194 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



imagine he is really what he gives himself out to be — a person un- 

 connected with the matters in dispute, and determined, from a sense 

 of justice, to defend what he thinks the cause of violated public 

 tranquillity. 



" If he had been himself a party, he would have written with 

 more bitterness, and been less disposed to make stupid quotations. 

 All this, however, my dear Wilson, unpleasant as it is at present, 

 may be attended with a very excellent result, if you will allow it to 

 be so. Both you and Lockhart are, I think, designed for much 

 higher things than the game you are playing. I believe that, with 

 the wantonness of youth and conscious power about you, which 

 you do not care much how you exhibit, you are really desirous of 

 doing good ; and that you are anxious to root out of the world 

 false sentiments in politics and religion, with a perfect unconcern 

 who may entertain them. This is the best view to take of you ; 

 and in this kind of crusade, you are heedless what shock you may 

 give to individuals, whose feelings yet deserve to be consulted, and 

 with whom the public will, in general, take part. I really think 

 nothing less than a Divine commission, such as Joshua received to 

 extirpate the Canaanites, could justify the way in which you are 

 throwing around you poisoned arrows against those w T hom you sur- 

 mise to be infidels. When you go beyond a certain mark, you lose 

 your aim. While with all the eloquence that you can mus- 

 ter, you will never persuade the reasonable part of the na- 

 tion that the Edinburgh Itevieio has for its insidious, skulking 

 design to make as many Jacobins and infidels as it can, I suppose 

 the character of that publication is pretty well understood. No- 

 body takes it up in the notion that they will receive religious in- 

 struction from it, or that the writers are very competent to give it ; 

 but nobody of sense supposes, whatever slips it may sometimes 

 have made, that its object and secret view is to pull down Christi- 

 anity ; and particularly, no one who knows Mr. Play fair conceives 

 that this is one of his darling contemplations and schemes, whatever 

 may be his opinions upon the subject of Revelation, which nobody 

 has any business to rake out. I believe the only slip he is supposed 

 to have committed in the Heview, was something on the subject of 

 miracles ; and what he says is, I imagine, defensible enough, and 

 reconcilable to a belief in Christianity. Then as to politics, although 

 here, too, there may be various offences, yet I believe the general 



