NATURAL AND REVEALED

RELIGION

EXPLAINING EACH OTHER:

IN TWO ESSAYS:

THE FIRST SHOWING WHAT RELIGION IS ESSENTIAL

TO MAN: THE SECOND, THE STATE OF SOULS

AFTER DEATH AS DISCOVERED BY

REVELATION.

Filari Huber

THE following ESSAYS are copied from the "Harleian Miscellany," published in 1745, a work which was made up of a collection of scarce, curious, and entertaining pamphlets and tracts, as well in manuscript as in print, found in the Earl of Oxford's Library. It will probably never be known who was the author of the Essays. They were found in the library of the Earl, and had never before been published. See "Modern History of Universalism," pp. 80-83.

EDITOR.

NATURAL AND REVEALED

RELIGION.

ESSAY I

On the Religion essential to Man.

IN Religion, all true principles must depend upon one only principle; this only principle is that of a self-sufficient being.

Every relation between two intelligent beings is necessarily founded in the nature of both. Now religion is essantially no more than a relation between God and man. It can therefore be founded only in the nature of these two beings.

Then every point of doctrine, every opinion, which is evidently opposite as well to the nature of God, as to that of man, ought to be deemed false, or at least foreign to man's essential religion.

From hence it is plain, that the religion, essential to man, must be simple, evident, free from all contradiction; that it must exclude everything false and imaginary; that it cannot require any man to strain his belief to what savors of an impossibility, much less to what savors of a contradiction.

If God is self-sufficient, he is perfectly disinterested; for what is infinite can lose nothing, as it can