate their miserable existence; Humanity will then, with one common consent, burst from the chains of error, and hail the glorious dawn of the sun of truth, bringing the first day of light to intellectual existence, and the first day of happiness to all sensitive Nature.

For any defect or inelegance of style in the following pages, I myself possess, and offer also to my readers, this consolatory reflection;

Error will be divested of all the power of her insidious blandishments of eloquence; and TRUTH will be displayed in all the beauty of her nakedness.