Excerpt from A Letter to Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford, on the Rationalistic, Socinian and Indfidel Tendency of Certain Passages: In His Address Before the Alumni of Yale College Now Sir, I venture to say that the very first perusal of this paragraph leaves the disagreeable impression, on the mind of any person who has looked at all into infidel wri ters, that it strangely symbolizes with their trains of thought and modes of reasoning. Mr. Hume opens the first section of his Natural History of Religion, in these words It appears to me, that if we consider the improvement of human society, from rude beginnings to a state of greater perfection, polytheism or idolatry was, and necessarily must have been, the first and most ancient religion of A little farther on, he continues; It seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant multitude must first entertain some grovelling and familiar notions of superior powers, before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being who bestowed order on the whole frame of nature; We may as'reasonably imagine that men inhabited palaces before huts and cottages, or studied geometry before agriculture as assert that the De ity appeared to them a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a pow erful though limited being, with human passions and appe tites, limbs and organs. The mind gradually rises from in ferior to superior by abstracting what is imperfect, it an idea of perfection and slowly distinguishing the nobler parts of its own frame from the grosser, it learns to transfer only the former much elevated and refined, to its All this appears to be perfectly identical with your theory of the progress of religion from the physical to the spiritual. Much more might be alleged from the same work, to the same purpose. But it is needless, for the work is only a development of the positions laid down in the extracts just given, and I must refer you to itself for the complete carrying out of the principles which you have advanced. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.