Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/49

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EUSEBES AND THEOSOPHUS.[1]

EUSEBES.

O Theosophus, I have long regretted and observed the strange infatuation which has blinded your understanding. It is not without acute uneasiness that I have beheld the progress of your audacious scepticism trample on the most venerable institutions of our forefathers, until it has rejected the salvation which the only begotten Son of God deigned to proffer in person to a guilty and unbelieving world. To this excess then has the pride of the human understanding at length arrived? To measure itself with Omniscience! To scan the intentions of Inscrutability!

You can have reflected but superficially on this awful and important subject. The love of paradox, an affectation of singularity, or the pride of reason has seduced you to the barren and gloomy paths of infidelity. Surely you

  1. In place of the title, A Refutation of Deism, this first page bears in Shelley's edition the heading Eusebes and Theosophus; and, as those words are uniformly adopted for the head-lines, the other name appearing nowhere but in the title-page, it seems not unlikely either that it was originally intended to call the work Eusebes and Theosophus, or that Deism was to have been refuted in a Series of Dialogues, each denominated by the names of the interlocutors.