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made a thorough study of military matters, and was appointed second in command in his regiment in 1754, and aide to General Braddock in 1755. In 1758 he was elected to the House of Burgesses. He was one of the six Virginian delegates to the Con tinental Congress in 1774, and in the following year he received the command of the Continental army. At the close of the War of Independence he returned to private life, but he was President of the Philadelphia Convention which framed a Constitution in 1787, and in 1789 he was elected first President of the &quot;United States. He was re-elected in 1793, and his vigorous and enlightened administration saw the new State solidly established. He declined re-election in 1796, and retired to Mount Vernon to devote himself to agriculture. There has been much controversy in America about Washington s views on religion, but the evidence is such that one can attribute it only to reluctance to allow Eationalism on the part of one of the greatest of Americans. President Thomas Jefferson, who ought to know, expressly says that Washington was not a Christian (Memoir, Correspondence, etc., vol. iv, p. 512). He says that Gouverneur Morris, who was intimate with Washington, &quot; often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system [Christianity] than he himself did.&quot; He says, on the authority of the chaplain of Congress, that the clergy, in presenting an address to Washington after his retirement, pointedly intimated to him that he had not yet said a single word in public that identified him with Christianity ; and that &quot; the old fox &quot; evaded their hint, and gave them satisfac tion on all points except that. The case for orthodoxy is best put by Jared Sparks in his Life of George Washington (1852), and is an entire failure. There is a vague reference to &quot; all his writings &quot;; whereas Washington, apart from Theistic phrases, merely spoke on one occasion of the benign influence of the Christian religion,&quot; as Eenan might do. The main point is that Washington had a pew, and regularly

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attended church ; but the force of this is. completely destroyed when Sparks admits that, while Mrs. Washington always re mained for the communion, Washington himself always went home before that part of the service. It is admitted that at least after the war he never took the communion ; and to plead that he was too busy and distracted (in his retirement) for so holy a function is ludicrous. The mean ing is plain. There is a very questionable statement that he said private prayer in the morning (as a Theist might) ; but Sparks himself gives a letter from Wash ington s adopted daughter in which she says that she does not know this. She obviously knows that he was not a Chris tian, and is seeking to obscure the fact. Sparks discusses the subject in an appendix (pp. 518-25) ; and all the evidence is collected and analysed in Eemsburg s Six Historic Americans. Finally, Sparks gives minute accounts of the last days of Wash ington, and from these it is clear that he&amp;gt; had no minister of religion. Sparks takes no notice of this. It is quite evident that Washington was, like Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and so many other of the great Americans, a Deist, though not so heterodox as Jefferson. D. Dec. 14, 1799.

WATSON, James, publisher. B. Sep. 21,. 1799. Ed. by his mother, a Sunday-school teacher. Watson was put to work at domestic service in a clergyman s house at the age of twelve. In 1817 he entered a warehouse at Leeds, and two years later he was converted to Eationalism by reading Cobbett and Carlile. When Carlile was. imprisoned in 1822, Watson went to London to assist in his shop, and he thus began his long and heroic work for the freedom of the press and enlightenment. In 1823 he was sent for a year to prison, where he read Hume and Gibbon and deepened his Eationalist convictions. After his release he learned printing, and was for a time on Carlile s Lion. In 1826 he joined the Owen- ites, and was for some months storekeeper to the First Co-operative Trading Associa- 872