Gazette Of The United States

For the Gazette of The United States.

Mr. Fenno,

It certainly was my intention to deliver a very serious truth, when I suggested that a progenitor of the Editor of the Aurora and his pupil Tom Paine, became enemies to the Bible because they found that the Bible was an enemy to them: And this by the way, will account for nine tenths of the hostility which the scriptures have ever met with.

But I really did not expect that Bache would have taken the matter so much in dudgeon as he seems to have done. Were it not that an allowance is always to be made for what a man says in hate and anger, one would be inclined in looking over his paragraph of this morning, to ask him some such questions as these. If I say a man was an infamous old lecher, is my position refuted by saying that he was a man of science? If I affirm that that he was an infidel, am I confuted by showing that he was a patriot? If I intimate that a man is a drunkard, is it a confutation to state that he was a friend to the American Revolution? Is it not a pretty compliment to our country to insinuate that the very "principles of the revolution and of republicanism" are going to be "decried" because the vices of any man whatever are exposed? does not he who insinuates this demonstrate himself to be a weak defender of a bad cause? Such questions might be asked; but it is wrong as I have said to scrutinize with rigour what a man utters when he is vexed I therefore entirely waive these inquiries, as well as all attention to the puerile vanity which has swelled a period or two in the paragraph I consider and closed the whole with a fulminating sentence of Latin; and only admonish my countrymen, not to be seduced by the names or characters of any men, however highly or justly famed for patriotism, to relinquish the christian religion; it is the anchor of the soul: "For with the talents of an angel a man may be a fool."

A. B.