World

,—a collective term used to signify all the nations of this vast globe. Here is an immense field of investigation for the philosopher. It is strange, but no less tue, that all nations, without any exception, are subject to and the slaves of, some error or superstition which is the fundamental of unhappiness to the people. Experience, knowledge, history, in vain afford them lessons, what paths to follow, what to shun. Blinded by the warring passions, and stupified by their love of sensuality, they rush on headlong into the abyss of vice and folly, and think to extricate themselves from these pitfalls by heaping crime upon crime, till they find themselves even with the rest of the world. The grand and stedfast enemies to the happiness of mankind, are religion and government. The first is the offspring of fear; the latter, the child of depravity; and if it were not for the intervention of priests and tyrants,mankind would still have had to bless the halcyn days of a natural government and a natural religion. It is worthy of remark, that a standard of truth is erected by every little tyrant, in every little state, and though truth is immutable, she is a very Proteus, diversifying and variegating her snowy garb in every soil, in every climate, among every tribe, and in every age. What is a virtue in one country, is a crim in another; what is truth in one, is falsehood in the next; what utility here, injury there; what laudable here, culpable there. Thus the axe and the halter, the rack and the wheel; the faggot and the crucifix are the infallible umpired, the unerring oracles, the unchangeable standards of truth, the grand determiners of right and wrong! Treason and integrity, religion and superstition, reason and error go hand in hand in the world, and the tyrant and the priest of every pitiful territory arbitrarily decide by law, which is truth, and which is error. “Oh! world, thy slippery turns!”