walking in the garden in the cool of the evening, as being pleased with sacrificial offerings, as angry with Adam and Eve, as personally cursing Cain for his crime of fratricide, and even as providing our first parents with garments to hide their nakedness; then He appears a material form in the midst of flames, thunder and lightning, and was regarded by the Levites as having a fixed residence in the Ark.  He is contrasted throughout the whole of the Old Testament with the gods of the heathens, only as being more powerful; and in the strange scene which took place in Pharaoh’s court He seemed to have measured His abilities with those of certain seers or magicians, and to have proved His superiority only by producing greater and more tremendous plagues.  In all the early history of the Jewish nation there is no conception approaching to the sublimity of that of Anaxagoras, who called God the Intelligence or [Greek text].  He appears always, on the contrary, like the genii of Arabian romance, living in clouds, descending on mountains, urging His chosen people to commit the most atrocious crimes, to destroy all the races not professing the same worship, and to exterminate even the child and the unborn infant.  Then, I find in the Old Testament no promise of a spiritual Messiah, but only of a temporal king, who, as the Jews believe, is yet to come.  The serpent in Genesis has no connection with the spirit of evil, but is described only as the most subtle beast of the field, and, having injured man, there was to be a perpetual enmity between their races—­the serpent when able was to bite the heel of the man, and the man when an opportunity occurred was to bruise the head of the serpent.  I will allow, if you please, that an instinct of religion or superstition belongs to the human mind, and that the different forms which this instinct assumes depend upon various circumstances and accidents of history and climate; but I am not sure that the religion of the Jews was superior to that of the Sabaeans who worshipped the stars, or the ancient Persians who adored the sun as the visible symbol of divine power, or the eastern nations who in the various forms of the visible universe worshipped the powers and energies of the Divinity.  I feel like the ancient Romans with respect to toleration; I would give a place to all the gods in my Pantheon, but I would not allow the followers of Brahmah or of Christ to quarrel about the modes of incarnation or the superiority of the attributes of their trien God.

Amb.—­You have mistaken me, Onuphrio, if you think I am shocked by your opinions; I have seen too much of the wanderings of human reason ever to be surprised by them, and the views you have adopted are not uncommon amongst young men of very superior talents, who have only slightly examined the evidences of revealed religion.  But I am glad to find that you have not adopted the code of infidelity of many of the French revolutionists and of an English school