Athenian letters Author:Thomas Birch Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " open to no passion, but the more refined one, of ambition or of pride. ' From the faint attacks of both these, the purity of their judg- " ments would preserve... more » them: in the former case, a just sense of " the divine perfections; in the latter, of their own. Else, I would " ask, of what value is exalted reason ? But granting there is this " commonwealth of evil spirits existing in the vast expanse; yet I " doubt whether they are suffered to break in upon the borders of " our world. To speak plainly, I must think their agency here not " only neither terrible nor troublesome, but entirely unnecessary. " Our virtue is sufficiently assaulted by internal passions or external " allurements; and reason often quits the field, unequal to the " combat. It is to be presumed, therefore, if these spirits are per- " mitted to ensnare mankind, that the good Being gives us, in those " moments, an extraordinary power, to assist our reason in withstand- " ing the extraordinary temptations which engage our appetites. " So that, admitting the fact to be as you state it, we are just in " the condition in which we were before, as to the proportion of " temptation to invite transgression, and of reason to support virtue. " Hence I maintain that the agency of these beings is unnecessary; " and as the wisest of all Beings can do nothing that is superfluous, I " must think the opinion is an error, however supported by tradition, " or enforced by authority. The truth is, the belief of the evil prin- " ciple (as I have already explained to you) arose from the conjectures of Ignorance; and the worship of him arose from the " suggestions of Fear; the two fatal ingredients of Superstition, which " begins in the first, and terminates in the last. For the understand- " ing and the passions reciprocally misreprese...« less