To cooperate, however, with you, sir, in this judicious design, I must observe that it is necessary to retrench two passages, seeing they afford the greatest support to the arguments of unbelievers.
* Mr.Blair, doctor of divinity, and Mr.Black, doctor in chemistry, met at the coffee house in Edinburg: a new theological pamphlet written by doctor Priestly was thrown upon the table, "Really," said Dr.Blair, "this man had better confine himself to chemistry, for he is absolutely ignorant in theology:"-- "I beg your pardon," answered Dr.
Black, "he is in the right, he is a minister of the gospel, he ought to adhere to his profession, for in truth he knows nothing of chemistry." You say, p.

15, "What is manifestly contrary to natural reason cannot be received by it;"-- and p.

62, "With respect to intellect, men and brute animals are born in the same state, having the same external senses, which are the only inlets to all ideas, and consequently the source of all the knowledge and of all the mental habits they ever acquire." Now if you admit, with Locke, and with us infidels, that every one has the right of rejecting whatever is contrary to his natural reason, and that all our ideas and all our knowledge are acquired only by the inlets of our external senses; What becomes of the system of revelation, and of that order of things in times past, which is so contradictory to that of the time present?
unless we consider it as a dream of the human brain during the state of superstitious ignorance.
With these two single phrases, I could overturn the whole edifice of your faith.

Dread not, however, sir, in me such overflowing zeal.

For the same reason that I have not the frenzy of martyrdom, I have not that of making proselytes.