56 
SOOFFEES. 
contemplates. For once take away from man the principle of 
responsibility, and his virtue is at the command of accident. 
But these consequences are not always considered by the phi¬ 
losopher in his closet: there the passions, asleep under the 
musing eye of reason, lie like a calm sea beneath a summer 
moon ; but when the business of the world calls the one to 
awake, and its wintry blasts rouse the other into tempest, 
what would man do in either case, without a positive law of con¬ 
duct, without a compass to direct him through the storm ? But 
even in countries civilized to the perfection of mortal means, and 
possessing that guiding light, (if they would use it!) which So¬ 
crates longed to behold, and did not, the Light of Revelation ! 
in those countries we often find men Sooffees in principle, pure 
self-idolaters, too proud of their own mental powers and fancied 
stoic virtue, to understand, till experience forces their compre¬ 
hension, that human nature is the infancy of immortality; and 
that laws and penalties, with answering rewards and punish¬ 
ments, are as necessary to the conduct and well-being of the 
wisest man, as parental discipline to the tuition and government 
of youth. That this lofty idea of innate perfectibility, frequently 
led the Sooffee fanatics into the most extravagant inconsistencies, 
we need look no further to shew, than the sect of the infamous 
Hassan Subah, mentioned by the historians of the Crusades 
under the name of The Old Man of the Mountain ; he, and all 
his sanguinary crew, deriving their impious dreams of partaking 
the divine nature from the Sooffee doctrines. The wild and 
mystic theories of these teachers, are offered to their disciples in 
the place of moral duties and pious observances; and their free 
opinions on all religious dogmas and established rites, with their 
own claim to a particular communion with the Deity, being cal- 
