O F NATURAL and REVEALED RELIGION. VOL. I. CONTAINING The Elements of NATURAL RELIGION; To which is prefixed, An Effay on the beft Method of communicating BY JOSEPH PRIESTLEY, LL. D. F.R.S. Wifdom is the principal Thing. SOLOMON. LONDON: Printed for J. JOHNSON, No. 72, in St. Paul's Koninklijke TO THE YOUNGER PART OF THE My young friends, I pofed these Institutes T was on your account that I com of natural and revealed religion, and to you I take the liberty to dedicate them. It is the earnest wish of my heart, that your minds may be well established in the found principles of religious knowledge, because I am fully perfuaded, that nothing elfe can be a fufficient foundation of a virtuous and truly refpectable conduct in life, or of good hope in death. a 2 A mind destitute of knowledge (and, comparatively speaking, no kind of knowledge, befides that of religion, deferves the name) is like a field on which no culture has been bestowed, which, the richer it is, the ranker weeds it will produce. If nothing good be sown in it, it will be occupied by plants that are ufelefs or noxious. Thus the mind of man can never be wholly barren. Through our whole lives we are fubject to fucceffive impreffions; for, either new ideas are continually flowing in, or traces of the old ones are marked deeper. If therefore, you be not acquiring good principles, be affured that you are acquiring bad ones; if you be not forming virtuous habits, you are, how infenfibly foever to your felves, forming vicious ones; and, instead of of becoming those amiable objects in yourselves, and those valuable members of fociety, which nature, and the God of nature intended that you fhould be, you will be at beft, uselefs cumberers of the ground, a dead weight upon the community, receiving fupport and advantage, but contributing nothing in return; or you will be the pests of fociety, growing continually more corrupt yourselves, and contributing to the corruption of others. Finding yourselves, therefore, in fuch a world as this, in which nothing is at a stand, it behoves you feriously to reflect upon your fituation and profpects. Form, then, the generous refolution (and every thing depends upon your refolution) of being at present what you will certainly wish you had been fome years a 3 hence, |