Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/63

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BERKELEY
47

a development of the evangelical principle of non-resistance to the Supreme Power. The Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) seek to demonstrate the providence of God and the incorporeal nature of the soul, to the confusion of skeptics and atheists. The essays of the Guardian (1713) are nearly all directed against free-thinkers. The Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) was written to remind Englishmen, then distressed by financial disaster, that a society cannot be safe or sane unless it is sober, pure, and religious. The Proposal for the Better Supplying of the Churches in our Foreign Plantations (1725) is the public statement of Berkeley's famous project for the founding of a university in Bermuda, and the conversion of the American Indians to Christianity. The seven dialogues of the Alciphron constitute a complete system of Christian apologetics, philosophic and moral in method and emphasis. The Analyst (1734) is a critique of the differential calculus—which had recently been invented and was attracting much attention—designed to show that there are mysteries in mathematics as well as in faith, and that one of the most famous anti-Christian arguments of the rationalists has therefore no validity. The Discourse Addressed to Magistrates (1738) is from beginning to end an invective against the license and