He adduces his own personal experience, and then appeals to the experience of his fellow-men: "I once prayed in all the fervency of this same religion.

I believed once all these things.

I put up prayers to Heaven which I cannot conceive how humanity could have refused to respond to,--prayers such as if put up to me I must have responded to.

I saw those near and dear to me perishing around me; and I learned the secret I care no longer to conceal, that man's dependence is upon his courage and his industry, and dependence upon Heaven there seems to be none."[293] Such was his private experience; and facts of public notoriety are appealed to in confirmation: "It has long seemed to me the most serious libel on the character of the Deity to assume for one moment that he interferes in human exigencies.

A mountain of desolating facts rises up to shame into silence the hazardous supposition?
Was not the whole land a short time ago convulsed with horror at the fate of the _Amazon_?
There was not a wretch in the whole country whose slumbering humanity would not have been aroused in the presence of that dismal calamity." ...