Item 16 - Letter from Charles Webb Le Bas

3 pp

East India College, Hertford - Has WW seen a work in French on the occult sciences by [Eusèbe Salverte]: one of its main objects is to show that the ancients were in full possession of such things as gunpowder and other mysteries, and that by means of these, 'most of the stupendous miracles of the O.T. [Old Testament] are capable of rational explanation?' Le Bas would like a discussion of this in the British Critic and thinks WW or someone from the Philosophical Society would be perfect for the task. Just as the Edinburgh Review is calling upon the ''well-paid and well-fed' functionaries of the Establishment...to grapple with the half starved rational Divines of Germany, who are for explaining away all miraculous aging. Surely it is...incumbent upon us to dispose of similar attacks from French free-thinkers. So far as I am able to judge, the hypothesis of the author is grossly extravagant - but it may require no common mastery in science to satisfy the public that it is so'. He is to offer himself for the Pulpit of Lincoln's Inn.