stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, which stone smote the image upon its feet. Then the gold, the silver, the brass, the iron and clay, became as chaff of the summer threshing-floor, and the wind drove them away.

In another vision, the same prophet saw the same potentates represented by wild beasts, a lion, a leopard, a bear, and a monster of indescribable terror and fierceness. These great powers were the abhorrence of God and the scourge of men, while they lasted: they rose like a monster out of a stormy sea agitated by tempests: their course was marked by an exterior of splendour and pomp, and by a vast and perpetual scene of human misery, oppression, and wickedness.

Theorists, in discussing the origin of governments, fall into curious and splendid reveries, substituting the blossoms of fancy which expand in the pleasant fields of imagination, for the realities of truth; and even the pious Christian is amused with the noise and commotion of great wars and revolutions, which come softened to his ear through the long vale of ages, while his eye is pleased with the lustre of heroes and conquerors, cleared, by the pen of the partial historian, from the stain. of blood and the blackness of guilt. But the gospel sheds a different light on these subjects; or rather divests them of all their charms, and throws them into darkness, covered with shame and contempt.

Why does a man grow serious and feel alarmed, as he approaches the hour of death and the borders of eternity? It is because the gospel, directing the convictions of his own conscience, sets before him concerns of infinitely greater importance than any thing of a temporal nature. His ambition is in a moment chilled, and he seems suddenly loosened from the powerful spell which passion, prejudice, the popular current, and the bustle of life, have held over him. I have taken some pains to show that we are not bound by any law, divine or human, or by any necessity of interest or circumstances, to take the lives of our fellow-creatures-of our brethren. And those topics of defence are confidently resorted to when the practice of taking life is called in question. But, Sir, that practice or custom depends upon, and is supported by far more stubborn reasons than any of the preceding, which I have endeavoured to answer; reasons on which I look with greater timidity and discouragement, and far less hope of their being removed, till the blessed and only potentate shall come to vindicate his Church, not from her professed enemies, but from her friends, who have long vindicated her with weapons and a warfare he never authorized, but forbid, and abhors.

The practice of taking life, Sir, is supported by the mighty torrent of opinion, prejudice, passion, and example, which carries all before it. Let any man who is never so strenuous to destroy the murderer out of hand, to shed his blood for the blood he has shed, be suddenly informed that all the great powers of Europe had abolished capital punishment; let him also know that our own government had fully adopted the same principle; that the whole current of opinion through Christendom was changed, and already running strong the other way, and that henceforth it would be considered as a blot and disgrace upon any nation that should punish capitally; what do you think, Sir, would be the effect? He would soon begin to find his opinions waver. He would perhaps open his eyes upon the Gospel, upon the system of righteousness and peace, of love and mercy ;-on those fair and sacred pages he would see no blood, but that of the Lamb of God shed for sin, and that of the saints shed for the witness of Jesus. We have daily and astonishing proofs of the overwhelming force of the tide of popular opinion; and the arguments by which it is supported serve as convenient topics of declamation; an armour resorted to when any one resists the current: but which armour would be dropped without a struggle-without an effort-without regret, should the current by any means change; or rather, with acknowledged regret that it had been so long pertinaciously held.

Sir, we have abundant proofs at all times, how much prejudice has, and how little sound reason and conscience have to do, in the extreme and universal thirst for the blood of a murderer, and in the vulgar supposition that all the powers, and laws, and sympathies of nature, operate for his detection and condign suffering: how groans and sobs are heardlights, apparitions, spectres, and goblins, are seen, where the horrid crime has been perpetrated and concealed, till the murder is brought to light. I plead not for murder; I hope to be able to evince to every one's satisfaction that I view it with sufficient horror.

But, Sir, a man shall commit murder, before the sun, in the presence of honourable witnesses; shall avow it in public, even in the midst of our own Christian people, so punctilious of justice shall, to adopt the common hyperbole of expression, parade our streets, brandishing his blood stained weapons, and menacing a second victim, in any one who shall assail his honour; that is to say, perhaps, who shall speak with too much freedom of his lies and villanies. But, behold! justice sleeps; no public sentiment is roused; no preterna

tural groans or sobs are heard no direful spectres are seen, no sagacious populace scents the "rank offence" in the tainted gale. All the sympathies of nature, under the narcotic power of some unknown charm, still slumber; even the very ghost of the murdered man never so much as once appears to demand justice.

By and by, this murderer is seen busily employed in making laws for his country; or perhaps on the solemn bench of justice, deciding with reverend and awful mein on the life and property of his fellow-citizens. How many names of my own countrymen this moment rush into mind, which need but to be added, to turn this illustration into history! I take not this method to reproach those unhappy men, who have fallen into this horrid crime; nor yet to reproach the lenity of my country, which has not brought them to justice. These men may be truly penitent; and may have reason to adore God that their country was lenient ;-I hope in God's mercy and goodness they are forgiven; and from my soul I forgive them but I state this to show that all this noise about the abhorrence of murder is a solemn farce. It has no foundation but in the brain, sick and delirious with prejudice, and public passion.

Thousands and thousands of murders are sanctioned by public law, and celebrated with public applause, where one is thus abhorred. Even admitting defensive war to be right, and fully authorized by God himself, still, to make the best of it, all who fall on one side are certainly murdered. And again, admitting fully the equity of defensive war, nevertheless the mere pretence of defensive war cannot shield from guiltneither can the plea of a mistake afford any justification. If I should way-lay my neighbour and shoot him from behind a wall, and set up as my plea that I verily thought he was coming to kill me, few courts, I believe, would pronounce my plea sufficient.

But, Sir, such is the depravity and blindness of men, that a nation may do any thing, and nobody be esteemed guilty. The extreme infatuation of men has brought it to pass, that when a man has set his name to a paper called a declaration of war, the business of killing on both sides, is immediately sanctioned; and hundreds of thousands may fall, and all the terrible panic about murder is done away: the strife is glorious and honourable.

I am, Sir, yours, &c.

LETTER XI.

Nations have no right to wage War.

SIR, UNDER the sanction of a Divine command given to the ancient Hebrew state, but repealed by Jesus Christ, as some believe, Christians continue to punish with death. Though I am persuaded that this practice, which is, in fact, the basis of war on the broad scale, owes its continuance far more to the force of custom and example than to a consciousness of a duty imposed by divine authority. In so much, that were the legislature of any state or kingdom, from their own peculiar views, induced to abolish capital punishment, no Christian who has knowledge of the gospel precepts, would feel much alarm, whatever he might think of the policy of the measure.

The Roman orator, as already noticed, considered that public executions, the sight of the shocking, and debasing apparatus of death, and the still more shocking and inhuman appearance of the horrid infliction, would defile and disgrace the Roman people. He drew his motives, however, from the feelings of humanity and from the pride of republican freedom. Could his imagination have followed the soul of the wretched sufferer into endless darkness and misery; could he have perceived the stroke of death to be but the commencement of the torments of hell, with how much more force might he have plead for the unhappy wretch to be continued in this world of hope and probation; at least, till the hand of Divine Justice, unaided by human agency, should close the catastrophe.

Death legalized by the sanction of the law, and by the presence of the authorities of a country both temporal and spiritual, and deliberately inflicted before the people, diminishes the dignity, the security, the inviolableness;--nay, lowers the estimation of human life, breaks down its sacred enclosures, and teaches men how to trifle with the probation and eternal destiny of each other.

It has been already observed, that murder is offensive war; the infliction of death on the murderer is defensive. If it be evident that under the gospel, the sanguinary penalties of the Jewish law are repealed, and that God does not require capital punishment, then the grand argument in favour of war, that it is necessary because commanded by God, is answered.

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For if war be not necessary, in this particular and private sense of the phrase, then surely it cannot be necessary, in reference to any divine command, between one nation and another. To this important branch of this inquiry, Sir, I now beg leave to draw your attention.

But here, there will scarce be room to dwell a moment. For however the question of capital punishment, in a few extreme cases, might be settled, whether for or against it, it is presumed that all national wars are placed, even by those who vindicate them, on the footing of right and expediency which a nation is at full liberty to discuss, and then to make war or not, as she may think best. In the Hebrew history alone, it is that we find any nation commanded by God to make war: but in their case the command was explicit, and the object definite; as were the promises of God to the Patriarchs, and the commissions of Moses and Joshua.

The right of a nation, however, to make war, must, in the mode of discussion I have adopted, be resolved into one of two distinct grounds: either, first, because God commands it, as he commanded Joshua to invade Canaan; in which case there is no option, as there was none to Joshua: or, secondly, because a state of things has arisen, in which God has left it to the discretion of a nation to make war or not, as they may see fit. Let us consider these grounds.

1. Were it not well known to what shifts and subterfuges men will resort in support of a favourite hypothesis, it would seem improbable that any advocate of war would go so far as to plead a divine command. Yet in the vindication of popular measures, where the current of opinion runs strong, and men's minds are heated, no assertion is too bold, no ground too narrow or too sandy, no argument too absurd.

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Every argument which I have adduced against the infliction of capital punishment, applies here with peculiar force. The wars of the Hebrew state, so often alluded to as our warrant and example, were prosecuted under a special and divine command, of which modern wars have no parallel. It surely will not be contended that God has commanded or sanctioned any modern wars, as he did those of Moses, Joshua, the judges and kings of Israel and Judah, by an immediate vision or oracle, or by any other express token of his authority.

The whole argument, in short, is, that as God once commanded to take life, and make war, so he now commands the same. Every Christian should remember, that we live under a different dispensation, and different laws. There is not a command to take life or to go to war in the whole Gospel;