nature of the subject upon which this prejudice takes place, is such, that the finest genius is nearly equally liable to an undue bias with the most vulgar.  To question with boldness and indifference, whether an individual, all-forming, all-seeing and all-governing Being exists, to whom, if he exists, we may possibly be responsible for our actions, whose intelligence and power must be infinitely superior to our own, requires a great conquest of former habitude, a firmness of nerves, as well as of understanding; it will therefore be no great wonder, if such men as Locke and Newton can be named among the believers in a Deity.  They were christians as well as theists, so that their authority goes as far in one respect as in the other.  But if the opinions of men of great genius are to have weight, what is to be said of modern men of genius?  You, Sir, are of opinion that the world is getting wiser as well as better.  There is all the reason in the world it should get wiser at least, since wisdom is only a collection of experience, and there must be more experience as the world is older.  Modern Philosophers are nearly all atheists.  I take the term atheist here in the popular sense.  Hume, Helvetius, Diderot, D’Alembert.  Can they not weigh against Locke and Newton, and even more than Locke and Newton, since their store of knowledge and learning was at hand to be added to their own, and among them are those who singly possessed equal science in mathematics as in metaphysics?  It is not impossible, perhaps not improbable, from his course of learning and inquiries, that if Dr. Priestley had not from his first initiation into science been dedicated for what is called the immediate service of God, he himself might have been one of the greatest disprovers of his pretended divinity.

In England you think, Sir, that atheism is not prevalent among men of free reasoning, though you acknowledge it to be much so in other countries.  It is not the first time it has been observed that the greater the superstition of the common people the less is that of men of letters.  In the heart of the Papal territories perhaps is the greatest number of atheists, and in the reformed countries the greatest number of deists.  Yet it is a common observation, especially by divines, that deism leads to atheism, and I believe the observation is well founded.  I hardly need explain here, that by deism in this sense is meant a belief in the existence of a Deity from natural and philosophical principles, and a disbelief in all immediate revelation by the Deity of his own existence.  Such is the force of habit, that it is by degrees only, that even men of sense and firmness shake off one prejudice after another.  They begin by getting rid of the absurdities of all popular religions.  This leaves them simple deists, but the force of reasoning next carries them a step farther, and whoever trusts to this reasoning, devoid of all fear and prejudice, is very likely to end at last in being an atheist.