Such a canvass is too broad for the age of seventy, and especially of one whose chief occupations have been in the practical business of life.  We must leave, therefore, to others, younger and more learned than we are, to prepare this euthanasia for Platonic Christianity, and its restoration to the primitive simplicity of its founder.  I think you give a just outline of the theism of the three religions, when you say that the principle of the Hebrew was the fear, of the Gentile the honor, and of the Christian the love of God.

An expression in your letter of September the 14th, that ’the human understanding is a revelation from its maker,’ gives the best solution that I believe can be given of the question, ’What did Socrates mean by his Daemon?’ He was too wise to believe, and too honest to pretend, that he had real and familiar converse with a superior and invisible being.  He probably considered the suggestions of his conscience, or reason, as revelations, or inspirations from the Supreme mind, bestowed, on important occasions, by a special superintending providence.

I acknowledge all the merit of the hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter, which you ascribe to it.  It is as highly sublime as a chaste and correct imagination can permit itself to go.  Yet in the contemplation of a being so superlative, the hyperbolic flights of the Psalmist may often be followed with approbation, even with rapture; and I have no hesitation in giving him the palm over all the hymnists of every language, and of every time.  Turn to the 148th psalm in Brady and Tate’s version.  Have such conceptions been ever before expressed?  Their version of the 15th psalm is more to be esteemed for its pithiness than its poetry.  Even Sternhold, the leaden Sternhold, kindles, in a single instance, with the sublimity of his original, and expresses the majesty of God descending on the earth, in terms not unworthy of the subject.

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The Latin versions of this passage by Buchanan and by Johnston, are but mediocres.  But the Greek of Duport is worthy of quotation.

The best collection of these psalms is that of the Octagonian dissenters of Liverpool, in their printed form of prayer; but they are not always the best versions.  Indeed, bad is the best of the English versions; not a ray of poetical genius having ever been employed on them.  And how much depends on this, may be seen by comparing Brady and Tate’s 15th psalm with Blacklock’s Justum et tenacem propositi virum of Horace, quoted in Hume’s History, Car. 2. ch. 66.  A translation of David in this style, or in that of Pompei’s Cleanthes, might give us some idea of the merit of the original.  The character, too, of the poetry of these hymns is singular to us; written in monostichs, each divided into strophe and antistrophe, the sentiment of the first member responded with amplification or antithesis in the second.