Thomas Paine and The Age of Reason, Part 2

THOMAS PAINE.
THE AGE OF REASON


Part Second  (see part 1 here)


Preface to Part II


    I HAVE mentioned in the former part of the Age of Reason that it
had long been my intention to publish my thoughts upon religion; but
that I had originally reserved it to a later period in life
intending it to be the last work I should undertake. The
circumstances, however, which existed in France in the latter end of
the year 1793, determined me to delay it no longer. The just and
humane principles of the revolution, which philosophy had first
diffused, had been departed from. The idea, always dangerous to
society, as it is derogatory to the Almighty, that priests could
forgive sins, though it seemed to exist no longer, had blunted the
feelings of humanity, and prepared men for the commission of all
manner of crimes. The intolerant spirit of Church persecutions had
transferred itself into politics; the tribunal styled revolutionary,
supplied the place of an inquisition; and the guillotine and the stake
outdid the fire and fagot of the Church. I saw many of my most
intimate friends destroyed, others daily carried to prison, and I
had reason to believe, and had also intimations given me, that the
same danger was approaching myself.


    Under these disadvantages, I began the former part of the Age of
Reason; I had, besides, neither Bible nor Testament to refer to,
though I was writing against both; nor could I procure any:
notwithstanding which, I have produced a work that no Bible
believer, though writing at his ease, and with a library of Church
books about him, can refute.


    Toward the latter end of December of that year, a motion was
made and carried, to exclude foreigners from the convention. There
were but two in it, Anacharsis Cloots and myself; and I saw I was
particularly pointed at by Bourdon de l'Oise, in his speech on that
motion.


    Conceiving, after this, that I had but a few days of liberty, I
sat down and brought the work to a close as speedily as possible;
and I had not finished it more than six hours, in the state it has
since appeared, before a guard came there, about three in the
morning, with an order signed by the two Committees of public
Safety and Surety General for putting me in arrestation as a
foreigner, and conveyed me to the prison of the Luxembourg.
I contrived, on my way there, to call on Joel Barlow, and I put
the manuscript of the work into his hands: as more safe than in
my possession in prison; and not knowing what might be the
fate in France either of the writer or the work, I addressed it to
the protection of the citizens of the United States.


    It is with justice that I say that the guard who executed this
order, and the interpreter of the Committee of General Surety who
accompanied them to examine my papers, treated me not only with
civility, but with respect. The keeper of the Luxembourg, Bennoit, a
man of a good heart, showed to me every friendship in his power, as
did also all his family, while he continued in that station. He was
removed from it, put into arrestation, and carried before the tribunal
upon a malignant accusation, but acquitted.


    After I had been in the Luxembourg about three weeks, the
Americans then in Paris went in a body to the convention to reclaim
me as their countryman and friend; but were answered by the
President, Vadier, who was also President of the Committee of
Surety-General, and had signed the order for my arrestation, that
I was born in England. I heard no more, after this, from any person
out of the walls of the prison till the fall of Robespierre, on the 9th
of Thermidor- July 27, 1794.


    About two months before this event I was seized with a fever, that
in its progress had every symptom of becoming mortal, and from the
effects of which I am not recovered. It was then that I remembered
with renewed satisfaction, and congratulated myself most sincerely, on
having written the former part of the Age of Reason. I had then but
little expectation of surviving, and those about me had less. I
know, therefore, by experience, the conscientious trial of my own
principles.
    I was then with three chamber comrades, Joseph Vanhuele, of
Bruges; Charles Bastini, and Michael Rubyns, of Louvain. The
unceasing and anxious attention of these three friends to me,
by night and by day, I remember with gratitude and mention with
pleasure. It happened that a physician (Dr. Graham) and a surgeon
(Mr. Bond), part of the suite of General O'Hara, were then in the
Luxembourg. I ask not myself whether it be convenient to them, as
men under the English government, that I express to them my
thanks, but should reproach myself if I did not; and also to the
physician of the Luxembourg, Dr. Markoski.


    I have some reason to believe, because I cannot discover any other
cause, that this illness preserved me in existence. Among the papers
of Robespierre that were examined and reported upon to the
Convention by a Committee of Deputies, is a note in the hand-writing
of Robespierre, in the following words:


    "Demander que Thomas Paine soit decrete d'accusation, pour
l'interet de l'Amerique autant que de la France."


    To demand that a decree of accusation be passed against Thomas
Paine, for the interest of America, as well as of France.


    From what cause it was that the intention was not put in execution
I know not, and cannot inform myself, and therefore I ascribe it to
impossibility, on account of that illness.


    The Convention, to repair as much as lay in their power the
injustice I had sustained, invited me publicly and unanimously to
return into the Convention, and which I accepted, to show I could bear
an injury without permitting it to injure my principles or my
disposition. It is not because right principles have been violated
that they are to be abandoned.


    I have seen, since I have been at liberty, several publications
written, some in America and some in England, as answers to the former
part of "The Age of Reason." If the authors of these can amuse
themselves by so doing, I shall not interrupt them. They may write
against the work, and against me, as much as they please; they do me
more service than they intend, and I can have no objection that they
write on. They will find, however, by this second part, without its
being written as an answer to them, that they must return to their
work, and spin their cobweb over again. The first is brushed away by
accident.
    They will now find that I have furnished myself with a Bible and
Testament; and I can say also that I have found them to be much
worse books than I had conceived. If I have erred in anything in the
former part of the Age of Reason, it has been by speaking better of
some parts of those books than they have deserved.


    I observe that all my opponents resort, more or less, to what they
call Scripture evidence and Bible authority to help them out. They are
so little masters of the subject, as to confound a dispute about
authenticity with a dispute about doctrines; I will, however, put them
right, that if they should be disposed to write any more, they may
know how to begin.
                                             THOMAS PAINE.
    October, 1795
CHAPTER I
As to the Old Testament


    IT has often been said, that anything may be proved from the
Bible, but before anything can be admitted as proved by the Bible, the
Bible itself must be proved to be true; for if the Bible be not
true, or the truth of it be doubtful, it ceases to have authority, and
cannot be admitted as proof of anything.


    It has been the practice of all Christian commentators on the
Bible, and of all Christian priests and preachers, to impose the Bible
on the world as a mass of truth and as the word of God; they have
disputed and wrangled, and anathematized each other about the
supposed meaning of particular parts and passages therein; one has
said and insisted that such a passage meant such a thing; another
that it meant directly the contrary; and a third, that it meant neither
one nor the other, but something different from both; and this they call
understanding the Bible.


    It has happened that all the answers which I have seen to the
former part of the Age of Reason have been written by priests; and
these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and
pretend to understand the Bible; each understands it differently,
but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in
telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not.


    Now, instead of wasting their time, and heating themselves in
fractious disputations about doctrinal points drawn from the Bible,
these men ought to know, and if they do not, it is civility to
inform them, that the first thing to be understood is, whether there
is sufficient authority for believing the Bible to be the word of God,
or whether there is not.


    There are matters in that book, said to be done by the express
command of God, that are as shocking to humanity and to every idea
we have of moral justice as anything done by Robespierre, by
Carrier, by Joseph le Bon, in France, by the English government in the
East Indies, or by any other assassin in modern times. When we read
in the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the
Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who, as
history itself shows, had given them no offence; that they put all
those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor
infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women, and children; that
they left not a soul to breathe- expressions that are repeated over
and over again in those books, and that, too, with exulting ferocity-
are we sure these things are facts? are we sure that the Creator of
man commissioned these things to be done? and are we sure that the
books that tell us so were written by his authority?


    It is not the antiquity of a tale that is any evidence of its
truth; on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous; for the
more ancient any history pretends to be, the more it has the
resemblance of a fable. The origin of every nation is buried in
fabulous tradition, and that of the Jews is as much to be suspected as
any other. To charge the commission of acts upon the Almighty,
which, in their own nature, and by every rule of moral justice, are
crimes, as all assassination is, and more especially the assassination
of infants, is matter of serious concern. The Bible tells us, that
those assassinations were done by the express command of God. To
believe, therefore, the Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our
belief in the moral justice of God; for wherein could crying or
smiling infants offend? And to read the Bible without horror, we
must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing, and benevolent in
the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that
the Bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it
to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.


    But in addition to all the moral evidence against the Bible, I
will in the progress of this work produce such other evidence as
even a priest cannot deny, and show, from that evidence, that the
Bible is not entitled to credit as being the word of God.


    But, before I proceed to this examination, I will show wherein the
Bible differs from all other ancient writings with respect to the
nature of the evidence necessary to establish its authenticity; and
this is the more proper to be done, because the advocates of the
Bible, in their answers to the former part of the Age of Reason,
undertake to say, and they put some stress thereon, that the
authenticity of the Bible is as well established as that of any
other ancient book; as if our belief of the one could become any
rule for our belief of the other.


    I know, however, but of one ancient book that authoritatively
challenges universal consent and belief, and that is Euclid's Elements
of Geometry;* and the reason is, because it is a book of
self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author, and of
everything relating to time, place, and circumstance. The matters
contained in that book would have the same authority they now have,
had they been written by any other person, or had the work been
anonymous, or had the author never been known; for the identical
certainty of who was the author, makes no part of our belief of the
matters contained in the book. But it is quite otherwise with
respect to the books ascribed to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel, etc.;
those are books of testimony, and they testify of things naturally
incredible; and therefore, the whole of our belief as to the
authenticity of those books rests, in the first place, upon the
certainty that they were written by Moses, Joshua, and Samuel;
secondly upon the credit we give to their testimony. We may believe
the first, that is, we may believe the certainty of the authorship,
and yet not the testimony; in the same manner that we may believe
that a certain person gave evidence upon a case and yet not believe
the evidence that he gave. But if it should be found that the books
ascribed to Moses, Joshua, and Samuel, were not written by Moses,
Joshua, and Samuel, every part of the authority and authenticity of
those books is gone at once; for there can be no such thing as
forged or invented testimony; neither can there be anonymous
testimony, more especially as to things naturally incredible, such
as that of talking with God face to face, or that of the sun and
moon standing still at the command of a man. The greatest part of
the other ancient books are works of genius; of which kind are those
ascribed to Homer, to Plato, to Aristotle, to Demosthenes, to
Cicero, etc. Here, again, the author is not essential in the credit we
give to any of those works, for, as works of genius, they would have
the same merit they have now, were they anonymous. Nobody
believes the Trojan story, as related by Homer, to be true- for it is
the poet only that is admired, and the merit of the poet will remain,
though the story be fabulous. But if we disbelieve the matters related
by the Bible authors, (Moses for instance), as we disbelieve the things
related by Homer, there remains nothing of Moses in our estimation,
but an impostor. As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to
Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and
credible, and no farther; for if we do, we must believe the two
miracles which Tacitus relates were performed by Vespasian, that of
curing a lame man and a blind man, in just the same manner as the
same things are told of Jesus Christ by his historians. We must also
believe the miracle cited by Josephus, that of the sea of Pamphilia
opening to let Alexander and his army pass, as is related of the Red
Sea in Exodus. These miracles are quite as well authenticated as the
Bible miracles, and yet we do not believe them; consequently the
degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things
naturally incredible, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far
greater than that which obtains our belief to natural and probable
things; and therefore the advocates for the Bible have no claim to our
belief of the Bible, because that we believe things stated in other
ancient writings; since we believe the things stated in these writings
no further than they are probable and credible, or because they are
self-evident, like Euclid; or admire them because they are elegant,
like Homer; or approve of them because they are sedate, like Plato
or judicious, like Aristotle.


    *Euclid, according to chronological history, lived three hundred
years before Christ, and about one hundred before Archimedes; he
was of the city of Alexandria, in Egypt.

    Having premised these things, I proceed to examine the
authenticity of the Bible, and I begin with what are called the five
books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy. My intention is to show that those books are spurious,
and that Moses is not the author of them; and still further, that they
were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred
years afterward; that they are no other than an attempted history of
the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived,
and also of the times prior thereto, written by some very ignorant and
stupid pretenders to authorship, several hundred years after the death
of Moses, as men now write histories of things that happened, or are
supposed to have happened, several hundred or several thousand
years ago.


    The evidence that I shall produce in this case is from the books
themselves, and I shall confine myself to this evidence only. Were I
to refer for proof to any of the, ancient authors whom the advocates
of the Bible call profane authors, they would controvert that
authority, as I controvert theirs; I will therefore meet them on their
own ground, and oppose them with their own weapon, the Bible.


    In the first place, there is no affirmative evidence that Moses is
the author of those books; and that he is the author, is an altogether
unfounded opinion, got abroad nobody knows how. The style and
manner in which those books were written give no room to believe,
or even to suppose, they were written by Moses, for it is altogether
the style and manner of another person speaking of Moses. In
Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers (for everything in Genesis is prior
to the time of Moses, and not the least allusion is made to him
therein), the whole, I say, of these books is in the third person; it
is always, the Lord said unto Moses, or Moses said unto the Lord,
or Moses said unto the people, or the people said unto Moses;
and this is the style and manner that historians use in speaking
of the persons whose lives and actions they are writing. It may be
said that a man may speak of himself in the third person, and
therefore it may be supposed that Moses did; but supposition
proves nothing; and if the advocates for the belief that Moses
wrote these books himself have nothing better to advance than
supposition, they may as well be silent.


    But granting the grammatical right that Moses might speak of
himself in the third person, because any man might speak of himself in
that manner, it cannot be admitted as a fact in those books that it is
Moses who speaks, without rendering Moses truly ridiculous and
absurd. For example, Numbers, chap. xii. ver. 3. Now the man Moses
was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the
earth. If Moses said this of himself, instead of being the meekest of
men, he was one of the most vain and arrogant of coxcombs; and the
advocates for those books may now take which side they please, for
both sides are against them; if Moses was not the author, the books
are without authority; and if he was the author, the author is without
credit, because to boast of meekness is the reverse of meekness, and
is a lie in sentiment.


    In Deuteronomy, the style and manner of writing marks more
evidently than in the former books that Moses is not the writer. The
manner here used is dramatical; the writer opens the subject by a
short introductory discourse, and then introduces Moses in the act
of speaking, and when he has made Moses finish his harangue, he (the
writer) resumes his own part, and speaks till he brings Moses
forward again, and at last closes the scene with an account of the
death, funeral, and character of Moses.


    This interchange of speakers occurs four times in this book;
from the first verse of the first chapter to the end of the fifth
verse, it is the writer who speaks; he then introduces Moses as in the
act of making his harangue, and this continues to the end of the
40th verse of the fourth chapter; here the writer drops Moses, and
speaks historically of what was done in consequence of what Moses,
when living, is supposed to have said, and which the writer has
dramatically rehearsed.


    The writer opens the subject again in the first verse of the fifth
chapter, though it is only by saying, that Moses called the people
of Israel together; he then introduces Moses as before, and
continues him, as in the act of speaking, to the end of the 26th
chapter. He does the same thing, at the beginning of the 27th chapter;
and continues Moses, as in the act of speaking, to the end of the 28th
chapter. At the 29th chapter the writer speaks again through the whole
of the first verse and the first line of the second verse, where he
introduces Moses for the last time, and continues him, as in the act
of speaking, to the end of the 33rd chapter.


    The writer having now finished the rehearsal on the part of Moses,
comes forward, and speaks through the whole of the last chapter; he
begins by telling the reader that Moses went to the top of Pisgah;
that he saw from thence the land which (the writer says) had been
promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; that he, Moses, died there,
in the land of Moab, but that no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto
this day; that is, unto the time in which the writer lived who wrote
the book of Deuteronomy. The writer then tells us, that Moses was
120 years of age when he died- that his eye was not dim, nor his
natural force abated; and he concludes by saying that there arose
not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom, says this
anonymous writer, the Lord knew face to face.


    Having thus shown, as far as grammatical evidence applies, that
Moses was not the writer of those books, I will, after making a few
observations on the inconsistencies of the writer of the book of
Deuteronomy, proceed to show from the historical and chronological
evidence contained in those books, that Moses was not, because he
could not be, the writer of them, and consequently that there is no
authority for believing that the inhuman and horrid butcheries of men,
women, and children, told of in those books, were done, as those
books say they were, at the command of God. It is a duty incumbent
on every true Deist, that he vindicate the moral justice of God against
the calumnies of the Bible.


    The writer of the book of Deuteronomy, whoever he was, (for it
is not an anonymous work), is obscure, and also in contradiction
with himself, in the account he has given of Moses.


    After telling that Moses went to the top of Pisgah (and it does
not appear from any account that he ever came down again), he
tells us that Moses died there in the land of Moab, and that he
buried him in a valley in the land of Moab; but as there is no
antecedent to the pronoun he, there is no knowing who he was
that did bury him. If the writer meant that he (God) buried him,
how should he (the writer) know it? or why should we
(the readers) believe him? since we know not who the writer was
that tells us so, for certainly Moses could not himself tell where
he was buried.


    The writer also tells us, that no man knoweth where the
sepulchre of Moses is unto this day, meaning the time in which this
writer lived; how then should he know that Moses was buried in a
valley in the land of Moab? for as the writer lived long after the
time of Moses, as is evident from his using the expression of unto
this day, meaning a great length of time after the death of Moses,
he certainly was not at his funeral; and on the other hand, it is
impossible that Moses himself could say that no man knoweth where
the sepulchre is unto this day. To make Moses the speaker, would
be an improvement on the play of a child that hides himself and cries
nobody can find me; nobody can find Moses!


    This writer has nowhere told us how he came by the speeches
which he has put into the mouth of Moses to speak, and therefore we
have a right to conclude, that he either composed them himself, or
wrote them from oral tradition. One or the other of these is the
more probable, since he has given in the fifth chapter a table of
commandments, in which that called the fourth commandment is
different from the fourth commandment in the twentieth chapter
of Exodus. In that of Exodus, the reason given for keeping the
seventh day is, "because (says the commandment) God made the
heavens and the earth in six days, and rested on the seventh;" but in
that of Deuteronomy, the reason given is that it was the day on
which the children of Israel came out of Egypt, and therefore, says
this commandment, the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the
sabbath day. This makes no mention of the creation, nor that of the
coming out of Egypt. There are also many things given as laws of
Moses in this book that are not to be found in any of the other books;
among which is that inhuman and brutal law, chapter xxi., verses 18,
19, 20 and 21, which authorizes parents, the father and the mother,
to bring their own children to have them stoned to death for what it
is pleased to call stubbornness. But priests have always been fond of
preaching up Deuteronomy, for Deuteronomy preaches up tithes; and
it is from this book, chap. xxv., ver. 4, that they have taken the
phrase, and applied it to tithing, that thou shall not muzzle the ox
when he treadeth out the corn; and that this might not escape
observation, they have noted it in the table of contents at the head
of the chapter, though it is only a single verse of less than two lines.
Oh, priests! priests! ye are willing to be compared to an ox, for the
sake of tithes. Though it is impossible for us to know identically who
the writer of Deuteronomy was, it is not difficult to discover him
professionally, that he was some Jewish priest, who lived, as I
shall show in the course of this work, at least three hundred and
fifty years after the time of Moses.


    I come now to speak of the historical and chronological
evidence. The chronology that I shall use is the Bible chronology, for
I mean not to go out of the Bible for evidence of anything, but to
make the Bible itself prove, historically and chronologically, that
Moses is not the author of the books ascribed to him. It is,
therefore, proper that I inform the reader (such a one at least as may
not have the opportunity of knowing it), that in the larger Bibles,
and also in some smaller ones, there is a series of chronology printed
in the margin of every page, for the purpose of showing how long the
historical matters stated in each page happened, or are supposed to
have happened, before Christ, and, consequently, the distance of
time between one historical circumstance and another.


    I begin with the book of Genesis. In the 14th chapter of
Genesis, the writer gives an account of Lot being taken prisoner in
a battle between the four kings against five, and carried off; and
that when the account of Lot being taken, came to Abraham, he armed
all his household and marched to rescue Lot from the captors, and that
he pursued them unto Dan (ver. 14).

    To show in what manner this expression pursuing them unto Dan
applies to the case in question, I will refer to two circumstances,
the one in America, the other in France. The city now called New York,
in America, was originally New Amsterdam; and the town in France,
lately called Havre Marat, was before called Havre de Grace. New
Amsterdam was changed to New York in the year 1664; Havre de
Grace to Havre Marat in 1793. Should, therefore, any writing be found,
though without date, in which the name of New York should be
mentioned, it would be certain evidence that such a uniting could
not have been written before, but must have been written after New
Amsterdam was changed to New York, and consequently, not till after
the year 1664, or at least during the course of that year. And, in
like manner, any dateless writing with the name of Havre Marat would
be certain evidence that such a writing must have been written after
Havre de Grace became Havre Marat, and consequently not till after
the year 1793, or at least during the course of that year.


    I now come to the application of those cases, and to show that
there was no such place as Dan, till many years after the death of
Moses, and consequently, that Moses could not be the writer of the
book of Genesis, where this account of pursuing them unto Dan is
given. The place that is called Dan in the Bible was originally a town
of the Gentiles called Laish; and when the tribe of Dan seized upon
this town, they changed its name to Dan, in commemoration of Dan,
who was the father of that tribe, and the great grandson of Abraham.


    To establish this in proof, it is necessary to refer from Genesis,
to the 18th chapter of the book called the Book of Judges. It is there
said (ver. 27) that they (the Danites) came unto Laish to a people
that were quiet and secure, and they smote them with the edge of the
sword (the Bible is filled with murder), and burned the city with
fire; and they built a city (ver. 28), and dwelt therein, and they
called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan, their
father, howbeit the name of the city was Laish at the first.


    This account of the Danites taking possession of Laish and
changing it to Dan, is placed in the Book of Judges immediately
after the death of Sampson. The death of Sampson is said to have
happened 1120 years before Christ, and that of Moses 1451 before
Christ; and, therefore, according to the historical arrangement, the
place was not called Dan till 331 years after the death of Moses.


    There is a striking confusion between the historical and the
chronological arrangement in the book of Judges. The five last
chapters, as they stand in the book, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, are put
chronologically before all the preceding chapters; they are made to be
28 years before the 16th chapter, 266 before the 15th, 245 before
the 13th, 195 before the 9th, 90 before the 4th, and 15 years before
the 1st chapter. This shows the uncertain and fabulous state of the
Bible. According to the chronological arrangement, the taking of Laish
and giving it the name of Dan is made to be 20 years after the death
of Joshua, who was the successor of Moses; and by the historical order
as it stands in the book, it is made to be 306 years after the death
of Joshua, and 331 after that of Moses; but they both exclude Moses
from being the writer of Genesis, because, according to either of
the statements, no such place as Dan existed in the time of Moses;
and therefore the writer of Genesis must have been some person who
lived after the town of Laish had the name of Dan; and who that person
was nobody knows, and consequently the book of Genesis is anonymous
and without authority.


    I proceed now to state another point of historical and
chronological evidence, and to show therefrom, as in the preceding
case, that Moses is not the author of the book of Genesis.


    In the 36th chapter of Genesis there is given a genealogy of the
sons and descendants of Esau, who are called Edomites, and also a
list, by name, of the kings of Edom, in enumerating of which, it is
said, (verse 31), And these are the kings that reigned in Edom, before
there reigned any king over the children of Israel.


    Now, were any dateless writings to be found in which, speaking
of any past events, the writer should say, These things happened
before there was any Congress in America, or before there was any
Convention in France, it would be evidence that such writing could not
have been written before, and could only be written after there was
a Congress in America, or a Convention in France, as the case might
be; and, consequently, that it could not be written by any person
who died before there was a Congress in the one country or a
Convention in the other.


    Nothing is more frequent, as well in history as in conversation,
than to refer to a fact in the room of a date; it is most natural so
to do, first, because a fact fixes itself in the memory better than
a date; secondly, because the fact includes the date, and serves to
excite two ideas at once; and this manner of speaking by
circumstances implies as positively that the fact alluded to is past as
if it were so expressed. When a person speaking upon any matter,
says, it was before I was married, or before my son was born, or
before I went to America, or before I went to France, it is absolutely
understood, and intended to be understood, that he had been married,
that he has had a son, that he has been in America, or been in France.
Language does not admit of using this mode of expression in any other
sense; and whenever such an expression is found anywhere, it can
only be understood in the sense in which it only could have been used.


    The passage, therefore, that I have quoted- "that these are the
kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the
children of Israel"- could only have been written after the first
king began to reign over them; and, consequently, that the book of
Genesis, so far from having been written by Moses, could not have
been written till the time of Saul at least. This is the positive sense
of the passage; but the expression, any king, implies more kings
than one, at least it implies two, and this will carry it to the
time of David; and if taken in a general sense, it carries it
through all the time of the Jewish monarchy.


    Had we met with this verse in any part of the Bible that professed
to have been written after kings began to reign in Israel, it would
have been impossible not to have seen the application of it. It
happens then that this is the case; the two books of Chronicles, which
gave a history of all the kings, of Israel, are professedly, as well
as in fact, written after the Jewish monarchy began; and this verse
that I have quoted, and all the remaining verses of the 36th chapter
of Genesis, are word for word in the first chapter of Chronicles,
beginning at the 43d verse


    It was with consistency that the writer of the Chronicles could
say, as he has said, 1st Chron., chap. i., ver. 43, These are the
kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over
the children of Israel, because he was going to give, and has given, a
list of the kings that had reigned in Israel; but as it is
impossible that the same expression could have been used before that
period, it is as certain as anything that can be proved from
historical language that this part of Genesis is taken from Chronicles
and that Genesis is not so old as Chronicles, and probably not so
old as the book of Homer, or as Aesop's Fables, admitting Homer to
have been, as the tables of Chronology state, contemporary with
David or Solomon, and Aesop to have lived about the end of the
Jewish monarchy.


    Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on
which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood,
and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of
stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of
downright lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his
ark, drops to a level with the Arabian tales, without the merit of being
entertaining; and the account of men living to eight and nine
hundred years becomes as fabulous immortality of the giants of the
Mythology.


    Besides, the character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the
most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was
the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the
pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation,
committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the
history of any nation, of which I will state only one instance.


    When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and
murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows: Numbers, chap.
xxxi., ver. 13:


    "And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the
congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses
was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over
thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle;
and Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? behold,
these caused the children of Israel, through the council of Balaam, to
commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was
a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill
every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known
a man by lying with him; but all the women-children, that have not
known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."


    Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have
disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than
Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the
boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters.


    Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers;
one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in
the hands of an executioner; let any daughter put herself in the
situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a
mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? It is in vain
that we attempt to impose upon nature, for nature will have her
course, and the religion that tortures all her social ties is a
false religion.


    After this detestable order, follows an account of the plunder
taken, and the manner of dividing it; and here it is that the
profaneness of priestly hypocrisy increases the catalogue of crimes.
Ver. 37 to 40, "And the lord's tribute of sheep was six hundred and
three score and fifteen; and the beeves were thirty and six
thousand, of which the Lord's tribute was three score and twelve;
and the asses were thirty thousand and five hundred, of which the
Lord's tribute was three score and one; and the persons were sixteen
thousand, of which the Lord's tribute was thirty and two persons."
In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many
other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read or for
decency to hear, for it appears, from the 35th verse of this
chapter, that the number of women-children consigned to debauchery
by the order of Moses was thirty-two thousand.


    People in general do not know what wickedness there is in this
pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take
it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they
permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they
form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have
been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens!
it is quite another thing; it is a book of lies, wickedness, and
blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the
wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty?


    But to return to my subject, that of showing that Moses is not the
author of the books ascribed to him, and that the Bible is spurious.
The two instances I have already given would be sufficient without any
additional evidence, to invalidate the authenticity of any book that
pretended to be four or five hundred years more ancient than the
matters it speaks of, or refers to, as facts; for in the case of
pursuing them unto Dan, and of the kings that reigned over the
children of Israel, not even the flimsy pretence of prophecy can be
pleaded. The expressions are in the preter tense, and it would be
downright idiotism to say that a man could prophecy in the preter
tense.


    But there are many other passages scattered throughout those
books that unite in the same point of evidence. It is said in Exodus,
(another of the books ascribed to Moses), chap. xvi. verse 34, "And
the children of Israel did eat manna forty years until they came to
a land inhabited; they did eat manna until they came unto the
borders of the land of Canaan.


    Whether the children of Israel ate manna or not, or what manna
was, or whether it was anything more than a kind of fungus or small
mushroom, or other vegetable substance common to that part of the
country, makes nothing to my argument; all that I mean to show is,
that it is not Moses that could write this account, because the
account extends itself beyond the life and time of Moses. Moses,
according to the Bible, (but it is such a book of lies and
contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe, or whether
any), died in the wilderness and never came upon the borders of the
land of Cannan; and consequently it could not be he that said what the
children of Israel did, or what they ate when they came there. This
account of eating manna, which they tell us was written by Moses,
extends itself to the time of Joshua, the successor of Moses; as
appears by the account given in the book of Joshua, after the children
of Israel had passed the river Jordan, and came unto the borders of
the land of Canaan. Joshua, chap. v., verse 12. "And the manna
ceased on the morrow, after they had eaten of the old corn of the
land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more, but they
did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year."


    But a more remarkable instance than this occurs in Deuteronomy,
which, while it shows that Moses could not be the writer of that book,
shows also the fabulous notions that prevailed at that time about
giants. In the third chapter of Deuteronomy, among the conquests
said to be made by Moses, is an account of the taking of Og, king of
Bashan, v. II. "For only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant
of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in
Rabbath of the children of Ammom? Nine cubits was the length
thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a
man." A cubit is 1 foot 9 888-1000ths inches; the length, therefore,
of the bed was 16 feet 4 inches, and the breadth 7 feet 4 inches; thus
much for this giant's bed. Now for the historical part, which,
though the evidence is not so direct and positive as in the former
cases, it is nevertheless very presumable and corroborating
evidence, and is better that the best evidence on the contrary side.


    The writer, by way of proving the existence of this giant,
refers to his bed as an ancient relic, and says, Is it not in
Rabbath (or Rabbah) of the children of Ammon? meaning that it is;
for such is frequently the Bible method of affirming a thing. But it
could not be Moses that said this, because Moses could know nothing
about Rabbah, nor of what was in it. Rabbah was not a city belonging
to this giant king, nor was it one of the cities that Moses took.
The knowledge, therefore, that this bed was at Rabbah, and of the
particulars of its dimensions, must be referred to the time when
Rabbah was taken, and this was not till four hundred years after the
death of Moses; for which see 2 Sam. chap. xii., ver. 26. "And Joab
(David's general) fought against Rabbah of the children of Ammon,
and took the royal city."


    As I am not undertaking to point out all the contradictions in
time, place, and circumstance that abound in the books ascribed to
Moses, and which prove to a demonstration that those books could not
have been written by Moses, nor in the time of Moses, I proceed to the
book of Joshua, and to show that Joshua is not the author of that
book, and that it is anonymous and without authority. The evidence I
shall produce is contained in the book itself; I will not go out of
the Bible for proof against the supposed authenticity of the Bible.
False testimony is always good against itself.


    Joshua, according to the first chapter of Joshua, was the
immediate successor of Moses; he was, moreover, a military man,
which Moses was not, and he continued as chief of the people of Israel
25 years, that is, from the time that Moses died, which, according
to the Bible chronology, was 1451 years before Christ, until 1426
years before Christ, when, according to the same chronology, Joshua
died. If, therefore, we find in this book, said to have been written
by Joshua, reference to facts done after the death of Joshua, it is
evidence that Joshua could not be the author; and also that the book
could not have been written till after the time of the latest fact
which it records. As to the character of the book, it is horrid; it is
a military history of rapine and murder, as savage and brutal as those
recorded of his predecessor in villainy and hypocrisy, Moses; and
the blasphemy consists, as in the former books, in ascribing those
deeds to the orders of the Almighty.


    In the first place, the book of Joshua, as is the case in the
preceding books, is written in the third person; it is the historian
of Joshua that speaks, for it would have been absurd and vain-glorious
that Joshua should say of himself, as is said of him in the last verse
of the sixth chapter, that "his fame was noised throughout all the
country." I now come more immediately to the proof.


    In the 24th chapter, ver. 31, it is said, "And Israel served the
Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders that
overlived Joshua." Now, in the name of common sense, can it be
Joshua that relates what people had done after he was dead? This
account must not only have been written by some historian that lived
after Joshua, but that lived also after the elders that outlived
Joshua.

    There are several passages of a general meaning with respect to
time scattered throughout the book of Joshua, that carries the time in
which the book was written to a distance from the time of Joshua,
but without marking by exclusion any particular time, as in the
passage above quoted. In that passage, the time that intervened
between the death of Joshua and the death of the elders is excluded
descriptively and absolutely, and the evidence substantiates that
the book could not have been written till after the death of the last.


    But though the passages to which I allude, and which I am going to
quote, do not designate any particular time by exclusion, they imply a
time far more distant from the days of Joshua than is contained
between the death of Joshua and the death of the elders. Such is the
passage, chap. x., ver. 14, where, after giving an account that the
sun stood still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon,
at the command of Joshua (a tale only fit to amuse children), the
passage says, "And there was no day like that, before it, or after it,
that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man."


    This tale of the sun standing still upon mount Gibeon, and the
moon in the valley of Ajalon, is one of those fables that detects
itself. Such a circumstance could not have happened without being
known all over the world. One half would have wondered why the
sun did not rise, and the other why it did not set; and the tradition
of it would be universal, whereas there is not a nation in the world
that knows anything about it. But why must the moon stand still?
What occasion could there be for moonlight in the daytime, and that
too while the sun shone? As a poetical figure, the whole is well
enough; it is akin to that in the song of Deborah and Barak, The
stars in their courses fought against Sisera; but it is inferior to the
figurative declaration of Mahomet to the persons who came to
expostulate with him on his goings on: "Wert thou," said he, "to
come to me with the sun in thy right hand and the moon in thy left,
itshould not alter my career." For Joshua to have exceeded
Mahomet, he should have put the sun and moon one in each pocket,
and carried them as Guy Fawkes carried his dark lantern, and taken
them out to shine as he might happen to want them.


    The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it
is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime
makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the
sublime again; the account, however, abstracted from the poetical
fancy, shows the ignorance of Joshua, for he should have
commanded the earth to have stood still.


    The time implied by the expression after it, that is, after that
day, being put in comparison with all the time that passed before
it, must, in order to give any expressive signification to the
passage, mean a great length of time: for example, it would have
been ridiculous to have said so the next day, or the next week, or the
next month, or the next year; to give, therefore, meaning to the
passage, comparative with the wonder it relates and the prior time
it alludes to, it must mean centuries of years; less, however, than
one would be trifling, and less than two would be barely admissible.


    A distant but general time is also expressed in the 8th chapter,
where, after giving an account of the taking of the city of Ai, it
is said, ver. 28, "And Joshua burned Ai, and made it a heap forever,
even a desolation unto this day;" and again, ver. 29, where,
speaking of the king of Ai, whom Joshua had hanged, and buried at
the entering of the gate, it is said, "And he raised thereon a great
heap of stones, which remaineth unto this day," that is, unto the
day or time in which the writer of the book of Joshua lived. And
again, in the 10th chapter, where, after speaking of the five kings
whom Joshua had hanged on five trees, and then thrown in a cave,
it is said, "And he laid great stones on the cave's mouth, which remain
unto this very day."


    In enumerating the several exploits of Joshua, and of the
tribes, and of the places which they conquered or attempted, it is
said, chap. xv., ver. 63: "As for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them out; but the
Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day.
The question upon this passage is, at what time did the Jebusites
and the children of Judah dwell together at Jerusalem? As this
matter occurs again in the first chapter of Judges, I shall reserve my
observations until I come to that part.


    Having thus shown from the book of Joshua itself without any
auxiliary evidence whatever, that Joshua is not the author of that
book, and that it is anonymous, and consequently without authority,
I proceed as before mentioned, to the book of Judges.


    The book of Judges is anonymous on the face of it; and, therefore,
even the pretence is wanting to call it the word of God; it has not so
much as a nominal voucher; it is altogether fatherless.


    This book begins with the same expression as the book of Joshua.
That of Joshua begins, chap. i., verse 1, "Now after the death of
Moses," etc., and this of the Judges begins, "Now after the death of
Joshua," etc. This, and the similarity of style between the two books,
indicate that they are the work of the same author, but who he was
is altogether unknown; the only point that the book proves, is that
the author lived long after the time of Joshua; for though it begins
as if it followed immediately after his death, the second chapter is
an epitome or abstract of the whole book, which, according to the
Bible chronology, extends its history through a space of 306 years;
that is, from the death of Joshua, 1426 years before Christ, to the
death of Samson, 1120 years before Christ, and only 25 years before
Saul went to seek his father's asses, and was made king. But there
is good reason to believe, that it was not written till the time of
David, at least, and that the book of Joshua was not written before
the same time.

    In the first chapter of Judges, the writer, after announcing the
death of Joshua, proceeds to tell what happened between the children
of Judah and the native inhabitants of the land of Canaan. In this
statement, the writer, having abruptly mentioned Jerusalem in the
7th verse, says immediately after, in the 8th verse, by way of
explanation, "Now the children of Judah had fought against
Jerusalem, and had taken it;" consequently this book could not have
been written before Jerusalem had been taken. The reader will
recollect the quotation I have just before made from the 15th
chapter of Joshua, ver. 63, where it is said that the Jebusites
dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day, meaning
the time when the book of Joshua was written.


    The evidence I have already produced to prove that the books I
have hitherto treated of were not written by the persons to whom
they are ascribed, nor till many years after their death, if such
persons ever lived, is already so abundant that I can afford to
admit this passage with less weight than I am entitled to draw from
it. For the case is, that so far as the Bible can be credited as a
history, the city of Jerusalem was not taken till the time of David;
and consequently that the books of Joshua and of Judges were not
written till after the commencement of the reign of David, which was
370 years after the death of Joshua.
    The name of the city that was afterward called Jerusalem was
originally Jebus, or Jebusi, and was the capital of the Jebusites. The
account of David's taking this city is given in II. Samuel, chap.
v., ver. 4, etc.; also in I. Chron. chap. xiv., ver. 4, etc. There
is no mention in any part of the Bible that it was ever taken
before, nor any account that favors such an opinion. It is not said,
either in Samuel or in Chronicles, that they utterly destroyed men,
women and children; that they left not a soul to breathe, as is said
of their other conquests; and the silence here observed implies that
it was taken by capitulation, and that the Jebusites, the native
inhabitants, continued to live in the place after it was taken. The
account therefore, given in Joshua, that the Jebusites dwell with
the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day corresponds to no
other time than after the taking of the city by David.


    Having now shown that every book in the Bible, from Genesis to
Judges, is without authenticity, I come to the book of Ruth, an
idle, bungling story, foolishly told, nobody knows by whom, about a
strolling country-girl creeping slyly to bed with her cousin Boaz.
Pretty stuff indeed to be called the word of God! It is, however,
one of the best books in the Bible, for it is free from murder and
rapine.


    I come next to the two books of Samuel, and to show that those
books were not written by Samuel, nor till a great length of time
after the death of Samuel; and that they are, like all the former
books, anonymous and without authority.


    To be convinced that these books have been written much later
than the time of Samuel, and consequently not by him, it is only
necessary to read the account which the writer gives of Saul going
to seek his father's asses, and of his interview with Samuel, of
whom Saul went to inquire about those lost asses, as foolish people
nowadays go to a conjuror to inquire after lost things.


    The writer, in relating this story of Saul, Samuel and the
asses, does not tell it as a thing that has just then happened, but as
an ancient story in the time this writer lived; for he tells it in the
language or terms used at the time that Samuel lived, which obliges
the writer to explain the story in the terms or language used in the
time the writer lived.


    Samuel, in the account given of him, in the first of those
books, chap ix., is called the seer; and it is by this term that
Saul inquires after him, ver. II, "And as they (Saul and his
servant) went up the hill to the city, they found young maidens
going out to draw water; and they said unto them, Is the seer here?"
Saul then went according to the direction of these maidens, and met
Samuel without knowing him, and said unto him, ver. 18, "Tell me, I
pray thee, where the seer's house is? and Samuel answered Saul, and
said, I am the seer."


    As the writer of the book of Samuel relates these questions and
answers, in the language or manner of speaking used in the time they
are said to have been spoken, and as that manner of speaking was out
of use when this author wrote, he found it necessary, in order to make
the story understood, to explain the terms in which these questions
and answers are spoken; and he does this in the 9th verse, when he
says "Before-time, in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God,
thus he spake, Come, and let us go to the seer; for he that is now
called a Prophet, was before-time called a Seer." This proves, as I
have before said, that this story of Saul, Samuel and the asses, was
an ancient story at the time the book of Samuel was written, and
consequently that Samuel did not write it, and that that book is
without authenticity.


    But if we go further into those books the evidence is still more
positive that Samuel is not the writer of them; for they relate things
that did not happen till several years after the death of Samuel.
Samuel died before Saul; for the 1st Samuel, chap. xxviii., tells that
Saul and the witch of Endor conjured Samuel up after he was dead;
yet the history of the matters contained in those books is extended
through the remaining part of Saul's life, and to the latter end of
the life of David, who succeeded Saul. The account of the death and
burial of Samuel (a thing which he could not write himself) is related
in the 25th chapter of the first book of Samuel, and the chronology
affixed to this chapter makes this to be 1060 years before Christ; yet
the history of this first book is brought down to 1056 years before
Christ; that is, till the death of Saul, which was not till four years
after the death of Samuel.


    The second book of Samuel begins with an account of things that
did not happen till four years after Samuel was dead; for it begins
with the reign of David, who succeeded Saul, and it goes on to the end
of David's reign, which was forty-three years after the death of
Samuel; and, therefore, the books are in themselves positive
evidence that they were not written by Samuel.


    I have now gone through all the books in the first part of the
Bible to which the names of persons are affixed, as being the
authors of those books, and which the Church, styling itself the
Christian Church, have imposed upon the world as the writings of
Moses, Joshua and Samuel, and I have detected and proved the
falsehood of this imposition. And now, ye priests of every
description, who have preached and written against the former
part of "The Age of Reason," what have ye to say? Will ye, with all
this mass of evidence against you, and staring you in the face, still
have the assurance to march into your pulpits and continue to
impose these books on your congregations as the works of inspired
penmen, and the word of God, when it is as evident as demonstration
can make truth appear, that the persons who ye say are the authors,
are not the authors, and that ye know not who the authors are.
What shadow of pretence have ye now to produce for continuing the
blasphemous fraud? What have ye still to offer against the pure and
moral religion of Deism, in support of your system of falsehood,
idolatry, and pretended revelation? Had the cruel and murderous
orders with which the Bible is filled, and the numberless torturing
executions of men, women and children, inconsequence of those orders,
been ascribed to some friend whose memory you revered, you would
have glowed with satisfaction at detecting the falsehood of the charge,
and gloried in defending his injured fame. Is it because ye are sunk in
the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your
Creator, that ye listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them
with callous indifference? The evidence I have produced, and shall
produce in the course of this work, to prove that the Bible is without
authority, will, while it wounds the stubbornness of a priest, relieve
and tranquilize the minds of millions; it will free them from all those
hard thoughts of the Almighty which priestcraft and the Bible had
infused into their minds, and which stood in everlasting opposition
to all their ideas of his moral justice and benevolence.


    I come now to the two books of Kings, and the two books of
Chronicles. Those books are altogether historical, and are chiefly
confined to the lives and actions of the Jewish kings, who in
general were a parcel of rascals; but these are matters with which
we have no more concern than we have with the Roman emperors or
Homer's account of the Trojan war. Besides which, as those works are
anonymous, and as we know nothing of the writer, or of his
character, it is impossible for us to know what degree of credit to
give to the matters related therein. Like all other ancient histories,
they appear to be a jumble of fable and of fact, and of probable and
of improbable things; but which distance of time and place, and change
of circumstances in the world, have rendered obsolete and uninteresting.


    The chief use I shall make of those books will be that of
comparing them with each other, and with other parts of the Bible,
to show the confusion, contradiction, and cruelty in this pretended
word of God.


    The first book of Kings begins with the reign of Solomon, which,
according to the Bible chronology, was 1015 years before Christ; and
the second book ends 588 years before Christ, being a little after the
reign of Zedekiah, whom Nebuchadnezzar, after taking Jerusalem and
conquering the Jews, carried captive to Babylon. The two books include
a space of 427 years.


    The two books of Chronicles are a history of the same times, and
in general of the same persons, by another author; for it would be
absurd to suppose that the same author wrote the history twice over.
The first book of Chronicles (after giving the genealogy from Adam
to Saul, which takes up the first nine chapters), begins with the
reign of David; and the last book ends as in the last book of Kings,
soon after the reign of Zedekiah, about 588 years before Christ. The
two last verses of the last chapter bring the history forward 52 years
more, that is, to 536. But these verses do not belong to the book,
as I shall show when I come to speak of the book of Ezra.


    The two books of Kings, besides the history of Saul, David and
Solomon, who reigned over all Israel, contain an abstract of the lives
of 17 kings and one queen, who are styled kings of Judah, and of 19,
who are styled kings of Israel; for the Jewish nation, immediately
on the death of Solomon, split into two parties, who chose separate
kings, and who carried on most rancorous wars against each other.


    These two books are little more than a history of
assassinations, treachery and wars. The cruelties that the Jews had
accustomed themselves to practise on the Canaanites, whose country
they had savagely invaded under a pretended gift from God, they
afterward practised as furiously on each other. Scarcely half their
kings died a natural death, and in some instances whole families
were destroyed to secure possession to the successor; who, after a
few years, and sometimes only a few months or less, shared the same
fate. In the tenth chapter of the second book of Kings, an account
is given of two baskets full of children's heads, seventy in number,
being exposed at the entrance of the city; they were the children of
Ahab, and were murdered by the order of Jehu, whom Elisha, the
pretended man of God, had anointed to be king over Israel, on
purpose to commit this bloody deed, and assassinate his predecessor.
And in the account of the reign of Menahem, one of the kings of Israel
who had murdered Shallum, who had reigned but one month, it is said, II. Kings,
chap. xv., ver. 16, that Menahem smote the city of Tiphsah, because they
opened not the city to him, and all the women therein that were with child he
ripped up.

    Could we permit ourselves to suppose that the Almighty would
distinguish any nation of people by the name of His chosen people,
we must suppose that people to have been an example to all the rest of
the world of the purest piety and humanity, and not such a nation of
ruffians and cut-throats as the ancient Jews were; a people who,
corrupted by and copying after such monsters and impostors as Moses
and Aaron, Joshua, Samuel and David, had distinguished themselves
above all others on the face of the known earth for barbarity and
wickedness. If we will not stubbornly shut our eyes and steel our
hearts, it is impossible not to see, in spite of all that
long-established superstition imposes upon the mind, that the
flattering appellation of His chosen people is no other than a lie
which the priests and leaders of the Jews had invented to cover the
baseness of their own characters, and which Christian priests,
sometimes as corrupt and often as cruel, have professed to believe.


    The two books of Chronicles are a repetition of the same crimes,
but the history is broken in several places by the author leaving
out the reign of some of their kings; and in this, as well as in
that of Kings, there is such a frequent transition from kings of Judah
to kings of Israel, and from kings of Israel to kings of Judah, that
the narrative is obscure in the reading. In the same book the
history sometimes contradicts itself; for example, in the second
book of Kings, chap, i., ver. 17, we are told, but in rather ambiguous
terms, that after the death of Ahaziah, king of Israel, Jehoram, or
Joram (who was of the house of Ahab), reigned in his stead, in the
second year of Jehoram or Joram, son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah;
and in chap. viii., ver. 16, of the same book, it is said, and in
the fifth year of Joram, the son of Ahab, king of Israel,
Jehoshaphat being then king of Judah, began to reign; that is, one
chapter says Joram of Judah began to reign in the second year of
Joram of Israel; and the other chapter says, that Joram of Israel
began to reign in the fifth year of Joram of Judah.


    Several of the most extraordinary matters related in one
history, as having happened during the reign of such and such of their
kings, are not to be found in the other, in relating the reign of
the same king; for example, the two first rival kings, after the death
of Solomon, were Rehoboam and Jeroboam; and in I. Kings, chap. xii
and xiii, an account is given of Jeroboam making an offering of burnt
incense, and that a man, who was there called a man of God, cried
out against the altar, chap. xiii., ver. 2: "O altar, altar! thus
saith the Lord; Behold, a child shall be born to the house of David,
Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the high
places that burn incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be burnt
upon thee." Verse 4: "And it came to pass, when king Jeroboam heard
the saying of the man of God, which had cried against the altar in
Bethel, that he put forth his hand from the altar, saying, Lay hold on
him. And his hand which he put out against him dried up, so that he
could not pull it in again to him."


    One would think that such an extraordinary case as this (which
is spoken of as a judgment), happening to the chief of one of the
parties, and that at the first moment of the separation of the
Israelites into two nations, would, if it had been true, have been
recorded in both histories. But though men in latter times have
believed all that the prophets have said unto him, it does not
appear that these prophets or historians believed each other; they
knew each other too well.


    A long account also is given in Kings about Elijah. It runs
through several chapters, and concludes with telling, Il. Kings, chap.
ii., ver. II, "And it came to pass, as they (Elijah and Elisha)
still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of
fire and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder, and Elijah went
up by a whirlwind into heaven." Hum! this the author of Chronicles,
miraculous as the story is, makes no mention of, though he mentions
Elijah by name; neither does he say anything of the story related in
the second chapter of the same book of Kings, of a parcel of
children calling Elisha bald head, bald head; and that this man of
God, verse 24, "Turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in
the name of the Lord; and there came forth two she-bears out of the
wood, and tore forty-and-two children of them." He also passes over in
silence the story told, II. Kings, chap. xiii., that when they were
burying a man in the sepulchre where Elisha had been buried, it
happened that the dead man, as they were letting him down, (ver.
21), touched the bones of Elisha, and he (the dead man) revived, and
stood upon his feet." The story does not tell us whether they buried
the man, notwithstanding he revived and stood upon his feet, or drew
him up again. Upon all these stories the writer of Chronicles is as
silent as any writer of the present day who did not choose to be
accused of lying, or at least of romancing, would be about stories
of the same kind.


    But, however these two historians may differ from each other
with respect to the tales related by either, they are silent alike
with respect to those men styled prophets, whose writings fill up
the latter part of the Bible. Isaiah, who lived in the time of
Hezekiah, is mentioned in Kings, and again in Chronicles, when these
historians are speaking of that reign; but, except in one or two
instances at most, and those very slightly, none of the rest are so
much as spoken of, or even their existence hinted at; although,
according to the Bible chronology, they lived within the time those
histories were written; some of their long before. If those
prophets, as they are called, were men of such importance in their day
as the compilers of the Bible and priests and commentators have
since represented them to be, how can it be accounted for that not
one of these histories should say anything about them?


    The history in the books of Kings and of Chronicles is brought
forward, as I have already said, to the year 588 before Christ; it
will, therefore, be proper to examine which of these prophets lived
before that period.


    Here follows a table of all the prophets, with the times in
which they lived before Christ, according to the chronology affixed to
the first chapter of each of the books of the prophets; and also of
the number of years they lived before the books of Kings and
Chronicles were written.


                   TABLE OF THE PROPHETS.


    Names.          Years        Years before            Observations.
                    before        Kings and
                    Christ.        Chronicles


    Isaiah           760            172                     mentioned.
    Jeremiah         629             41          mentioned only in the
                                                  last chap. of Chron.
    Ezekiel          595              7                 not mentioned.
    Daniel           607             19                 not mentioned.
    Hosea            785             97                 not mentioned.
    Joel             800            212                 not mentioned.
    Amos             789            199                 not mentioned.
    Obadiah          789            199                 not mentioned.
    Jonah            862            274                 see the note.*
    Micah            750            162                 not mentioned.
    Nahum            713            125                 not mentioned.
    Habakkuk         620             38                 not mentioned.
    Zephaniah        630             42                 not mentioned.
    Haggai   - after the year 588
    Zachariah- after the year 588
    Malachi  - after the year 588


   *In II. Kings, chap. xiv., verse 25, the name of Jonah is mentioned
on account of the restoration of a tract of land by Jeroboam; but
nothing further is said of him, nor is any allusion made to the book
of Jonah, nor to his expedition to Nineveh, nor to his encounter
with the whale.


    This table is either not very honorable for the Bible
historians, or not very honorable for the Bible prophets; and I
leave to priests and commentators, who are very learned in little
things, to settle the point of etiquette between the two, and to
assign a reason why the authors of Kings and Chronicles have treated
those prophets whom, in the former part of the Age of Reason, I have
considered as poets, with as much degrading silence as any historian
of the present day would treat Peter Pindar.


    I have one observation more to make on the book of Chronicles,
after which I shall pass on to review the remaining books of the
Bible.


    In my observations on the book of Genesis, I have quoted a passage
from the 36th chapter, verse 31, which evidently refers to a time after
kings began to reign over the children of Israel; and I have
shown that as this verse is verbatim the same as in Chronicles,
chap. i, verse 43, where it stands consistently with the order of
history, which in Genesis it does not, that the verse in Genesis,
and a great part of the 36th chapter, have been taken from Chronicles;
and that the book of Genesis, though it is placed first in the Bible, and
ascribed to Moses, has been manufactured by some unknown person after
the book of Chronicles was written, which was not until at least eight
hundred and sixty years after the time of Moses.


    The evidence I proceed by to substantiate this is regular and
has in it but two stages. First, as I have already stated that the
passage in Genesis refers itself for time to Chronicles; secondly,
that the book of Chronicles, to which this passage refers itself,
was not begun to be written until at least eight hundred and sixty
years after the time of Moses. To prove this, we have only to look
into the thirteenth verse of the third chapter of the first book of
Chronicles, where the writer, in giving the genealogy of the
descendants of David, mentions Zedekiah; and it was in the time of
Zedekiah that Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, 588 years before
Christ and consequently more then 860 years after Moses. Those who
have superstitiously boasted of the antiquity of the Bible, and
particularly of the books ascribed to Moses, have done it without
examination, and without any authority than that of one credulous
man telling it to another; for so far as historical and
chronological evidence applies, the very first book in the Bible is
not so ancient as the book of Homer by more then three hundred
years, and is about the same age with Aesop's Fables.


    I am not contending for the morality of Homer; on the contrary,
I think it a book of false glory, tending to inspire immoral and
mischievous notions of honor; and with respect to Aesop, though the
moral is in general just, the fable is often cruel; and the cruelty of
the fable does more injury to the heart, especially in a child, than
the moral does good to the judgment.


    Having now dismissed Kings and Chronicles, I come to the next in
course, the book of Ezra.

    As one proof, among others I shall produce, to show the disorder
in which this pretended word of God, the Bible, has been put together,
and the uncertainty of who the authors were, we have only to look at
the three first verses in Ezra, and the last two in Chronicles; for by
what kind of cutting and shuffling has it been that the three first
verses in Ezra should be the two last verses in Chronicles, or that
the two last in Chronicles should be the three first in Ezra? Hither
the authors did not know their own works, or the compilers did not
know the authors.


    The last verse in Chronicles is broken abruptly, and end in the
middle of the phrase with the word up, without signifying to what
place. This abrupt break, and the appearance of the same verses in
different books, show, as I have already said, the disorder and
ignorance in which the Bible has been put together, and that the
compilers of it had no authority for what they were doing, nor we
any authority for believing what they have done.*


               Two last verses of Chronicles.


    Ver. 22. Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that
the word of the Lord, spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah, might be
accomplished, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia,
that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it
also in writing, saying,


    23. Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, All the kingdoms of the
earth hath the Lord God of heaven given me: and he hath charged me
to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there
among you of all his people? the Lord his God be with him, and let him
go up.
                Three first verses of Ezra.


    Ver. 1. Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the
word of the Lord, by the mouth of Jeremiah, might be fulfilled, the
Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, that he made a
proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing,
saying,


    2. Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, the Lord God of heaven hath
given me all the kingdoms of earth; and he hath charged me to build
him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.


    3. Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with
him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build
the house of the Lord God of Israel (he is the God,) which is in
Jerusalem.


    *I observed, as I passed along, several broken and senseless
passages in the Bible, without thinking them of consequence enough
to be introduced in the body of the work; such as that, I. Samuel,
chap. xiii. ver. 1, where it is said, "Saul reigned one year; and when
he had reigned two years over Israel, Saul chose him three thousand
men," &c. The first part of verse, that Saul reigned one year, has
no sense, since it does not tell us what Saul did, nor say anything of
what happened at the end of that one year; and it is, besides, mere
absurdity to say he reigned one year, when the very next phrase says
he had reigned two; for if he had reigned two, it was impossible not
to have reigned one.


    Another instance occurs in Joshua, chap. v, where the writer tells
us a story of an angel (for such the table of contents at the head
of the chapter calls him) appearing unto Joshua; and the story ends
abruptly, and without any conclusion. The story is as follows: Verse
13, "And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted
up his eyes and looked, and behold there stood a man over against
him with his sword drawn in his hand; and Joshua went unto him and
said unto him, Art thou for us or for our adversaries?" Verse 14, "And
he said, Nay; but as captain of the hosts of the Lord am I now come.
And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said
unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant?" Verse 15, "And the
captain of the Lord's host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off
thy foot: for the place whereon thou standeth is holy. And Joshua
did so." And what then? nothing, for here the story ends, and the
chapter too.


    Either the story is broken off in the middle, or it is a story
told by some Jewish humorist, in ridicule of Joshua's pretended
mission from God; and the compilers of the Bible, not perceiving the
design of the story, have told it as a serious matter. As a story of
humor and ridicule it has a great deal of point, for it pompously
introduces an angel in the figure of a man, with a drawn sword in
his hand, before whom Joshua falls on his face to the earth and
worships (which is contrary to their second commandment); and then
this most important embassy from heaven ends in telling Joshua to
pull off his shoe. It might as well have told him to pull up his breeches.


    It is certain, however, that the Jews did not credit everything
their leaders told them, as appears from the cavalier manner in
which they speak of Moses, when he was gone into the mount. "As for
this Moses" say they, "we wot not what is become of him." Exod.
chap. xxxii, ver. I.


    The only thing that has any appearance of certainty in the book of
Ezra, is the time in which it was written, which was immediately after
the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, about 536
years before Christ. Ezra (who, according to the Jewish
commentators, is the same person as is called Esdras in the
Apocrypha), was one of the persons who returned, and who, it is
probable, wrote the account of that affair. Nehemiah, whose book
follows next to Ezra, was another of the returned persons; and who, it
is also probable, wrote the account of the same affair in the book
that bears his name. But these accounts are nothing to us, nor to
any other persons, unless it be to the Jews, as a part of the
history of their nation; and there is just as much of the word of
God in those books as there is in any of the histories of France, or
Rapin's History of England, or the history of any other country.


    But even in matters of historical record, neither of those writers
are to be depended upon. In the second chapter of Ezra, the writer
gives a list of the tribes and families, and of the precise number
of souls of each, that returned from Babylon to Jerusalem: and this
enrolment of the persons so returned appears to have been one of the
principal objects for writing the book; but in this there is an
error that destroys the intention of the undertaking.


    The writer begins his enrolment in the following manner, chap.
ii., ver. 3: "The children of Parosh, two thousand a hundred seventy
and two." Ver. 4, "The children of Shephatiah, three hundred seventy
and two." And in this manner he proceeds through all the families; and
in the 64th verse, he makes a total, and says, "The whole congregation
together was forty and two thousand three hundred and threescore."


     But whoever will take the trouble of casting up the several
particulars will find that the total is but 29,818; so that the
error is 12,542.* What certainty, then, can there be in the Bible
for anything?


    *Particulars of the Families from the second Chapter of Ezra.
Chap. ii
       Brought forward:  12,243            15,953            24,144
Verse 3  2172   Verse 14   2056   Verse 25    743   Verse 36    973
      4   372         15    454         26    621         37   1052
      5   775         16     98         27    122         38   1247
      6  2812         17    323         28    223         39   1017
      7  1254         18    112         29     52         40     74
      8   945         19    223         30    156         41    128
      9   760         20     95         31   1254         42    139
     10   642         21    123         32    320         53    392
     11   623         22     56         33    725         60    652
     12  1222         23    128         34    345
     13   666         24     42         35   3630
-      ------            ------            ------             -----
       12,243            15,953            24,144     Total  29,818


    Nehemiah, in like manner, gives a list of the returned families,
and of the number of each family. He begins, as in Ezra, by saying,
chap. vii., ver. 8, "The children of Parosh, two thousand a hundred
seven and two; and so on through all the families. The list differs in
several of the particulars from that of Ezra. In the 66th verse,
Nehemiah makes a total, and says, as Ezra had said, "The whole
congregation together was forty and two thousand three hundred and
threescore." But the particulars of this list makes a total of but
31,089, so that the error here is 11,271. These writers may do well
enough for Bible-makers, but not for anything where truth and
exactness is necessary.


    The next book in course is the book of Esther. If Madame Esther
thought it any honor to offer herself as a kept mistress to Ahasuerus,
or as a rival to Queen Vashti, who had refused to come to a drunken
king in the midst of a drunken company, to be made a show of, (for
the account says they had been drinking seven days and were merry),
let Esther and Mordecai look to that; it is no business of ours; at
least it is none of mine; besides which the story has a great deal the
appearance of being fabulous, and is also anonymous. I pass on to
the book of Job.


    The book of Job differs in character from all the books we have
hitherto passed over. Treachery and murder make no part of this
book; it is the meditations of a mind strongly impressed with the
vicissitudes of human life, and by turns sinking under, and struggling
against the pressure. It is a highly-wrought composition, between
willing submission and involuntary discontent, and shows man, as he
sometimes is, more disposed to be resigned than he is capable of
being. Patience has but a small share in the character of the person
of whom the book treats; on the contrary, his grief is often
impetuous, but he still endeavors to keep a guard upon it, and seems
determined in the midst of accumulating ills, to impose upon himself
the hard duty of contentment.


    I have spoken in a respectful manner of the book of Job in the
former part of the Age of Reason, but without knowing at that time
what I have learned since, which is, that from all the evidence that
can be collected the book of Job does not belong to the Bible.


    I have seen the opinion of two Hebrew commentators, Abenezra
and Spinoza, upon this subject. They both say that the book of Job
carries no internal evidence of being a Hebrew book; that the genius
of the composition and the drama of the piece are not Hebrew; that
it has been translated from another language into Hebrew, and that
the author of the book was a Gentile; that the character represented
under the name of Satan (which is the first and only time this name is
mentioned in the Bible) does not correspond to any Hebrew idea, and
that the two convocations which the Deity is supposed to have made
of those whom the poem calls sons of God, and the familiarity which
this supposed Satan is stated to have with the Deity, are in the same
case.


    It may also be observed, that the book shows itself to be the
production of a mind cultivated in science, which the Jews, so far
from being famous for, were very ignorant of. The allusions to objects
of natural philosophy are frequent and strong, and are of a
different cast to anything in the books known to be Hebrew. The
astronomical names, Pleiades, Orion, and Arcturus, are Greek and not
Hebrew names, and it does not appear from anything that is to be found
in the Bible, that the Jews knew anything of astronomy or that they
studied it; they had no translation of those names into their own
language, but adopted the names as they found them in the poem.


    That the Jews did translate the literary productions of the
Gentile nations into the Hebrew language, and mix them with their own,
is not a matter of doubt; the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs is an
evidence of this; it is there said, v. i: "The words of King Lemuel,
the prophecy that his mother taught him." This verse stands as a
preface to the Proverbs that follow, and which are not the proverbs of
Solomon, but of Lemuel; and this Lemuel was not one of the kings of
Israel, nor of Judah, but of some other country, and consequently a
Gentile. The Jews, however, have adopted his proverbs, and as they
cannot give any account who the author of the book of Job was, nor
how they came by the book, and as it differs in character from the
Hebrew writings, and stands totally unconnected with every other
book and chapter in the Bible, before it and after it, it has all
the circumstantial evidence of being originally a book of the
Gentiles.*


    *The prayer known by the name of Agur's prayer, in the 30th
chapter of Proverbs, immediately preceding the proverbs of Lemuel,
and which is the only sensible, well-conceived and well-expressed
prayer in the Bible, has much the appearance of being a prayer
taken from the Gentiles. The name of Agur occurs on no other
occasion than this; and he is introduced, together with the prayer
ascribed to him, in the same manner, and nearly in the same words,
that Lemuel and his proverbs are introduced in the chapter that
follows. The first verse of the 30th chapter says, "The words of
Agur, the son of Jakeh, even the prophecy." Here the word prophecy
is used in the same application it has in the following chapter of
Lemuel, unconnected with any thing of prediction. The prayer of
Agur is in the 8th and 9th verses, "Remove far from me vanity
and lies; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food
convenient for me; lest I be full and deny thee, and say, Who is
the Lord? or lest I be poor and steal, and take the name of my God
in vain." This has not any of the marks of being a Jewish prayer, for
the Jews never prayed but when they were in trouble, and never for
anything but victory, vengeance and riches.


    The Bible-makers and those regulators of time, the
chronologists, appear to have been at a loss where to place and
how to dispose of the book of Job; for it contains no one historical
circumstance, nor allusion to any, that might determine its place in
the Bible. But it would not have answered the purpose of these men
to have informed the world of their ignorance, and therefore, they
have affixed it to the era of 1520 years before Christ, which is
during the time the Israelites were in Egypt, and for which they
have just as much authority and no more than I should have for
saying it was a thousand years before that period. The probability,
however, is that it is older than any book in the Bible; and it is the
only one that can be read without indignation or disgust.


    We know nothing of what the ancient Gentile world (as it is
called) was before the time of the Jews, whose practise has been to
calumniate and blacken the character of all other nations; and it is
from the Jewish accounts that we have learned to call them heathens.
But, as far as we know to the contrary, they were a just and moral
people, and not addicted, like the Jews, to cruelty and revenge, but
of whose profession of faith we are unacquainted. It appears to have
been their custom to personify both virtue and vice by statues and
images, as is done nowadays both by statuary and by painting; but it
does not follow from this that they worshiped them, any more than we
do.


    I pass on to the book of Psalms, of which it is not necessary to
make much observation. Some of them are moral, and others are very
revengeful; and the greater part relates to certain local
circumstances of the Jewish nation at the time they were written, with
which we have nothing to do. It is, however, an error or an imposition
to call them the Psalms of David. They are a collection, as song-books
are nowadays, from different song-writers, who lived at different
times. The 137th Psalm could not have been written till more than
400 years after the time of David, because it was written in
commemoration of an event, the captivity of the Jews in Babylon,
which did not happen till that distance of time. "By the rivers of
Babylon we sat down; yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows, in the midst thereof; for
there they that carried us away captive required of us a song,
saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion." As a man would say to
an American, or to a Frenchman, or to an Englishman, "Sing us one
of your American songs, or of your French songs, or of your English
songs." This remark,with respect to the time this Psalm was written,
is of no other use than to show (among others already mentioned)
the general imposition the world has been under in respect to the
authors of the Bible. No regard has been paid to time, place and
circumstance, and the names of persons have been affixed to the
several books, which it was as impossible they should write as that
a man should walk in procession at his own funeral.


     The Book of Proverbs. These, like the Psalms, are a collection,
and that from authors belonging to other nations than those of the
Jewish nation, as I have shown in the observations upon the book of
Job; besides which some of the proverbs ascribed to Solomon did not
appear till two hundred and fifty years after the death of Solomon;
for it is said in the 1st verse of the 25th chapter, "These are also
proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah,
copied out." It was two hundred and fifty years from the time of
Solomon to the time of Hezekiah. When a man is famous and his name
is abroad, he is made the putative father of things he never said or
did, and this, most probably, has been the case with Solomon. It
appears to have been the fashion of that day to make proverbs, as it
is now to make jest-books and father them upon those who never saw
them.

    The book of Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher, is also ascribed to
Solomon, and that with much reason, if not with truth. It is written
as the solitary reflections of a worn-out debauchee, such as Solomon
was, who, looking back on scenes he can no longer enjoy, cries out,
"All is vanity!" A great deal of the metaphor and of the sentiment
is obscure, most probably by translation; but enough is left to show
they were strongly pointed in the original.* From what is
transmitted to us of the character of Solomon, he was witty,
ostentatious, dissolute, and at last melancholy. He lived fast, and
died, tired of the world, at the age of fifty-eight years.


    *Those that look out of the window shall be darkened, is an
obscure figure in translation for loss of sight.


    Seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines are worse than
none, and, however it may carry with it the appearance of heightened
enjoyment, it defeats all the felicity of affection by leaving it no
point to fix upon. Divided love is never happy. This was the case with
Solomon, and if he could not, with all his pretentions to wisdom,
discover it beforehand, he merited, unpitied, the mortification he
afterward endured. In this point of view, his preaching is
unnecessary, because, to know the consequences, it is only necessary
to know the cause. Seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines
would have stood in place of the whole book. It was needless, after this,
to say that all was vanity and vexation of spirit; for it is impossible to
derive happiness from the company of those whom we deprive of
happiness.


    To be happy in old age, it is necessary that we accustom ourselves
to objects that can accompany the mind all the way through life, and
that we take the rest as good in their day. The mere man of pleasure
is miserable in old age, and the mere drudge in business is but little
better; whereas, natural philosophy, mathematical and mechanical
science, are a continual source of tranquil pleasure, and in spite
of the gloomy dogmas of priests and of superstition, the study of
these things is the true theology; it teaches man to know and to
admire the Creator, for the principles of science are in the creation,
and are unchangeable and of divine origin.


    Those who knew Benjamin Franklin will recollect that his mind
was ever young, his temper ever serene; science, that never grows
gray, was always his mistress. He was never without an object, for
when we cease to have an object, we become like an invalid in a
hospital waiting for death.


    Solomon's Songs are amorous and foolish enough, but which wrinkled
fanaticism has called divine. The compilers of the Bible have placed these
songs after the book of Ecclesiastes, and the chronologists have affixed
to them the era of 1014 years before Christ, at which time Solomon,
according to the same chronology, was nineteen years of age, and was
then forming his seraglio of wives and concubines. The Bible-makers and
the chronologists should have managed this matter a little better, and
either have said nothing about the time, or chosen a time less inconsistent
with the supposed divinity of those songs; for Solomon was then in the
honeymoon of one thousand debaucheries.


    It should also have occurred to them that, as he wrote, if he
did write, the book of Ecclesiastes long after these songs, and in
which he exclaims, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit, that
he included those songs in that description. This is the more
probable, because he says, or somebody for him, Ecclesiastes, chap.
ii. ver. 8, "I gat me men singers and women singers (most probably
to sing those songs), as musical instruments and that of all sorts;
and behold, (ver. II), all was vanity and vexation of spirit." The
compilers, however, have done their work but by halves, for as they
have given us the songs, they should have given us the tunes, that
we might sing them.


    The books called the Books of the Prophets fill up all the
remaining parts of the Bible; they are sixteen in number, beginning
with Isaiah, and ending with Malachi, of which I have given you a list
in my observations upon Chronicles. Of these sixteen prophets, all
of whom, except the three last, lived within the time the books of
Kings and Chronicles were written, two only, Isaiah and Jeremiah,
are mentioned in the history of those books. I shall begin with
those two, reserving what I have to say on the general character of
the men called prophets to another part of the work.


    Whoever will take the trouble of reading the book ascribed to
Isaiah will find it one of the most wild and disorderly compositions
ever put together; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end; and,
except a short historical part and a few sketches of history in two or
three of the first chapters, is one continued, incoherent, bombastical
rant, full of extravagant metaphor, without application, and destitute
of meaning; a school-boy would scarcely have been excusable for
writing such stuff; it is (at least in the translation) that kind of
composition and false taste that is properly called prose run mad.


    The historical part begins at the 36th chapter, and is continued
to the end of the 39th chapter. It relates to some matters that are
said to have passed during the reign of Hezekiah, king of Judah; at
which time Isaiah lived. This fragment of history begins and ends
abruptly; it has not the least connection with the chapter that
precedes it, nor with that which follows it, nor with any other in the
book. It is probable that Isaiah wrote this fragment himself,
because he was an actor in the circumstances it treats of; but, except
this part, there are scarcely two chapters that have any connection
with each other; one is entitled, at the beginning of the first verse,
"The burden of Babylon;" another, "The burden of Moab;" another
"The burden of Damascus;" another, "The burden of Egypt;" another,
"The burden of the desert of the sea;" another, "The burden of the
valley of vision"*- as you would say, "The story of the Knight of the
Burning Mountain," "The story of Cinderella," or "The Children in
the Wood," etc., etc.


    *See beginning of chapters xiii, xv, xvii, xix, xxi and xxii.


    I have already shown, in the instance of the two last verses of
Chronicles, and the three first in Ezra, that the compilers of the
Bible mixed and confounded the writings of different authors with each
other, which alone, were there no other cause, is sufficient to
destroy the authenticity of any compilation, because it is more than
presumptive evidence that the compilers were ignorant who the
authors were. A very glaring instance of this occurs in the book
ascribed to Isaiah; the latter part of the 44th chapter and the
beginning of the 45th, so far from having been written by Isaiah,
could only have been written by some person who lived at least a
hundred and fifty years after Isaiah was dead.


    These chapters are a compliment to Cyrus, who permitted the Jews
to return to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity, to rebuild
Jerusalem and the temple, as is stated in Ezra. The last verse of
the 44th chapter and the beginning of the 45th, are in the following
words: "That saith of Cyrus; He is my shepherd and shall perform all
my pleasure; even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shall be built, and to the
temple, Thy foundation shall be laid. Thus saith the Lord to his
annointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations
before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the
two-leaved gates and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before
thee," etc.


    What audacity of church and priestly ignorance it is to impose
this book upon the world as the writing of Isaiah, when Isaiah,
according to their own chronology, died soon after the death of
Hezekiah, which was 693 years before Christ, and the decree of
Cyrus, in favor of the Jews returning to Jerusalem, was, according
to the same chronology, 536 years before Christ, which is a distance
of time between the two of 162 years. I do not suppose that the
compilers of the Bible made these books, but rather that they picked
up some loose anonymous essays, and put them together under the
names of such authors as best suited their purpose. They have
encouraged the imposition, which is next to inventing it, for it was
impossible but they must have observed it.


    When we see the studied craft of the Scripture-makers, in making
every part of this romantic book of schoolboy's eloquence bend to
the monstrous idea of a Son of God begotten by a ghost on the body
of a virgin, there is no imposition we are not justified in suspecting
them of. Every phrase and circumstance is marked with the barbarous
hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was
impossible they could have. The head of every chapter and the top of
every page are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church,
that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began to
read.


    "Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son," Isaiah, chap.
vii. ver. 14, has been interpreted to mean the person called Jesus
Christ, and his mother Mary, and has been echoed through
Christendom for more than a thousand years; and such has been
the rage of this opinion that scarcely a spot in it but has been
stained with blood, and marked with desolation in consequence of it.
Though it is not my intention to enter into controversy on subjects
of this kind, but to confine myself to show that the Bible is spurious,
and thus, by taking away the foundation, to overthrow at once the
whole structure of superstition raised thereon, I will, however, stop
a moment to expose the fallacious application of this passage.


    Whether Isaiah was playing a trick with Ahaz, king of Judah, to
whom this passage is spoken, is no business of mine; I mean only to
show the misapplication of the passage, and that it has no more
reference to Christ and his mother than it has to me and my mother.
The story is simply this: The king of Syria and the king of Israel, (I
have already mentioned that the Jews were split into two nations,
one of which was called Judah, the capital of which was Jerusalem,
and the other Israel), made war jointly against Ahaz, king of Judah,
and marched their armies toward Jerusalem. Ahaz and his people
became alarmed, and the account says, verse 2, "And his heart was
moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are
moved with the wind."


    In this situation of things, Isaiah addresses himself to Ahaz, and
assures him in the name of the Lord (the cant phrase of all the
prophets) that these two kings should not succeed against him; and
to satisfy Ahaz that this should be the case, tells him to ask a sign.
This, the account says, Ahaz declined doing, giving as a reason that
he would not tempt the Lord upon which Isaiah, who is the speaker,
says, ver. 14, "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign,
Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son;" and the 16th verse
says, "For before this child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose
the good, the land that thou abhorrest, (or dreadest, meaning Syria
and the kingdom of Israel) shall be forsaken of both her kings."
Here then was the sign, and the time limited for the completion of the
assurance or promise, namely, before this child should know to
refuse the evil and choose the good.


    Isaiah having committed himself thus far, it became necessary to
him, in order to avoid the imputation of being a false prophet and the
consequence thereof, to take measures to make this sign appear. It
certainly was not a difficult thing, in any time of the world, to find
a girl with child, or to make her so, and perhaps Isaiah knew of one
beforehand; for I do not suppose that the prophets of that day were
any more to be trusted than the priests of this. Be that, however,
as it may, he says in the next chapter, ver. 2, "And I took unto me
faithful witnesses to record, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the
son of Jeberechiah, and I went unto the prophetess, and she
conceived and bare a son."


    Here, then, is the whole story, foolish as it is, of this child
and this virgin; and it is upon the barefaced perversion of this
story, that the book of Matthew, and the impudence and sordid
interests of priests in later times, have founded a theory which
they call the Gospel; and have applied this story to signify the
person they call Jesus Christ, begotten, they say, by a ghost, whom
they call holy, on the body of a woman, engaged in marriage, and
afterward married, whom they call a virgin, 700 years after this
foolish story was told; a theory which, speaking for myself, I
hesitate not to disbelieve, and to say, is as fabulous and as false as
God is true.*


    *In the 14th verse of the 7th chapter, it is said that the child
should be called Immanuel; but this name was not given to either of
the children otherwise than as a character which the word signifies.
That of the prophetess was called Maher-shalal-hash-baz, and that of
Mary was called Jesus.


    But to show the imposition and falsehood of Isaiah, we have only
to attend to the sequel of this story, which, though it is passed over
in silence in the book of Isaiah, is related in the 28th chapter of
the second Chronicles, and which is, that instead of these two kings
failing in their attempt against Ahaz, king of Judah, as Isaiah had
pretended to foretell in the name of the Lord, they succeeded; Ahaz
was defeated and destroyed, a hundred and twenty thousand of his
people were slaughtered, Jerusalem was plundered, and two hundred
thousand women, and sons and daughters, carried into captivity. Thus
much for this lying prophet and impostor, Isaiah, and the book of
falsehoods that bears his name.


    I pass on to the book of Jeremiah. This prophet, as he is
called, lived in the time that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem, in
the reign of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah; and the suspicion was
strong against him that he was a traitor in the interests of
Nebuchadnezzar. Everything relating to Jeremiah shows him to have
been a man of an equivocal character; in his metaphor of the potter
and the clay, chap. xviii., he guards his prognostications in such a
crafty manner as always to leave himself a door to escape by, in
case the event should be contrary to what he had predicted.


    In the 7th and 8th verses of that chapter he makes the Almighty to
say, "At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and
concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and destroy it.
If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their
evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them."
Here was a proviso against one side of the case; now for the other
side.


    Verses 9 and 10, "And at what instant I shall speak concerning a
nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, if it do
evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice; then I shall repent of
the good wherewith I said I would benefit them." Here is a proviso
against the other side; and, according to this plan of prophesying,
a prophet could never be wrong, however mistaken the Almighty
might be. This sort of absurd subterfuge, and this manner of
speaking of the Almighty, as one would speak of a man, is consistent
with nothing but the stupidity of the Bible.


    As to the authenticity of the book, it is only necessary to read
it, in order to decide positively that, though some passages
recorded therein may have been spoken by Jeremiah, he is not the
author of the book. The historical parts, if they can be called by
that name, are in the most confused condition; the same events are
several times repeated, and that in a manner different, and
sometimes in contradiction to each other; and this disorder runs
even to the last chapter, where the history upon which the greater
part of the book has been employed begins anew, and ends abruptly.
The book has all the appearance of being a medley of unconnected
anecdotes respecting persons and things of that time, collected
together in the same rude manner as if the various and contradictory
accounts that are to be found in a bundle of newspapers respecting
persons and things of the present day, were put together without
date, order, or explanation. I will give two or three examples of this
kind.


    It appears, from the account of the 37th chapter, that the army of
Nebuchadnezzar, which is called the army of the Chaldeans, had
besieged Jerusalem some time, and on their hearing that the army of
Pharaoh, of Egypt, was marching against them they raised the siege
and retreated for a time. It may here be proper to mention, in order to
understand this confused history, that Nebuchadnezzar had besieged
and taken Jerusalem during the reign of Jehoiakim, the predecessor of
Zedekiah; and that it was Nebuchadnezzar who had made Zedekiah king,
or rather viceroy; and that this second siege, of which the book of
Jeremiah treats, was in consequence of the revolt of Zedekiah
against Nebuchadnezzar. This will in some measure account for the
suspicion that affixes to Jeremiah of being a traitor and in the
interest of Nebuchadnezzar; whom Jeremiah calls, in the 43d chapter,
ver. 10, the servant of God.


    The 11th verse of this chapter (the 37th), says, "And it came to
pass, that, when the army of the Chaldeans was broken up from
Jerusalem, for fear of Pharoah's army, that Jeremiah went forth out of
Jerusalem, to go (as this account states) into the land of Benjamin,
to separate himself thence in the midst of the people, and when he
was in the gate of Benjamin, a captain of the ward was there, whose
name was Irijah, the son of Shelemiah, the son of Hananiah, and he
took Jeremiah the prophet, saying, Thou fallest away to the Chaldeans.
Then said Jeremiah, It is false; I fall not away to the Chaldeans." Jeremiah
being thus stopped and accused, was, after being examined, committed
to prison on suspicion of being a traitor, where he remained, as is stated
in the last verse of this chapter.


    But the next chapter gives an account of the imprisonment of
Jeremiah which has no connection with this account, but ascribes his
imprisonment to another circumstance, and for which we must go back
to the 21st chapter. It is there stated, ver. 1, that Zedekiah sent
Pashur, the son of Malchiah, and Zephaniah, the son of Maaseiah the
priest, to Jeremiah to inquire of him concerning Nebuchadnezzar, whose
army was then before Jerusalem; and Jeremiah said unto them, ver.
8 and 9, "Thus saith the Lord, Behold I set before you the way of
life, and the way of death; he that abideth in this city shall die
by the sword, and by the famine, and by the pestilence; but he that
goeth out and falleth to the Chaldeans that besiege you, he shall
live, and his life shall be unto him for a prey."


    This interview and conference breaks off abruptly at the end of
the 10th verse of the 21st chapter; and such is the disorder of this
book that we have to pass over sixteen chapters, upon various
subjects, in order to come at the continuation and event of this
conference, and this brings us to the first verse of the 38th chapter,
as I have just mentioned.


    The 38th chapter opens with saying, "Then Shepatiah, the son of
Mattan; Gedaliah, the son of Pashur; and Jucal, the son of
Shelemiah; and Pashur, the son of Malchiah (here are more persons
mentioned than in the 21st chapter), heard the words that Jeremiah
had spoken unto all the people, saying, Thus saith the Lord, He that
remaineth in this city, shall die by the sword, by the famine, and
by the pestilence; but he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall
live, for he shall have his life for prey, and shall live;" (which are
the words of the conference), therefore, (they say to Zedekiah), "We
beseech thee, let us put this man to death, for thus he weakeneth
the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the hands of
all the people in speaking such words unto them; for this man
seeketh not the welfare of the people, but the hurt." And at the 6th
verse it is said, "Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the
dungeon of Malchiah."


    These two accounts are different and contradictory. The one
ascribes his imprisonment to his attempt to escape out of the city:
the other to his preaching and prophesying in the city; the one to his
being seized by the guard at the gate; the other to his being
accused before Zedekiah, by the conferees.*


    *I observed two chapters, 16th and 17th, in the first book of
Samuel, that contradict each other with respect to David, and the
manner he became acquainted with Saul; as the 37th and 38th
chapters of the book of Jeremiah contradict each other with respect
to the cause of Jeremiah's imprisonment.


    In the 16th chapter of Samuel, it is said, that an evil spirit
of God troubled Saul, and that his servants advised him (as a
remedy) "to seek out a man who was a cunning player upon the harp."
And Saul said, [verse 17,] Provide me now a man that can play well,
and bring him to me. Then answered one of the servants, and said,
Behold I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is cunning in
playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in
matters, and a comely person, and the LORD is with him. Wherefore
Saul sent messengers unto Jesse, and said, "Send me David thy son."
And [verse 21,] David came to Saul, and stood before him, and he
loved him greatly, and he became his armor-bearer. And when the evil
spirit from God was upon Saul [ver. 23] that David took an harp, and
played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well."


    But the next chapter [17] gives an account, all different to this,
of the manner that Saul and David became acquainted. Here it is
ascribed to David's encounter with Goliah, when David was sent by
his father to carry provision to his brethren in the camp. In the 55th
verse of this chapter it is said, "And when Saul saw David go forth
against the Philistine [Goliah], he said unto Abner, the captain of
the host, Abner, whose son is this youth? And Abner said, As thy
soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell. And the king said, Enquire thou
whose son the stripling is. And as David returned from the slaughter
of the Philistine, Abner took him, and brought him before Saul with
the head of the Philistine in his hand. And Saul said to him, Whose
son art thou young man? And David answered, I am the son of thy
servant Jesse the Bethlehemite." These two accounts belie each
other, because each of them supposes Saul and David not to have
known each other before. This book, the Bible is too ridiculous even
for criticism.

    In the next chapter (the 39th) we have another instance of the
disordered state of this book; for notwithstanding the siege of the
city by Nebuchadnezzar has been the subject of several of the
preceding chapters, particularly the 37th and 38, the 39th chapter
begins as if not a word had been said upon the subject; and as if
the reader was to be informed of every particular concerning it, for
it begins with saying, verse it, "In the ninth year of Zedekiah,
king of Judah, in the tenth month, came Nebuchadnezzar, king of
Babylon, and all his army, against Jerusalem, and they besieged it,"
etc.


    But the instance in the last chapter (the 52d) is still more
glaring, for though the story has been told over and over again,
this chapter still supposes the reader not to know anything of it, for
it begins by saying, ver. 1, "Zedekiah was one and twenty years old
when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem,
and his mother's name was Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah of
Libnah. (Ver. 4,) And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign,
in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar,
king of Babylon, came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and
pitched against it, and built forts against it," etc.


    It is not possible that any one man, and more particularly
Jeremiah, could have been the writer of this book. The errors are such
as could not have been committed by any person sitting down to compose
a work. Were I, or any other man, to write in such a disordered manner,
nobody would read what was written; and everybody would suppose that
the writer was in a state of insanity. The only way, therefore, to account for
this disorder is, that the book is a medley of detached, unauthenticated
anecdotes, put together by some stupid book-maker, under the name of
Jeremiah, because many of them refer to him and to the circumstances
of the times he lived in.
   Of the duplicity, and of the false prediction of Jeremiah, I shall
mention two instances, and then proceed to review the remainder of the Bible.


    It appears from the 38th chapter, that when Jeremiah was in
prison, Zedekiah sent for him, and at this interview, which was
private, Jeremiah pressed it strongly on Zedekiah to surrender himself
to the enemy. "If," says he (ver. 17,) "thou wilt assuredly go forth
unto the king of Babylon's princes, then thy soul shall live," etc.
Zedekiah was apprehensive that what passed at this conference should
be known, and he said to Jeremiah (ver. 25), "If the princes
[meaning those of Judah] hear that I have talked with thee, and they
come unto thee, and say unto thee, Declare unto us now what thou
hast said unto the king; hide it not from us, and we will not put thee
to death; and also what the king said unto thee; then thou shalt say
unto them, I presented my supplication before the king, that he
would not cause me to return to Jonathan's house to die there. Then
came all the princes unto Jeremiah, and asked him: and he told them
according to all the words the king had commanded." Thus, this man
of God, as he is called, could tell a lie or very strongly
prevaricate, when he supposed it would answer his purpose; for
certainly he did not go to Zedekiah to make his supplication,
neither did he make it; he went because he was sent for, and he
employed that opportunity to advise Zedekiah to surrender himself to
Nebuchadnezzar.


    In the 34th chapter is a prophecy of Jeremiah to Zedekiah, in
these words (ver. 2), "Thus saith the Lord, Behold I will give this
city into the hands of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it
with fire; and thou shalt not escape out of his hand, but shalt surely
be taken, and delivered into his hand; and thine eyes shall behold the
eyes of the king of Babylon, and he shall speak with thee mouth to
mouth, and thou shalt go to Babylon. Yet hear the word of the Lord,
O Zedekiah, king of Judah, Thus saith the Lord, of thee, Thou shalt
not die by the sword, but thou shalt die in peace; and with the
burnings of thy fathers, the former kings which were before thee, so
shall they burn odors for thee, and they will lament thee, saying, Ah,
lord; for I have pronounced the word, saith the Lord."


    Now, instead of Zedekiah beholding the eyes of the king of
Babylon, and speaking with him mouth to mouth, and dying in peace,
and with the burning of odors, as at the funeral of his fathers, (as
Jeremiah had declared the Lord himself had pronounced), the reverse,
according to the 52nd chapter, was the case; it is there said (ver.
10), "And the king of Babylon slew the son of Zedekiah before his
eyes; Then he put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and the king of Babylon
bound him in chains, and carried him to Babylon, and put him in prison
till the day of his death." What, then, can we say of these
prophets, but that they were impostors and liars?


    As for Jeremiah, he experienced none of those evils. He was
taken into favor by Nebuchadnezzar, who gave him in charge to the
captain of the guard (chap. xxxix. ver. 12), "Take him (said he) and
look well to him, and do him no harm; but do unto him even as he shall
say unto thee." Jeremiah joined himself afterward to Nebuchadnezzar,
and went about prophesying for him against the Egyptians, who had
marched to the relief of Jerusalem while it was besieged. Thus much
for another of the lying prophets, and the book that bears his name.


    I have been the more particular in treating of the books
ascribed to Isaiah and Jeremiah, because those two are spoken of in
the books of Kings and Chronicles, which the others are not. The
remainder of the books ascribed to the men called prophets I shall not
trouble myself much about, but take them collectively into the
observations I shall offer on the character of the men styled
prophets.


   In the former part of the Age of Reason, I have said that the word
prophet was the Bible word for poet, and that the flights and
metaphors of Jewish poets have been foolishly erected into what are
now called prophecies. I am sufficiently justified in this opinion,
not only because the books called the prophecies are written in
poetical language, but because there is no word in the Bible, except
it be the word prophet, that describes what we mean by a poet. I
have also said, that the word signifies a performer upon musical
instruments, of which I have given some instances, such as that of a
company of prophets prophesying with psalteries, with tabrets, with
pipes, with harps, etc., and that Saul prophesied with them, I.
Sam., chap x., ver. 5. It appears from this passage, and from other
parts in the book of Samuel, that the word prophet was confined to
signify poetry and music; for the person who was supposed to have a
visionary insight into concealed things, was not a prophet but a seer*
(I. Sam., chap. ix., ver. 9); and it was not till after the word
seer went out of use (which most probably was when Saul banished
those he called wizards) that the profession of the seer, or the art of
seeing, became incorporated into the word prophet.


    *I know not what is the Hebrew word that corresponds to the word
seer in English; but I observe it is translated into French by la
voyant, from the verb voir, to see; and which means the person who
sees, or the seer.


    According to the modern meaning of the word prophet and
prophesying, it signifies foretelling events to a great distance of
time, and it became necessary to the inventors of the Gospel to give
it this latitude of meaning, in order to apply or to stretch what they
call the prophecies of the Old Testament to the times of the New;
but according to the Old Testament, the prophesying of the seer, and
afterward of the prophet, so far as the meaning of the word seer
incorporated into that of prophet, had reference only to things of the
time then passing, or very closely connected with it, such as the
event of a battle they were going to engage in, or of a journey, or of
any enterprise they were going to undertake, or of any circumstance
then pending, or of any difficulty they were then in; all of which had
immediate reference to themselves (as in the case already mentioned
of Ahaz and Isaiah with respect to the expression, "Behold a virgin
shall conceive and bear a son,") and not to any distant future time. It
was that kind of prophesying that corresponds to what we call
fortune-telling, such as casting nativities, predicting riches,
fortunate or unfortunate marriages, conjuring for lost goods, etc.;
and it is the fraud of the Christian Church, not that of the Jews, and
the ignorance and the superstition of modern, not that of ancient
times, that elevated those poetical, musical, conjuring, dreaming,
strolling gentry into the rank they have since had.


    But, besides this general character of all the prophets, they
had also a particular character. They were in parties, and they
prophesied for or against, according to the party they were with, as
the poetical and political writers of the present day write in defence
of the party they associate with against the other.


    After the Jews were divided into two nations, that of Judah and
that of Israel, each party had its prophets, who abused and accused
each other of being false prophets, lying prophets, impostors, etc.

    The prophets of the party of Judah prophesied against the prophets
of the party of Israel; and those of the party of Israel against those
of Judah. This party prophesying showed itself immediately on the
separation under the first two rival kings, Rehoboam and Jeroboam.
The prophet that cursed or prophesied against the altar that Jeroboam
had built in Bethel, was of the party of Judah, where Rehoboam was
king; and he was waylaid on his return home, by a prophet of the party
of Israel, who said unto him (I. Kings, chap. xiii.), "Art thou the
man of God that came from Judah? and he said, I am." Then the
prophet of the party of Israel said to him, "I am a prophet also, as
thou art (signifying of Judah), and an angel spake unto me by the
word of the Lord, saying, Bring him back with thee into thine house,
that he may eat bread and drink water: but (says the 18th verse) he
lied unto him." This event, however, according to the story, is that the
prophet of Judah never got back to Judah, for he was found dead on
the road, by the contrivance of the prophet of Israel, who, no doubt,
was called a true prophet by his own party, and the prophet of Judah a
lying prophet.


    In the third chapter of the second of Kings, a story is related of
prophesying or conjuring that shows, in several particulars, the
character of a prophet. Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, and Jehoram,
king of Israel, had for a while ceased their party animosity, and
entered into an alliance; and these two, together with the king of
Edom, engaged in a war against the king of Moab. After uniting and
marching their armies, the story says, they were in great distress for
water; upon which Jehoshaphat said, "Is there not here a prophet of
the Lord, that we may inquire of the Lord by him? and one of the
servants of the king of Israel said, Here is Elisha." [Elisha was
one of the party of Judah]. "And Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, said,
The word of the Lord is with him." The story then says, that these
three kings went down to Elisha (who, as I have said, was a
Judahmite prophet) saw the king of Israel, he said unto him, "What
have I to do with thee? get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to
the prophets of thy mother. And the king of Israel said unto him, Nay,
for the Lord hath called these three kings together, to deliver them
into the hands of Moab." [Meaning because of the distress they were in
for water.] Upon which Elisha said, "As the Lord of hosts liveth,
before whom I stand, surely, were it not that I regard the presence of
Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, I would not look towards thee, nor see
thee." Here is all the venom and vulgarity of a party prophet. We have
now to see the performance, or manner of prophesying.


    Ver. 15. "Bring me, (said Elisha,) a minstrel: And it came to
pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon
him." Here is the farce of the conjurer. Now for the prophecy: "And
Elisha said, [singing most probably to the tune he was playing,]
Thus saith the Lord, make this valley full of ditches;" which was just
telling them what every countryman could have told them, without
either fiddle or farce, that the way to get water was to dig for it.


    But as every conjurer is not famous alike for the same thing, so
neither were those prophets; for though all of them, at least those
I have spoken of, were famous for lying, some of them excelled in
cursing. Elisha, whom I have just mentioned, was a chief in this
branch of prophesying; it was he that cursed the forty-two children in
the name of the Lord, whom the two she-bears came and devoured.
We are to suppose that those children were of the party of Israel; but
as those who will curse will lie, there is just as much credit to be
given to this story of Elisha's two she-bears as there is to that of
the Dragon of Wantley, of whom it is said:


           "Poor children three devoured he,
              That could not with him grapple;
           And at one sup he ate them up,
              As a man would eat an apple."


    There was another description of men called prophets, that
amused themselves with dreams and visions; but whether by night or
by day we know not. These, if they were not quite harmless, were but
little mischievous. Of this class are:


    Ezekiel and Daniel; and the first question upon those books, as
upon all the others, is, are they genuine? that is, were they
written by Ezekiel and Daniel?


    Of this there is no proof, but so far as my own opinion goes, I am
more inclined to believe they were, than that they were not. My
reasons for this opinion are as follows: First, Because those books do
not contain internal evidence to prove they were not written by
Ezekiel and Daniel, as the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, Samuel,
etc., prove they were not written by Moses, Joshua, Samuel, etc.


    Secondly, Because they were not written till after the
Babylonian captivity began, and there is good reason to believe that
not any book in the Bible was written before that period; at least
it is proveable, from the books themselves, as I have already shown,
that they were not written till after the commencement of the Jewish
monarchy.


    Thirdly, Because the manner in which the books ascribed to Ezekiel
and Daniel are written agrees with the condition these men were in
at the time of writing them.


    Had the numerous commentators and priests, who have foolishly
employed or wasted their time in pretending to expound and unriddle
those books, been carried into captivity, as Ezekiel and Daniel
were, it would have greatly improved their intellects in comprehending
the reason for this mode of writing, and have saved them the trouble
of racking their invention, as they have done, to no purpose; for they
would have found that themselves would be obliged to write whatever
they had to write respecting their own affairs or those of their
friends or of their country, in a concealed manner, as those men
have done.


    These two books differ from all the rest for it is only these that
are filled with accounts of dreams and visions; and this difference
arose from the situation the writers were in as prisoners of war, or
prisoners of state, in a foreign country, which obliged them to convey
even the most trifling information to each other, and all their
political projects or opinions, in obscure and metaphorical terms. The
pretend to have dreamed dreams and seen visions, because it was
unsafe for them to speak facts or plain language. We ought, however
to suppose that the persons to whom they wrote understood what they
meant, and that it was not intended anybody else should. But these
busy commentators and priests have been puzzling their wits to find
out what it was not intended they should know, and with which they
have nothing to do.


    Ezekiel and Daniel were carried prisoners to Babylon under the
first captivity, in the time of Jehoiakim, nine years before the
second captivity in the time of Zedekiah.


    The Jews were then still numerous, and had considerable force at
Jerusalem; and as it is natural to suppose that men in the situation
of Ezekiel and Daniel would be meditating the recovery of their
country and their own deliverance, it is reasonable to suppose that
the accounts of dreams and visions with which those books are filled,
are no other than a disguised mode of correspondence, to facilitate
those objects- it served them as a cipher or secret alphabet. If
they are not thus, they are tales, reveries, and nonsense; or, at
least, a fanciful way of wearing off the wearisomeness of captivity;
but the presumption is they were the former.


    Ezekiel begins his books by speaking of a vision of cherubims
and of a wheel within a wheel, which he says he saw by the river
Chebar, in the land of his captivity. Is it not reasonable to suppose,
that by the cherubims he meant the temple at Jerusalem, where
they had figures of cherubims? and by a wheel within a wheel (which,
as a figure, has always been understood to signify political contrivance)
the project or means of recovering Jerusalem? In the latter part of
this book, he supposes himself transported to Jerusalem and into the
temple; and he refers back to the vision on the river Chebar, and says
(chapter xliii, verse 3), that this last vision was like the vision on
the river Chebar; which indicates that those pretended dreams and
visions had for their object the recovery of Jerusalem, and nothing
further.


    As to the romantic interpretations and applications, wild as the
dreams and visions they undertake to explain, which commentators
and priests have made of those books, that of converting them into
things which they call prophecies, and making them bend to times and
circumstances as far remote even as the present day, it shows the
fraud or the extreme folly to which credulity or priestcraft can go.


    Scarcely anything can be more absurd than to suppose that men
situated as Ezekiel and Daniel were, whose country was overrun and
in the possession of the enemy, all their friends and relations in
captivity abroad, or in slavery at home, or massacred, or in continual
danger of it; scarcely anything, I say, can be more absurd, than to
suppose that such men should find nothing to do but that of
employing their time and their thoughts about what was to happen to
other nations a thousand or two thousand years after they were dead;
at the same time, nothing is more natural than that they should
meditate the recovery of Jerusalem, and their own deliverance and
that this was the sole object of all the obscure and apparently frantic
writings contained in those books.


    In this sense, the mode of writing used in those two books,
being forced by necessity, and not adopted by choice, is not
irrational; but, if we are to use the books as prophecies, they are
false. In the 29th chapter of Ezekiel, speaking of Egypt, it is
said, (ver. II), "No foot of man shall pass through it, nor foot of
beast shall pass through it; neither shall it be inhabited for forty
years." This is what never came to pass, and consequently it is false,
as all the books I have already reviewed are. I here close this part
of the subject.


    In the former part of the Age of Reason I have spoken of Jonah,
and of the story of him and the whale. A fit story for ridicule, if it
was written to be believed; or of laughter, if it was intended to
try what credulity could swallow; for if it could swallow Jonah and
the whale, it could swallow anything.

    But, as is already shown in the observations on the book of Job
and of Proverbs, it is not always certain which of the books in the
Bible are originally Hebrew, or only translations from the books of
the Gentiles into Hebrew; and as the book of Jonah, so far from
treating of the affairs of the Jews, says nothing upon that subject,
but treats altogether of the Gentiles, it is more probable that it
is a book of the Gentiles than of the Jews, and that it has been
written as a fable, to expose the nonsense and satirize the vicious
and malignant character of a Bible prophet, or a predicting priest.


    Jonah is represented, first, as a disobedient prophet, running
away from his mission, and taking shelter aboard a vessel of the
Gentiles, bound from Joppa to Tarshish; as if he ignorantly
supposed, by some paltry contrivance, he could hide himself where
God could not find him. The vessel is overtaken by a storm at sea, and
the mariners, all of whom are Gentiles, believing it to be a judgment,
on account of some one on board who had committed a crime, agreed
to cast lots to discover the offender, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
But, before this, they had cast all their wares and merchandise
overboard to lighten the vessel, while Jonah, like a stupid fellow,
was fast asleep in the hold.


    After the lot had designated Jonah to be the offender, they
questioned him to know who and what he was? and he told them he
was a Hebrew; and the story implies that he confessed himself to be
guilty. But these Gentiles, instead of sacrificing him at once,
without pity or mercy, as a company of Bible prophets or priests would
have done by a Gentile in the same case, and as it is related Samuel
had done by Agag and Moses by the women and children, they
endeavored to save him, though at the risk of their own lives, for the
account says, "Nevertheless (that is, though Jonah was a Jew and a
foreigner, and the cause of all their misfortunes and the loss of
their cargo,) the men rowed hard to bring it (the boat) to land, but
they could not for the sea wrought and was tempestuous against
them." Still, they were unwilling to put the fate of the lot into
execution, and they cried (says the account) unto the Lord, saying,
(v. 14,) "We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not
perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood; for
thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee." Meaning, thereby, that
they did not presume to judge Jonah guilty, since that he might be
innocent; but that they considered the lot that had fallen to him as a
decree of God, or as it pleased God. The address of this prayer
shows that the Gentiles worshipped one Supreme Being, and that they
were not idolaters, as the Jews represented them to be. But the
storm still continuing and the danger increasing, they put the fate of
the lot into execution, and cast Jonah into the sea, where,
according to the story, a great fish swallowed him up whole and alive.


    We have now to consider Jonah securely housed from the storm in
the fish's belly. Here we are told that he prayed; but the prayer is a
made-up prayer, taken from various parts of the Psalms, without any
connection or consistency, and adapted to the distress, but not at all
to the condition that Jonah was in. It is such a prayer as a
Gentile, who might know something of the Psalms, could copy out for
him. This circumstance alone, were there no other, is sufficient to
indicate that the whole is a made-up story. The prayer, however, is
supposed to have answered the purpose, and the story goes on (taking
up at the same time the cant language of a Bible prophet), saying:
(chap. ii, ver. 10,) "And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited
out Jonah upon the dry land."


    Jonah then received a second mission to Nineveh, with which he
sets out; and we have now to consider him as a preacher. The
distress he is represented to have suffered, the remembrance of his
own disobedience as the cause of it, and the miraculous escape he is
supposed to have had, were sufficient, one would conceive, to have
impressed him with sympathy and benevolence in the execution of his
mission; but, instead of this, he enters the city with denunciation
and malediction in his mouth, crying: (chap. iii. ver. 4,) "Yet
forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown."


    We have now to consider this supposed missionary in the last act
of his mission; and here it is that the malevolent spirit of a
Bible-prophet, or of a predicting priest, appears in all that
blackness of character that men ascribe to the being they call the
devil.


    Having published his predictions, he withdrew, says the story,
to the east side of the city. But for what? not to contemplate, in
retirement, the mercy of his Creator to himself or to others, but to
wait, with malignant impatience, the destruction of Nineveh. It came
to pass, however, as the story relates that the Ninevites reformed,
and that God, according to the Bible phrase, repented him of the
evil he had said he would do unto them, and did it not. This, saith
the first verse of the last chapter, "displeased Jonah exceedingly,
and he was very angry." His obdurate heart would rather that all
Nineveh should be destroyed, and every soul, young and old, perish
in its ruins, than that his prediction should not be fulfilled. To
expose the character of a prophet still more, a gourd is made to
grow up in the night, that promised him an agreeable shelter from
the heat of the sun, in the place to which he had retired, and the
next morning it dies.


    Here the rage of the prophet becomes excessive, and he is ready to
destroy himself. "It is better, said he, for me to die than to
live." This brings on a supposed expostulation between the Almighty
and the prophet, in which the former says, "Doest thou well to be
angry for the gourd? And Jonah said, I do well to be angry even unto
death; Then, said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which
thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a
night, and perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that
great city, in which are more than sixscore thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?"


    Here is both the winding up of the satire and the moral of the
fable. As a satire, it strikes against the character of all the
Bible prophets, and against all the indiscriminate judgments upon men,
women, and children, with which this lying book, the Bible, is
crowded; such as Noah's flood, the destruction of the cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah, the extirpation of the Canaanites, even to the
sucking infants, and women with child, because the same reflection,
that there are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot
discern between their right hand and their left hand, meaning young
children, applies to all their cases. It satirizes also the supposed
partiality of the Creator for one nation more than for another.


    As a moral, it preaches against the malevolent spirit of
prediction; for as certainly as a man predicts ill, he becomes
inclined to wish it. The pride of having his judgment right hardens
his heart, till at last he beholds with satisfaction, or sees with
disappointment, the accomplishment or the failure of his
predictions. This book ends with the same kind of strong and
well-directed point against prophets, prophecies, and indiscriminate
judgment, as the chapter that Benjamin Franklin made for the Bible,
about Abraham and the stranger, ends against the intolerant spirit
of religious persecution. Thus much for the book of Jonah.


    Of the poetical parts of the Bible, that are called prophecies,
I have spoken in the former part of the Age of Reason, and already
in this, where I have said that the word prophet is the Bible word for
poet, and that the flights and metaphors of those poets, many of
which have become obscure by the lapse of time and the change of
circumstances, have been ridiculously erected into things called
prophecies, and applied to purposes the writers never thought of.
When a priest quotes any of those passages, he unriddles it agreeably
to his own views, and imposes that explanation upon his congregation
as the meaning of the writer. The whore of Babylon has been the
common whore of all the priests, and each has accused the other of
keeping the strumpet; so well do they agree in their explanations.


    There now remain only a few books, which they call books of the
lesser prophets, and as I have already shown that the greater are
impostors, it would be cowardice to disturb the repose of the little
ones. Let them sleep, then, in the arms of their nurses, the
priests, and both be forgotten together.


    I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a
wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and
the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick
them in the ground, but they will never make them grow. I pass on to
the books of the New Testament.


CHAPTER II
Turning to the New Testament
    The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of
the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.


    As it is nothing extraordinary that a woman should be with child
before she was married, and that the son she might bring forth
should be executed, even unjustly, I see no reason for not believing
that such a woman as Mary, and such a man as Joseph, and Jesus
existed; their mere existence is a matter of indifference about
which there is no ground either to believe or to disbelieve, and which
comes under the common head of, It may be so; and what then? The
probability, however, is that there were such persons, or at least
such as resembled them in part of the circumstances, because almost
all romantic stories have been suggested by some actual
circumstance; as the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, not a word of
which is true, were suggested by the case of Alexander Selkirk.


    It is not the existence, or non-existence, of the persons that I
trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in
the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised
thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told,
is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman
engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is,
to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost, under the impious
pretence (Luke, chap. i., ver. 35), that "the Holy Ghost shall come
upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee."
Notwithstanding which, Joseph afterward marries her, cohabits with
her as his wife, and in his turn rivals the ghost. This is putting the
story into intelligible language, and when told in this manner, there
is not a priest but must be ashamed to own it.*


    *Mary, the supposed virgin-mother of Jesus, had several other
children, sons and daughters. See Matthew, chap. xiii, verses 55, 56.


    Obscenity in matters of faith, however wrapped up, is always a
token of fable and imposture; for it is necessary to our serious
belief in God that we do not connect it with stories that run, as this
does, into ludicrous interpretations. This story is upon the face of
it, the same kind of story as that of Jupiter and Leda, or Jupiter and
Europa, or any of the amorous adventures of Jupiter; and shows, as
is already stated in the former part of the Age of Reason, that the
Christian faith is built upon the heathen mythology.


    As the historical parts of the New Testament, so far as concerns
Jesus Christ, are confined to a very short space of time, less than
two years, and all within the same country, and nearly to the same
spot, the discordance of time, place, and circumstance, which
detects the fallacy of the books of the Old Testament, and proves them
to be impositions, cannot be expected to be found here in the same
abundance. The New Testament compared with the Old, is like a farce
of one act, in which there is not room for very numerous violations of
the unities. There are, however, some glaring contradictions, which,
exclusive of the fallacy of the pretended prophecies, are sufficient
to show the story of Jesus Christ to be false.


    I lay it down as a position which cannot be controverted, first,
that the agreement of all the parts of a story does not prove that
story to be true, because the parts may agree, and the whole may be
false; secondly, that the disagreement of the parts of a story
proves the whole cannot be true. The agreement does not prove true,
but the disagreement proves falsehood positively.


    The history of Jesus Christ is contained in the four books
ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first chapter of
Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the
third chapter of Luke, there is also given a genealogy of Jesus
Christ. Did those two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be
true, because it might, nevertheless, be a fabrication; but as they
contradict each other in every particular, it proves falsehood
absolutely. If Matthew speaks truth, Luke speaks falsehood, and if
Luke speaks truth, Matthew speaks falsehood; and as there is no
authority for believing one more than the other, there is no authority
for believing either; and if they cannot be believed even in the
very first thing they say and set out to prove, they are not
entitled to be believed in any thing they say afterward. Truth is a
uniform thing; and as to inspiration and revelation, were we to
admit it, it is impossible to suppose it can be contradictory. Either,
then, the men called apostles are impostors, or the books ascribed
to them has been written by other persons and fathered upon them,
as is the case with the Old Testament.


    The book of Matthew gives, chap. i., ver 6, a genealogy by name
from David up through Joseph, the husband of Mary, to Christ; and
makes there to be twenty-eight generations. The book of Luke gives
also a genealogy by name from Christ, through Joseph, the husband of
Mary, down to David, and makes there to be forty-three generations;
besides which, there are only the two names of David and Joseph that
are alike in the two lists. I here insert both genealogical lists, and
for the sake of perspicuity and comparison, have placed them both in
the same direction, that is from Joseph down to David.


  Genealogy according to Matthew.         Genealogy according to Luke.


     Christ        23 Josaphat               Christ        23 Neri
   2 Joseph        24 Asa                  2 Joseph        24 Melchi
   3 Jacob         25 Abia                 3 Heli          25 Addi
   4 Matthan       26 Roboam               4 Matthat       26 Cosam
   5 Eleazar       27 Solomon              5 Levi          27 Elmodam
   6 Eliud         28 David*               6 Melchi        28 Er
   7 Achim                                 7 Janna         29 Jose
   8 Sadoc                                 8 Joseph        30 Eliezer
   9 Azor                                  9 Mattathias    31 Jorim
  10 Eliakim                              10 Amos          32 Matthat
  11 Abiud                                11 Naum          33 Levi
  12 Zorobabel                            12 Esli          34 Simeon
  13 Salathiel                            13 Nagge         35 Juda
  14 Jechonias                            14 Maath         36 Joseph
  15 Josias                               15 Mattathias    37 Jonan
  16 Amon                                 16 Semei         38 Eliakim
  17 Manasses                             17 Joseph        39 Melea
  18 Ezekias                              18 Juda          40 Menan
  19 Achaz                                19 Joanna        41 Mattatha
  20 Joatham                              20 Rhesa         42 Nathan
  21 Ozias                                21 Zorobabel     43 David
  22 Joram                                22 Salathiel

    *From the birth of David to the birth of Christ is upwards of 1080
years; and as the lifetime of Christ is not included, there are but 27
full generations. To find therefore the average age of each person
mentioned in the list, at the time his first son was born, it is
only necessary to divide 1080 years by 27, which gives 40 years for
each person. As the lifetime of man was then but the same extent it is
now, it is an absurdity to suppose that 27 following generations
should all be old bachelors, before they married; and the more so,
when we are told, that Solomon, the next in succession to David,
had a house full of wives and mistresses before he was twenty-one
years of age. So far from this genealogy being a solemn truth, it is
not even a reasonable lie. This list of Luke gives about twenty-six years
for the average age, and this is too much.


    Now, if these men, Matthew and Luke, set out with a falsehood
between them as these two accounts show they do) in the very
commencement of their history of Jesus Christ, and of whom and of what
he was, what authority (as I have before asked) is there left for
believing the strange things they tell us afterward? If they cannot be
believed in their account of his natural genealogy, how are we to
believe them when they tell us he was the son of God begotten by a
ghost, and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? If
they lied in one genealogy, why are we to believe them in the other?
If his natural genealogy be manufactured, which it certainly is, why
are we not to suppose that his celestial genealogy is manufactured
also, and that the whole is fabulous? Can any man of serious
reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story
naturally impossible, repugnant to every idea of decency, and
related by persons already detected of falsehood? Is it not more
safe that we stop ourselves at the plain, pure, and unmixed belief
of one God, which is Deism, than that we commit ourselves on an
ocean of improbable, irrational, indecent and contradictory tales?


    The first question, however, upon the books of the New
Testament, as upon those of the Old, is, Are they genuine? Were they
written by the persons to whom they are ascribed? for it is upon
this ground only that the strange things related therein have been
credited. Upon this point there is no direct proof for or against, and
all that this state of a case proves is doubtfulness, and doubtfulness
is the opposite of belief. The state, therefore, that the books are
in, proves against themselves as far as this kind of proof can go.


    But exclusive of this, the presumption is that the books called
the Evangelists, and ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were
not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and that they are
impositions. The disordered state of the history in those four
books, the silence of one book upon matters related in the other,
and the disagreement that is to be found among them, implies that
they are the production of some unconnected individuals, many
years after the things they pretend to relate, each of whom made
his own legend; and not the writings of men living intimately
together, as the men called the apostles are supposed to have
done - in fine, that they have been manufactured, as the books of
the Old Testament have been, by other persons than those whose
names they bear.


    The story of the angel announcing what the church calls the
immaculate conception is not so much as mentioned in the books
ascribed to Mark and John; and is differently related in Matthew and
Luke. The former says the angel appeared to Joseph; the latter says it
was to Mary; but either Joseph or Mary was the worst evidence that
could have been thought of, for it was others that should have
testified for them, and not they for themselves. Were any girl that is
now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten
with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be
believed? Certainly she would not. Why, then, are we to believe the
same thing of another girl, whom we never saw, told by nobody knows
who, nor when, nor where? How strange and inconsistent it is, that the
same circumstance that would weaken the belief even of a probable
story, should be given as a motive for believing this one, that has
upon the face of it every token of absolute impossibility and
imposture!


    The story of Herod destroying all the children under two years
old, belongs altogether to the book of Matthew; not one of the rest
mentions anything about it. Had such a circumstance been true, the
universality of it must have made it known to all the writers, and the
thing would have been too striking to have been omitted by any. This
writer tells us, that Jesus escaped this slaughter because Joseph
and Mary were warned by an angel to flee with him unto Egypt; but he
forgot to make any provision for John, who was then under two years
of age. John, however, who stayed behind, fared as well as Jesus, who
fled; and, therefore, the story circumstantially belies itself.


    Not any two of these writers agree in reciting, exactly in the
same words, the written inscription, short as it is, which they tell
us was put over Christ when he was crucified; and besides this, Mark
says: He was crucified at the third hour (nine in the morning), and
John says it was the sixth hour (twelve at noon).*


    *According to John, the sentence was not passed till about the
sixth hour (noon), and, consequently, the execution could not be
till the afternoon; but Mark says expressly, that he was crucified
at the third hour (nine in the morning), chap. xv, verse 25. John,
chap. xix, verse 14.


    The inscription is thus stated in these books:


       MATTHEW. This is Jesus, the king of the Jews.
       MARK.... The king of the Jews.
       LUKE.... This is the king of the Jews.
       JOHN.... Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews.


    We may infer from these circumstances, trivial as they are, that
those writers, whoever they were, and in whatever time they lived,
were not present at the scene. The only one of the men called apostles
who appears to have been near the spot was Peter, and when he was
accused of being one of Jesus' followers, it is said, (Matthew,
chap. xxvi., ver. 74,) "Then he [Peter] began to curse and to swear,
saying, I know not the man!" yet we are now called upon to believe
the same Peter, convicted, by their own account, of perjury. For what
reason, or on what authority, shall we do this?


    The accounts that are given of the circumstances that they tell us
attended the crucifixion are differently related in these four books.

    The book ascribed to Matthew says, chap. xxvii, v. 45, "Now from
the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth
hour." Ver. 51, 52, 53, "And, behold, the veil of the temple was
rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and
the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the
saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his
resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared unto many."
Such is the account which this dashing writer of the book of Matthew
gives, but in which he is not supported by the writers of the other
books.


    The writer of the book ascribed to Mark, in detailing the
circumstances of the crucifixion, makes no mention of any
earthquake, nor of the rocks rending, nor of the graves opening, nor
of the dead men walking out. The writer of the book of Luke is
silent also upon the same points. And as to the writer of the book
of John, though he details all the circumstances of the crucifixion
down to the burial of Christ, he says nothing about either the
darkness- the veil of the temple- the earthquake- the rocks- the
graves- nor the dead men.


    Now, if it had been true that those things had happened, and if
the writers of those books had lived at the time they did happen,
and had been the persons they are said to be, namely, the four men
called apostles, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it was not possible for
them, as true historians, even without the aid of inspiration, not
to have recorded them. The things, supposing them to have been
facts, were of too much notoriety not to have been known, and of too
much importance not to have been told. All these supposed apostles
must have been witnesses of the earthquake, if there had been any;
for it was not possible for them to have been absent from it; the
opening of the graves and the resurrection of the dead men, and
their walking about the city, is of greater importance than the
earthquake. An earthquake is always possible and natural, and proves
nothing but this opening of the graves is supernatural, and directly
in point to their doctrine, their cause, and their apostleship. Had it
been true, it would have filled up whole chapters of those books,
and been the chosen theme and general chorus of all the writers; but
instead of this, little and trivial things, and mere prattling
conversations of, he said this, and he said that, are often
tediously detailed, while this, most important of all, had it been
true, is passed off in a slovenly manner by a single dash of the
pen, and that by one writer only, and not so much as hinted at by
the rest.


    It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to
support the lie after it is told. The writer of the book of Matthew
should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and
went into the city, and what became of them afterward, and who it
was that saw them- for he is not hardy enough to say he saw them
himself; whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff,
he-saints and she-saints; or whether they came full dressed, and
where they got their dresses; whether they went to their former
habitations, and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and their
property, and how they were received; whether they entered
ejectments for the recovery of their possessions, or brought actions
of crim. con. against the rival interlopers; whether they remained on
earth, and followed their former occupation of preaching or working;
or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and
buried themselves.


    Strange, indeed, that an army of saints should return to life, and
nobody know who they were, nor who it was that saw them, and that
not a word more should be said upon the subject, nor these saints have
anything to tell us! Had it been the prophets who (as we are told) had
formerly prophesied of these things, they must have had a great deal to
say. They could have told us everything and we should have had
posthumous prophecies, with notes and commentaries upon the first,
a little better at least than we have now. Had it been Moses and Aaron
and Joshua and Samuel and David, not an unconverted Jew had remained
in all Jerusalem. Had it been John the Baptist, and the saints of the time
then present, everybody would have known them, and they would have
out-preached and out-famed all the other apostles. But, instead of this,
these saints were made to pop up, like Jonah's gourd in the night, for no
purpose at all but to wither in the morning. Thus much for this part of the
story.


    The tale of the resurrection follows that of the crucifixion,
and in this as well as in that, the writers, whoever they were,
disagree so much as to make it evident that none of them were there.

    The book of Matthew states that when Christ was put in the
sepulchre, the Jews applied to Pilate for a watch or a guard to be
placed over the sepulchre, to prevent the body being stolen by the
disciples; and that, in consequence of this request, the sepulchre was
made sure, sealing the stone that covered the mouth, and setting a
watch. But the other books say nothing about this application, nor
about the sealing, nor the guard, nor the watch; and according to
their accounts, there were none. Matthew, however, follows up this
part of the story of the guard or the watch with a second part, that I
shall notice in the conclusion, as it serves to detect the fallacy
of these books.


    The book of Matthew continues its account, and says (chap.
xxviii., ver. 1) that at the end of the Sabbath, as it began to
dawn, toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the
other Mary, to see the sepulchre. Mark says it was sun-rising, and
John says it was dark. Luke says it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna,
and Mary, the mother of James, and other women, that came to the
sepulchre; and John states that Mary Magdalene came alone. So well
do they agree about their first evidence! they all, however, appear to
have known most about Mary Magdalene; she was a woman of a large
acquaintance, and it was not an ill conjecture that she might be
upon the stroll.


    The book of Matthew goes on to say (ver. 2), "And behold there
was a great earthquake, for the angel of the Lord descended from
heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat
upon it." But the other books say nothing about any earthquake, nor
about the angel rolling back the stone and sitting upon it, and
according to their account, there was no angel sitting there. Mark says
the angel was within the sepulchre, sitting on the right side. Luke says
there were two, and they were both standing up; and John says they
were both sitting down, one at the head and the other at the feet.


    Matthew says that the angel that was sitting upon the stone on the
outside of the sepulchre told the two Marys that Christ was risen, and
that the women went away quickly. Mark says that the women, upon
seeing the stone rolled away, and wondering at it, went into the
sepulchre, and that it was the angel that was sitting within on the
right side, that told them so. Luke says it was the two angels that
were standing up; and John says it was Jesus Christ himself that
told it to Mary Magdalene, and that she did not go into the sepulchre,
but only stooped down and looked in.


    Now, if the writer of those four books had gone into a court of
justice to prove an alibi (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is
here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by
supernatural means), and had they given their evidence in the same
contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in
danger of having their ears cropped for perjury, and would have justly
deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books that
have been imposed upon the world, as being given by divine
inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God.


    The writer of the book of Matthew, after giving this account
relates a story that is not to be found in any of the other books, and
which is the same I have just before alluded to.


    "Now," says he (that is, after the conversation the women had with
the angel sitting upon the stone), "behold some of the watch
[meaning the watch that he had said had been placed over the
sepulchre] came into the city, showed unto the chief priests all the
things that were done; and when they were assembled with the elders
and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers,
saying, Say ye His disciples came by night, and stole him away while
we slept; and if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade
him, and secure you. So they took the money, and did as they were
taught; and this saying [that his disciples stole him away] is
commonly reported among the Jews until this day."


    The expression, until this day, is an evidence that the book
ascribed to Matthew was not written by Matthew, and that it had been
manufactured long after the time and things of which it pretends to
treat; for the expression implies a great length of intervening
time. It would be inconsistent in us to speak in this manner of
anything happening in our own time. To give therefore, intelligible
meaning to the expression, we must suppose a lapse of some
generations at least, for this manner of speaking carries the mind
back to ancient time.


    The absurdity also of the story is worth noticing; for it shows
the writer of the book of Matthew to have been an exceedingly weak
and foolish man. He tells a story that contradicts itself in point of
possibility; for through the guard, if there were any, might be made
to say that the body was taken away while they were asleep, and to
give that as a reason for their not having prevented it, that same
sleep must also have prevented their knowing how and by whom it
was done, and yet they are made to say, that it was the disciples
who did it. Were a man to tender his evidence of something that he
should say was done, and of the manner of doing it, and of the
person who did it, while he was asleep, and could know nothing of
the matter, such evidence could not be received; it will do well
enough for Testament evidence, but not for anything where truth is
concerned.


    I come now to that part of the evidence in those books, that
respects the pretended appearance of Christ after this pretended
resurrection.


    The writer of the book of Matthew relates, that the angel that was
sitting on the stone at the mouth of the sepulchre, said to the two
Marys, chap. xxviii., ver. 7, "Behold Christ has gone before you
into Galilee, there shall ye see him; lo, I have told you." And the
same writer at the next two verses (8, 9), makes Christ himself to
speak to the same purpose to these women immediately after the
angel had told it to them, and that they ran quickly to tell it to the
disciples; and at the 16th verse it is said, "Then the eleven
disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had
appointed them; and when they saw him, they worshiped him."


    But the writer of the book of John tells us a story very different
to this; for he says, chap. xx., ver. 19, "Then the same day at
evening, being the first day of the week [that is, the same day that
Christ is said to have risen,] when the doors were shut where the
disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood
in the midst of them."


    According to Matthew the eleven were marching to Galilee to meet
Jesus in a mountain, by his own appointment, at the very time when,
according to John, they were assembled in another place, and that
not by appointment, but in secret, for fear of the Jews.


    The writer of the book of Luke contradicts that of Matthew more
pointedly than John does; for he says expressly that the meeting was
in Jerusalem the evening of the same day that he [Christ] rose, and
that the eleven were there. See Luke, chap. xxiv, ver. 13, 33.


    Now, it is not possible, unless we admit these supposed
disciples the right of willful lying, that the writer of those books
could be any of the eleven persons called disciples; for if, according
to Matthew, the eleven went into Galilee to meet Jesus in a mountain
by his own appointment on the same day that he is said to have
risen, Luke and John must have been two of that eleven; yet the
writer of Luke says expressly, and John implies as much, that the
meeting was that same day, in a house in Jerusalem; and, on the
other hand, if, according to Luke and John, the eleven were assembled
in a house in Jerusalem, Matthew must have been one of that eleven;
yet Matthew says the meeting was in a mountain in Galilee, and
consequently the evidence given in those books destroys each other.

    The writer of the book of Mark says nothing about any meeting in
Galilee; but he says, chap. xvi, ver. 12, that Christ, after his
resurrection, appeared in another form to two of them as they walked
into the country, and that these two told it to the residue, who would
not believe them. Luke also tells a story in which he keeps Christ
employed the whole day of this pretended resurrection, until the
evening, and which totally invalidates the account of going to the
mountain in Galilee. He says that two of them, without saying which
two, went that same day to a village call Emmaus, three score furlongs
(seven miles and a half) from Jerusalem, and that Christ, in disguise,
went with them, and stayed with them unto the evening, and supped
with them, and then vanished out of their sight, and re-appeared that
same evening at the meeting of the eleven in Jerusalem.


    This is the contradictory manner in which the evidence of this
pretended re-appearance of Christ is stated; the only point in which
the writers agree, is the skulking privacy of that re-appearance;
for whether it was in the recess of a mountain in Galilee, or a
shut-up house in Jerusalem, it was still skulking. To what cause,
then, are we to assign this skulking? On the one hand it is directly
repugnant to the supposed or pretended end- that of convincing the
world that Christ had risen; and on the other hand, to have asserted
the publicity of it would have exposed the writers of those books to
public detection, and, therefore, they have been under the necessity
of making it a private affair.


    As to the account of Christ being seen by more than five hundred
at once, it is Paul only who says it, and not the five hundred who say
it for themselves. It is, therefore, the testimony of but one man, and
that, too, of a man who did not, according to the same account,
believe a word of the matter himself at the time it is said to have
happened. His evidence, supposing him to have been the writer of the
15th chapter of Corinthians, where this account is given, is like that
of a man who comes into a court of Justice to swear that what he had
sworn before is false. A man may often see reason, and he has, too,
always the right of changing his opinion; but this liberty does not
extend to matters of fact.


    I now come to the last scene, that of the ascension into heaven.
Here all fear of the Jews, and of everything else, must necessarily
have been out of the question: it was that which, if true, was to seal
the whole, and upon which the reality of the future mission of the
disciples was to rest for proof. Words, whether declarations or
promises, that passed in private, either in the recess of a mountain
in Galilee or in a shut-up house in Jerusalem, even supposing them
to have been spoken, could not be evidence in public; it was therefore
necessary that this last scene should preclude the possibility of
denial and dispute, and that it should be, as I have stated in the
former part of the Age of Reason, as public and as visible as the
sun at noonday; at least it ought to have been as public as the
crucifixion is reported to have been. But to come to the point.


    In the first place, the writer of the book of Matthew does not say
a syllable about it; neither does the writer of the book of John. This
being the case, it is not possible to suppose that those writers,
who effect to be even minute in other matters, would have been
silent upon this, had it been true? The writer of the book of Mark
passes it off in a careless, slovenly manner, with a single dash of
the pen, as if he was tired of romancing or ashamed of the story. So
also does the writer of Luke. And even between these two, there is not
an apparent agreement as to the place where his final parting is
said to have been.


    The book of Mark says that Christ appeared to the eleven as they
sat at meat, alluding to the meeting of the eleven at Jerusalem; he
then states the conversation that he says passed at that meeting;
and immediately after says (as a school-boy would finish a dull story)
"So then, after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up
into heaven and sat on the right hand of God." But the writer of Luke
says, that the ascension was from Bethany; that he [Christ] led them
out as far as Bethany, and was parted from them, and was carried up
into heaven. So also was Mahomet; and as to Moses, the apostle Jude
says, ver. 9 "that Michael and the devil disputed about his body." While
we believe such fables as these, or either of them, we believe
unworthily of the Almighty.


    I have now gone through the examination of the four books ascribed
to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; and when it is considered that the
whole space of time from the crucifixion to what is called the
ascension is but a few days, apparently not more than three or four,
and that all the circumstances are said to have happened nearly
about the same spot, Jerusalem, it is, I believe, impossible to find
in any story upon record so many and such glaring absurdities,
contradictions and falsehoods as are in those books. They are more
numerous and striking than I had any expectation of finding when I
began this examination, and far more so than I had any idea of when
I wrote the former part of the Age of Reason. I had then neither Bible
nor Testament to refer to, nor could I procure any. My own
situation, even as to existence, was becoming every day more
precarious, and as I was willing to leave something behind me on the
subject, I was obliged to be quick and concise. The quotations I
then made were from memory only, but they are correct; and the
opinions I have advanced in that work are the effect of the most clear
and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are
impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus
Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath
of God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous
inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty;
that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean
now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character,
or the practice of what are called moral virtues- and that it was
upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all
my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now- and so help me God.


    But to return to the subject. Though it is impossible, at this
distance of time, to ascertain as a fact who were the writers of those
four books (and this alone is sufficient to hold them in doubt, and
where we doubt we do not believe), it is not difficult to ascertain
negatively that they were not written by the persons to whom they
are ascribed. The contradictions in those books demonstrate two
things:


    First, that the writers could not have been eye-witnesses and
ear-witnesses of the matters they relate, or they would have related
them without those contradictions; and consequently, that the books
have not been written by the persons called apostles, who are
supposed to have been witnesses of this kind.


    Secondly, that the writers, whoever they were, have not acted in
concerted imposition; but each writer separately and individually
for himself, and without the knowledge of the other.


    The same evidence that applies to prove the one, applies equally
to prove both cases; that is, that the books were not written by the
men called apostles, and also that they are not a concerted
imposition. As to inspiration, it is altogether out of the question;
we may as well attempt to unite truth and falsehood, as inspiration
and contradiction.

    If four men are eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses to a scene, they
will, without any concert between them, agree as to time and place
when and where that scene happened. Their individual knowledge of
the thing, each one knowing it for himself, renders concert totally
unnecessary; the one will not say it was in a mountain in the country,
and the other at a house in town: the one will not say it was at
sunrise, and the other that it was dark. For in whatever place it was,
at whatever time it was, they know it equally alike.


    And, on the other hand, if four men concert a story, they will
make their separate relations of that story agree and corroborate with
each other to support the whole. That concert supplies the want of
fact in the one case, as the knowledge of the fact supersedes, in
the other case, the necessity of a concert. The same contradictions,
therefore, that prove that there has been no concert, prove also
that the reporters had no knowledge of the fact (or rather of that
which they relate as a fact), and detect also the falsehood of their
reports. Those books, therefore, have neither been written by the
men called apostles, nor by impostors in concert. How then have they
been written?


    I am not one of those who are fond of believing there is much of
that which is called willful lying, or lying originally, except in the
case of men setting up to be prophets, as in the Old Testament; for
prophesying is lying professionally. In almost all other cases, it
is not difficult to discover the progress by which even simple
supposition, with the aid of credulity, will, in time, grow into a
lie, and at last be told as a fact; and whenever we can find a
charitable reason for a thing of this kind, we ought not to indulge
a severe one.


    The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story
of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in
vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of
the assassination of Julius Caesar, not many years before; and they
generally have their origin in violent deaths, or in the execution
of innocent persons. In cases of this kind, compassion lends its aid
and benevolently stretches the story. It goes on a little and a little
further till it becomes a most certain truth. Once start a ghost and
credulity fills up the history of its life, and assigns the cause of
its appearance! one tells it one way, another another way, till
there are as many stories about the ghost and about the proprietor
of the ghost, as there are about Jesus Christ in these four books.


    The story of the appearance of Jesus Christ is told with that
strange mixture of the natural and impossible that distinguishes
legendary tale from fact. He is represented as suddenly coming in
and going out when the doors were shut, and of vanishing out of
sight and appearing again, as one would conceive of an unsubstantial
vision; then again he is hungry, sits down to meat, and eats his
supper. But as those who tell stories of this kind never provide for
all the cases, so it is here; they have told us that when he arose
he left his grave clothes behind him; but they have forgotten to
provide other clothes for him to appear in afterward, or to tell us
what he did with them when he ascended- whether he stripped all off,
or went up clothes and all. In the case of Elijah, they have been
careful enough to make him throw down his mantle; how it happened
not to be burned in the chariot of fire they also have not told us. But
as imagination supplies all deficiencies of this kind, we may
suppose, if we please, that it was made of salamander's wool.


    Those who are not much acquainted with ecclesiastical history
may suppose that the book called the New Testament has existed ever
since the time of Jesus Christ, as they suppose that the books
ascribed to Moses have existed ever since the time of Moses. But the
fact is historically otherwise. There was no such book as the New
Testament till more than three hundred years after the time that
Christ is said to have lived.


    At what time the books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
began to appear is altogether a matter of uncertainty. There is not
the least shadow of evidence of who the persons were that wrote
them, nor at what time they were written; and they might as well
have been called by the names of any of the other supposed apostles,
as by the names they are now called. The originals are not in the
possession of any Christian Church existing, any more than the two
tables of stone written on, they pretend, by the finger of God, upon
Mount Sinai, and given to Moses, are in the possession of the Jews.
And even if they were, there is no possibility of proving the
handwriting in either case. At the time those books were written there
was no printing, and consequently there could be no publication,
otherwise than by written copies, which any man might make or alter
at pleasure, and call them originals.* Can we suppose it is consistent
with the wisdom of the Almighty, to commit himself and his will to
man upon such precarious means as these, or that it is consistent we
should pin our faith upon such uncertainties? We cannot make, nor
alter, nor even imitate so much as one blade of grass that he has
made, and yet we can make or alter words of God as easily as words
of man.


    *The former part of the “The Age of Reason” has not been published
in two years, and there is already an expression in it that is not mine.
The expression is, The book of Luke was carried by a majority of one voice
only. It may be true, but it is not I that have said it. Some person, who
might know of the circumstance, has added it in a note at the bottom of
the page of some of the editions, printed either in England or in America;
and the printers, after that, have placed it into the body of the work, and
made me the author of it. If this has happened within such a short space
of time, notwithstanding the aid of printing, which prevents the alteration
of copies individually, what may not have happened in a much greater
length of time, when there was no printing, and when any man who could
write could make a written copy, and call it an original by Matthew, Mark,
Luke, or John?


    About three hundred and fifty years after the time that Christ
is said to have lived, several writings of the kind I am speaking of
were scattered in the hands of diverse individuals; and as the
church had began to form itself into a hierarchy, or church
government, with temporal powers, it set itself about collecting
them into a code, as we now see them, called The New Testament.
They decided by vote, as I have before said in the former part of
“The Age of Reason,” which of those writings, out of the collection
they had made, should be the word of God, and which should not.
The Rabbins of the Jews had decided, by vote, upon the books of
the Bible before.


    As the object of the church, as is the case in all national
establishments of churches, was power and revenue, and terror the
means it used, it is consistent to suppose that the most miraculous
and wonderful of the writings they had collected stood the best chance
of being voted. And as to the authenticity of the books, the vote
stands in the place of it, for it can be traced no higher.


    Disputes, however, ran high among the people then calling
themselves Christians; not only as to points of doctrine, but as to
the authenticity of the books. In the contest between the persons
called St. Augustine and Fauste, about the year 400, the latter
says: "The books called the Evangelists have been composed long
after the times of the apostles by some obscure men, who, fearing
that the world would not give credit to their relation of matters of
which they could not be informed, have published them under the
names of the apostles, and which are so full of sottishness and
discordant relations, that there is neither agreement nor connection
between them."

    And in another place, addressing himself to the advocates of those
books, as being the word of God, he says, "It is thus that your
predecessors have inserted in the scriptures of our Lord many
things, which, though they carry his name agrees not with his
doctrines. This is not surprising, since that we have often proved
that these things have not been written by himself, nor by his
apostles, but that for the greater part they are founded upon tales,
upon vague reports, and put together by I know not what, half-Jews,
but with little agreement between them, and which they have
nevertheless published under the names of the apostles of our Lord,
and have thus attributed to them their own errors and their lies."*


    *I have these two extracts from Boulanger's Life of Paul,
written in French. Boulanger has quoted them from the writings of
Augustine against Fauste, to which he refers.


    The reader will see by these extracts, that the authenticity of
the books of the New Testament was denied, and the books treated as
tales, forgeries, and lies, at the time they were voted to be the word
of God.* But the interest of the church, with the assistance of the
fagot, bore down the opposition, and at last suppressed all
investigation. Miracles followed upon miracles, if we will believe
them, and men were taught to say they believed whether they
believed or not. But (by way of throwing in a thought) the French
Revolution has excommunicated the church from the power of
working miracles; she has not been able, with the assistance of all
her saints, to work one miracle since the revolution began; and as
she never stood in greater need than now, we may, without the aid
of divination, conclude that all her former miracles were tricks and lies.


    *Boulanger, in his Life of Paul, has collected from the
ecclesiastical histories, and from the writings of fathers, as they
are called, several matters which show the opinions that prevailed
among the different sects of Christians at the time the Testament,
as we now see it, was voted to be the word of God. The following
extracts are from the second chapter of that work.


    "The Marcionists, (a Christian sect,) assumed that the evangelists
were filled with falsities. The Manicheans, who formed a very numerous
sect at the commencement of Christianity, rejected as false all the
New Testament, and showed other writings quite different that they
gave for authentic. The Cerinthians, like the Marcionists, admitted
not the Acts of the Apostles. The Encratites, and the Severians,
adopted neither the Acts nor the Epistles of Paul. Chrysostom, in a
homily which he made upon the Acts of the Apostles, says that in his
time, about the year 400, many people knew nothing either of the
author or of the book. St. Irene, who lived before that time,
reports that the Valentinians, like several other sects of Christians,
accused the scriptures of being filled with imperfections, errors, and
contradictions. The Ebionites, or Nazarines, who were the first
Christians, rejected all the Epistles of Paul and regarded him as an
impostor. They report, among other things, that he was originally a
pagan, that he came to Jerusalem, where he lived some time; and that
having a mind to marry the daughter of the high priest, he caused
himself to be circumcised: but that not being able to obtain her, he
quarreled with the Jews and wrote against circumcision, and against
the observance of the sabbath, and against all the legal ordinances.


    When we consider the lapse of more than three hundred years
intervening between the time that Christ is said to have lived and the
time the New Testament was formed into a book, we must see, even
without the assistance of historical evidence, the exceeding
uncertainty there is of its authenticity. The authenticity of the book
of Homer, so far as regards the authorship, is much better established
than that of the New Testament, though Homer is a thousand years
the most ancient. It is only an exceedingly good poet that could have
written the book of Homer, and therefore few men only could have
attempted it; and a man capable of doing it would not have thrown
away his own fame by giving it to another. In like manner, there were
but few that could have composed Euclid's Elements, because none but
an exceedingly good geometrician could have been the author of that work.


    But with respect to the books of the New Testament, particularly
such parts as tell us of the resurrection and ascension of Christ, any
person who could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's
walking could have made such books; for the story is most wretchedly
told. The chance, therefore, of forgery in the Testament, is
millions to one greater than in the case of Homer or Euclid. Of the
numerous priests or parsons of the present day, bishops and all, every
one of them can make a sermon, or translate a scrap of Latin,
especially if it had been translated a thousand times before; but is
there any among them that can write poetry like Homer, or science
like Euclid? The sum total of a person's learning, with very few
exceptions, is a b ab, and hic haec, hoc; and their knowledge of
science is three times one is three; and this is more than
sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at the time, to have
written all the books of the New Testament.


    As the opportunities of forgeries were greater, so also was the
inducement. A man could gain no advantage by writing under the name
of Homer or Euclid; if he could write equal to them, it would be better
that he wrote under his own name; if inferior, he could not succeed.
Pride would prevent the former, and impossibility the latter. But with
respect to such books as compose the New Testament, all the
inducements were on the side of forgery. The best imagined history
that could have been made, at the distance of two or three hundred
years after the time, could not have passed for an original under
the name of the real writer; the only chance of success lay in
forgery, for the church wanted pretence for its new doctrine, and
truth and talents were out of the question.


    But as is not uncommon (as before observed) to relate stories of
persons walking after they are dead, and of ghosts and apparitions
of such as have fallen by some violent or extraordinary means; and
as the people of that day were in the habit of believing such
things, and of the appearance of angels, and also of devils, and of
their getting into people's insides and shaking them like a fit of
an ague, and of their being cast out again as if by an emetic- (Mary
Magdalene, the book of Mark tells us, has brought up, or been
brought to bed of seven devils)- it was nothing extraordinary that
some story of this kind should get abroad of the person called Jesus
Christ, and become afterward the foundation of the four books
ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each writer told the tale
as he heard it, or thereabouts, and gave to his book the name of the
saint or the apostle whom tradition had given as the eye-witness. It
is only upon this ground that the contradiction in those books can be
accounted for; and if this be not the case, they are downright
impositions, lies and forgeries, without even the apology of
credulity.
   That they have been written by a sort of half Jews, as the
foregoing quotations mention, is discernable enough. The frequent
references made to that chief assassin and impostor, Moses, and to
the men called prophets, establish this point; and, on the other band,
the church has complemented the fraud by admitting the Bible and the
Testament to reply to each other. Between the Christian Jew and the
Christian Gentile, the thing called a prophecy and the thing
prophesied, the type and the thing typified, the sign and the thing
signified, have been industriously rummaged up and fitted together,
like old locks and pick-lock keys. The story foolishly enough told
of Eve and the serpent, and naturally enough as to the enmity
between men and serpents (for the serpent always bites about the heel,
because it cannot reach higher; and the man always knocks the
serpent about the head, as the most effectual way to prevent its
biting*) this foolish story, I say, has been made into a prophecy, a
type, and a promise to begin with; and the lying imposition of
Isaiah to Ahaz, That a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, as a sign
that Ahaz should conquer, when the event was that he was defeated
(as already noticed in the observations on the book of Isaiah), has
been perverted and made to serve as a winder up.

    *It shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel. Genesis,
chap. iii, verse 15.


    Jonah and the whale are also made into a sign or a type. Jonah
is Jesus, and the whale is the grave; for it is said (and they have
made Christ to say it of himself), Matt. chap. xii, ver. 40, "For as
Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall
the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the
earth." But it happens, awkwardly enough, that Christ, according to
their own account, was but one day and two nights in the grave;
about 36 hours, instead of 72; that is, the Friday night, the
Saturday, and the Saturday night; for they say he was up on the
Sunday morning by sunrise, or before. But as this fits quite as well
as the bite and the kick in Genesis, or the virgin and her son in Isaiah,
it will pass in the lump of orthodox things. Thus much for the
historical part of the Testament and its evidences.


    Epistles of Paul.- The epistles ascribed to Paul, being fourteen
in number, almost fill up the remaining part of the Testament. Whether
those epistles were written by the person to whom they are ascribed is
a matter of no great importance, since the writer, whoever he was,
attempts to prove his doctrine by argument. He does not pretend to have
been witness to any of the scenes told of the resurrection and the
ascension, and he declares that he had not believed them.


    The story of his being struck to the ground as he was journeying
to Damascus has nothing in it miraculous or extraordinary; he
escaped with life, and that is more than many others have done, who
have been struck with lightning; and that he should lose his sight for
three days, and be unable to eat or drink during that time, is nothing
more than is common in such conditions. His companions that were
with him appear not to have suffered in the same manner, for they were
well enough to lead him the remainder of the journey; neither did they
pretend to have seen any vision.


    The character of the person called Paul, according to the accounts
given of him, has in it a great deal of violence and fanaticism; he
had persecuted with as much heat as he preached afterward; the
stroke he had received had changed his thinking, without altering
his constitution; and either as a Jew or a Christian, he was the
same zealot. Such men are never good moral evidences of any doctrine
they preach. They are always in extremes, as well of actions as of belief.


    The doctrine he sets out to prove by argument is the
resurrection of the same body, and he advances this as an evidence
of immortality. But so much will men differ in their manner of
thinking, and in the conclusions they draw from the same premises,
that this doctrine of the resurrection of the same body, so far from
being an evidence of immortality, appears to me to furnish an evidence
against it; for if I have already died in this body, and am raised again in
the same body in which I have lived, it is a presumptive evidence that I
shall die again. That resurrection no more secures me against the
repetition of dying, than an ague-fit, when passed, secures me against
another. To believe, therefore, in immortality, I must have a more
elevated idea than is contained in the gloomy doctrine of the resurrection.


    Besides, as a matter of choice, as well as of hope, I had rather
have a better body and a more convenient form than the present.
Every animal in the creation excels us in something. The winged
insects, without mentioning doves or eagles, can pass over more
space and with greater ease in a few minutes than man can in an
hour. The glide of the smallest fish, in proportion to its bulk,
exceeds us in motion almost beyond comparison, and without
weariness. Even the sluggish snail can ascend from the bottom of a
dungeon, where a man, by the want of that ability, would perish; and
a spider can launch itself from the top, as a playful amusement. The
personal powers of man are so limited, and his heavy frame so little
constructed to extensive enjoyment, that there is nothing to induce us
to wish the opinion of Paul to be true. It is too little for the
magnitude of the scene- too mean for the sublimity of the subject.


    But all other arguments apart, the consciousness of existence is
the only conceivable idea we can have of another life, and the
continuance of that consciousness is immortality. The consciousness of
existence, or the knowing that we exist, is not necessarily confined
to the same form, nor to the same matter, even in this life.


    We have not in all cases the same form, nor in any case the same
matter that composed our bodies twenty or thirty years ago; and yet
we are conscious of being the same persons. Even legs and arms,
which make up almost half the human frame, are not necessary to the
consciousness of existence. These may be lost or taken away, and the
full consciousness of existence remain; and were their place
supplied by wings, or other appendages, we cannot conceive that it
would alter our consciousness of existence. In short, we know not
how much, or rather how little, of our composition it is, and how
exquisitely fine that little is, that creates in us this consciousness
of existence; and all beyond that is like the pulp of a peach,
distinct and separate from the vegetative speck in the kernel.


    Who can say by what exceedingly fine action of fine matter it is
that a thought is produced in what we call the mind? and yet that
thought when produced, as I now produce the thought I am writing, is
capable of becoming immortal, and is the only production of man that
has that capacity.


    Statues of brass or marble will perish; and statues made in
imitation of them are not the same statues, nor the same
workmanship, any more than the copy of a picture is the same
picture. But print and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and
that with materials of any kind- carve it in wood or engrave it on
stone, the thought is eternally and identically the same thought in
every case. It has a capacity of unimpaired existence, unaffected by
change of matter, and is essentially distinct and of a nature
different from every thing else that we know or can conceive. If,
then, the thing produced has in itself a capacity of being immortal,
it is more than a token that the power that produced it, which is
the self-same thing as consciousness of existence, can be immortal
also; and that as independently of the matter it was first connected
with, as the thought is of the printing or writing it first appeared
in. The one idea is not more difficult to believe than the other,
and we can see that one is true.


    That the consciousness of existence is not dependent on the same
form or the same matter is demonstrated to our senses in the works
of the creation, as far as our senses are capable of receiving that
demonstration. A very numerous part of the animal creation preaches
to us, far better that Paul, the belief of a life hereafter. Their little
life resembles an earth and a heaven- a present and a future state,
and comprises, if it may be so expressed, immortality in miniature.

    The most beautiful parts of the creation to our eye are the winged
insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and
that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and
creeping caterpillar-worm of to-day passes in a few days to a torpid
figure and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes
forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly.
No resemblance of the former creature remains; everything is
changed; all his powers are new, and life is to him another thing.
We cannot conceive that the consciousness of existence is not the
same in this state of the animal as before; why then must I believe
that the resurrection of the same body is necessary to continue to
me the consciousness of existence hereafter?


    In the former part of the Age of Reason I have called the creation
the only true and real word of God; and this instance, or this text,
in the book of creation, not only shows to us that this thing may be
so, but that it is so; and that the belief of a future state is a
rational belief, founded upon facts visible in the creation; for it is
not more difficult to believe that we shall exist hereafter in a
better state and form than at present, than that a worm should
become a butterfly, and quit the dunghill for the atmosphere, if we
did not know it as a fact.


    As to the doubtful jargon ascribed to Paul in the 15th chapter
of I. Corinthians, which makes part of the burial service of some
Christian sectaries, it is as destitute of meaning as the tolling of a
bell at a funeral; it explains nothing to the understanding- it
illustrates nothing to the imagination, but leaves the reader to
find any meaning if he can. "All flesh (says he) is not the same
flesh. There is one flesh of men; another of beast; another of fishes;
and another of birds." And what then?- nothing. A cook could have
said as much. "There are also (says he) bodies celestial, and bodies
terrestrial; the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the
terrestrial is another." And what then?- nothing. And what is the
difference? nothing that he has told. "There is (says he) one glory of
the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the
stars." And what then?- nothing; except that he says that one star
differeth from another star in glory, instead of distance; and he
might as well have told us that the moon did not shine so bright as
the sun. All this is nothing better than the jargon of a conjuror, who
picks up phrases he does not understand, to confound the credulous
people who have come to have their fortunes told. Priests and
conjurors are of the same trade.


    Sometimes Paul affects to be a naturalist and to prove his
system of resurrection from the principles of vegetation. "Thou
fool, (says he), that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it
die." To which one might reply in his own language and say, "Thou
fool, Paul, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die
not; for the grain that dies in the ground never does, nor can
vegetate. It is only the living grains that produce the next crop."
But the metaphor, in any point of view, is no simile. It is
succession, and not resurrection.


    The progress of an animal from one state of being to another, as
from a worm to a butterfly, applies to the case; but this of a grain
does not, and shows Paul to have been what he says of others, a fool.


    Whether the fourteen epistles ascribed to Paul were written by him
or not, is a matter of indifference; they are either argumentative
or dogmatical; and as the argument is defective and the dogmatical
part is merely presumptive, it signifies not who wrote them. And the
same may be said for the remaining parts of the Testament. It is not
upon the epistles, but upon what is called the Gospel, contained in
the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and upon
the pretended prophecies, that the theory of the church calling itself
the Christian Church is founded. The epistles are dependent upon
those, and must follow their fate; for if the story of Jesus Christ be
fabulous, all reasoning founded upon it as a supposed truth must
fall with it.


    We know from history that one of the principal leaders of this
church, Athanasius, lived at the time the New Testament was
formed;* and we know also, from the absurd jargon he left us under
the name of a creed, the character of the men who formed the New
Testament; and we know also from the same history that the
authenticity of the books of which it is composed was denied at the
time. It was upon the vote of such as Athanasius, that the Testament
was decreed to be the word of God; and nothing can present to us a
more strange idea than that of decreeing the word of God by vote.
Those who rest their faith upon such authority put man in the place of
God, and have no foundation for future happiness; credulity, however,
is not a crime, but it becomes criminal by resisting conviction. It is
strangling in the womb of the conscience the efforts it makes to ascertain
truth. We should never force belief upon ourselves in anything.


    *Athanasius died, according to the Church chronology, in the
year 371.


    I here close the subject of the Old Testament and the New. The
evidence I have produced to prove them forgeries is extracted from the
books themselves, and acts, like a two-edged sword, either way. If the
evidence be denied, the authenticity of the scriptures is denied
with it; for it is scripture evidence; and if the evidence be
admitted, the authenticity of the books is disproved. The
contradictory impossibilities contained in the Old Testament and the
New, put them in the case of a man who swears for and against.
Either evidence convicts him of perjury, and equally destroys
reputation.


    Should the Bible and the New Testament hereafter fall, it is not I
that have been the occasion. I have done no more than extracted the
evidence from the confused mass of matter with which it is mixed,
and arranged that evidence in a point of light to be clearly seen
and easily comprehended; and, having done this, I leave the reader
to judge for himself, as I have judged for myself.


CHAPTER III


Conclusion


    In the former part of “The Age of Reason” I have spoken of the three
frauds, mystery, miracle, and prophecy; and as I have seen nothing in
any of the answers to that work that in the least affects what I have
there said upon those subjects, I shall not encumber this Second Part
with additions that are not necessary.


    I have spoken also in the same work upon what is called
revelation, and have shown the absurd misapplication of that term to
the books of the Old Testament and the New; for certainly revelation
is out of the question in reciting anything of which man has been
the actor or the witness. That which a man has done or seen, needs
no revelation to tell him he had done it or seen it, for he knows it
already; nor to enable him to tell it or to write it. It is
ignorance or imposition to apply the term revelation in such cases:
yet the Bible and Testament are classed under this fraudulent
description of being all revelation.


    Revelation then, so far as the term has relation between God and
man, can only be applied to something which God reveals of his will to
man; but though the power of the Almighty to make such a
communication is necessarily admitted, because to that power all things
are possible, yet the thing so revealed (if anything ever was revealed,
and which, bye the bye, it is impossible to prove), is revelation to the
person only to whom it is made. His account of it to another person is
not revelation; and whoever puts faith in that account, puts it in the
man from whom the account comes; and that man may have been
deceived, or may have dreamed it, or he may be an impostor and may
lie. There is no possible criterion whereby to judge of the truth of what
he tells, for even the morality of it would be no proof of revelation. In all
such cases the proper answer would be, "When it is revealed to me, I will
believe it to be a revelation; but it is not, and cannot be incumbent upon
me to believe it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should
take the word of a man as the word of God, and put man in the place of
God." This is the manner in which I have spoken of revelation in the former
part of "The Age of Reason;" and which, while it reverentially admits
revelation as a possible thing, because, as before said, to the
Almighty all things are possible, it prevents the imposition of one
man upon another, and precludes the wicked use of pretended
revelation.


    But though, speaking for myself, I thus admit the possibility of
revelation, I totally disbelieve that the Almighty ever did
communicate anything to man, by any mode of speech, in any
language, or by any kind of vision, or appearance, or by any
means which our senses are capable of receiving, otherwise than
by the universal display of himself in the works of the creation, and
by that repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and the
disposition to do good ones.

    The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the
greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their
origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has
been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the
Divinity, the most destructive to morality and the peace and happiness
of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist. It is
better, far better, that we admitted, if it were possible, a
thousand devils to roam at large, and to preach publicly the
doctrine of devils, if there were any such, than that we permitted one
such impostor and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible
prophets, to come with the pretended word of God in his mouth, and
have credit among us.


    Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of
men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled, and the
bloody persecutions and tortures unto death, and religious wars,
that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes- whence
rose they but from this impious thing called revealed religion, and
this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man? The lies of the
Bible have been the cause of the one, and the lies of the Testament of
the other.


    Some Christians pretend that Christianity was not established by
the sword; but of what period of time do they speak? It was impossible
that twelve men could begin with the sword; they had not the power;
but no sooner were the professors of Christianity sufficiently powerful
to employ the sword, than they did so, and the stake and fagot, too;
and Mahomet could not do it sooner. By the same spirit that Peter cut
off the ear of the high priest's servant (if the story be true), he would
have cut off his head, and the head of his master, had he been able.
Besides this, Christianity grounds itself originally upon the Bible, and the
Bible was established altogether by the sword, and that in the worst use
of it- not to terrify, but to extirpate. The Jews made no converts; they
butchered all. The Bible is the sire of the Testament, and both are called
the word of God. The Christians read both books; the ministers preach
from both books; and this thing called Christianity is made up of both.
It is then false to say that Christianity was not established by the sword.


    The only sect that has not persecuted are the Quakers; and the
only reason that can be given for it is, that they are rather Deists
than Christians. They do not believe much about Jesus Christ, and they
call the scriptures a dead letter. Had they called them by a worse name,
they had been nearer the truth.


    It is incumbent on every man who reverences the character of the
Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial
miseries, and remove the cause that has sown persecutions thick
among mankind, to expel all ideas of revealed religion, as a dangerous
heresy and an impious fraud. What is that we have learned from this
pretended thing called revealed religion? Nothing that is useful to
man, and everything that is dishonorable to his maker. What is it
the Bible teaches us?- rapine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the
Testament teaches us?- to believe that the Almighty committed
debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of
this debauchery is called faith.


    As to the fragments of morality that are irregularly and thinly
scattered in these books, they make no part of this pretended thing,
revealed religion. They are the natural dictates of conscience, and
the bonds by which society is held together, and without which it
cannot exist, and are nearly the same in all religions and in all
societies. The Testament teaches nothing new upon this subject, and
where it attempts to exceed, it becomes mean and ridiculous. The
doctrine of not retaliating injuries is much better expressed in
Proverbs, which is a collection as well from the Gentiles as the Jews,
than it is in the Testament. It is there said, Proverbs xxv, ver.
21, "If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be
thirsty, give him water to drink;"* but when it is said, as in the
Testament, "If a man smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the
other also;" it is assassinating the dignity of forbearance, and
sinking man into a spaniel.


    *According to what is called Christ's sermon on the mount, in
the book of Matthew, where, among some other good things, a great
deal of this feigned morality is introduced, it is there expressly said,
that the doctrine of forbearance, or of not retaliating injuries,
was not any part of the doctrine of the Jews; but as this doctrine
is found in Proverbs it must, according to that statement, have been
copied from the Gentiles, from whom Christ had learned it. Those
men, whom Jewish and Christian idolaters have abusively called
heathens, had much better and clearer ideas of justice and morality
than are to be found in the Old Testament, so far as it is Jewish;
or in the New. The answer of Solon on the question, Which is the
most perfect popular government? has never been exceeded by any
one since his time, as containing a maxim of political morality. "That,"
says he, "where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is
considered as an insult on the whole constitution." Solon lived
about 500 years before Christ.


    Loving enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has
besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he
does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political
sense, for there is no end to retaliation, each retaliates on the
other, and calls it justice; but to love in proportion to the
injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for crime.
Besides the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a
moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a
proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and
prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in
politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal
intention; and it is incumbent upon as, and it contributes also to our
own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing
that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no
motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love
voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically
impossible.


    Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first
place, are impossible to be performed; and, if they could be, would be
productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The
maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this
strange doctrine of loving enemies: for no man expects to be loved
himself for his crime or for his enmity.


    Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies are in
general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so
doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that
hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own
part I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous
morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted
him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution,
or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned
evil for evil. But it is not incumbent on man to reward a bad action
with a good one, or to return good for evil; and whenever it is
done, it is a voluntary act, and not a duty. It is also absurd to
suppose that such doctrine can make any part of a revealed religion.
We imitate the moral character of the Creator by forbearing with
each other, for he forbears with all; but this doctrine would imply
that he loved man, not in proportion as he was good, but as he was
bad.


    If we consider the nature of our condition here, we must see there
is no occasion for such a thing as revealed religion. What is it we
want to know? Does not the creation, the universe we behold, preach
to us the existence of an Almighty Power that governs and regulates
the whole? And is not the evidence that this creation holds out to our
senses infinitely stronger than anything we can read in a book that
any impostor might make and call the word of God? As for morality,
the knowledge of it exists in every man's conscience.


    Here we are. The existence of an Almighty Power is sufficiently
demonstrated to us, though we cannot conceive, as it is impossible
we should, the nature and manner of its existence. We cannot
conceive how we came here ourselves, and yet we know for a fact that
we are here. We must know also that the power that called us into
being, can, if he please, and when he pleases, call us to account
for the manner in which we have lived here; and, therefore, without
seeking any other motive for the belief, it is rational to believe
that he will, for we know beforehand that he can. The probability or
even possibility of the thing is all that we ought to know; for if
we knew it as a fact, we should be the mere slaves of terror; our
belief would have no merit, and our best actions no virtue.


    Deism, then, teaches us, without the possibility of being
deceived, all that is necessary or proper to be known. The creation is
the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the
Creator himself, the certainty of his existence and the immutability
of his power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him
forgeries. The probability that we may be called to account
hereafter will, to a reflecting mind, have the influence of belief;
for it is not our belief or disbelief that can make or unmake the
fact. As this is the state we are in, and which it is proper we should
be in, as free agents, it is the fool only, and not the philosopher,
or even the prudent man, that would live as if there were no God.

    But the belief of a God is so weakened by being mixed with the
strange fable of the Christian creed, and with the wild adventures
related in the Bible, and of the obscurity and obscene nonsense of the
Testament, that the mind of man is bewildered as in a fog. Viewing all
these things in a confused mass, he confounds fact with fable; and
as he cannot believe all, he feels a disposition to reject all. But
the belief of a God is a belief distinct from all other things, and
ought not to be confounded with any. The notion of a Trinity of Gods
has enfeebled the belief of one God. A multiplication of beliefs
acts as a division of belief; and in proportion as anything is divided
it is weakened.


    Religion, by such means, becomes a thing of form, instead of
fact- of notion, instead of principles; morality is banished to make
room for an imaginary thing called faith, and this faith has its
origin in a supposed debauchery; a man is preached instead of God;
an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves
with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the
brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits
of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and
condemn the Jews for doing it. A man, by hearing all this nonsense
lumped and preached together, confounds the God of the creation with
the imagined God of the Christians, and lives as if there were none.


    Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is
none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more
repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing
called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to
convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart
torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of
power it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth,
the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in
general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.


    The only religion that has not been invented, and that has in it
every evidence of divine originality, is pure and simple Deism. It
must have been the first, and will probably be the last, that man
believes. But pure and simple Deism does not answer the purpose of
despotic governments. They cannot lay hold of religion as an engine,
but by mixing it with human inventions, and making their own authority
a part; neither does it answer the avarice of priests, but by
incorporating themselves and their functions with it, and becoming,
like the government, a party in the system. It is this that forms
the otherwise mysterious connection of church and state; the church
humane, and the state tyrannic.


    Were man impressed as fully and as strongly as he ought to be with
the belief of a God, his moral life would be regulated by the force of
that belief; he would stand in awe of God and of himself, and would
not do the thing that could not be concealed from either. To give this
belief the full opportunity of force, it is necessary that it acts
alone. This is Deism. But when, according to the Christian Trinitarian
scheme, one part of God is represented by a dying man, and another
part called the Holy Ghost, by a flying pigeon, it is impossible
that belief can attach itself to such wild conceits.*


    *The book called the book of Matthew says, chap, iii, verse 16,
that the Holy Ghost descended in the shape of a dove. It might as well
have said a goose; the creatures are equally harmless, and the one
is as much of a nonsensical lie as the other. The second of Acts,
verse, 2, 3, says that it descended in a mighty rushing wind, in the
shape of cloven tongues, perhaps it was cloven feet. Such absurd stuff
is only fit for tales of witches and wizards.


    It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all the
other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the
Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his
rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and
are calculated for mutual support. The study of theology, as it stands
in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on
nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities;
it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no
conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science, without our
being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as
this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the
study of nothing.


    Instead then, of studying theology, as is now done, out of the
Bible and Testament, the meanings of which books are always
controverted and the authenticity of which is disproved, it is
necessary that we refer to the Bible of the creation. The principles
we discover there are eternal and of divine origin; they are the
foundation of all the science that exists in the world, and must be
the foundation of theology.


    We can know God only through his works. We cannot have a
conception of any one attribute but by following some principle that
leads to it. We have only a confused idea of his power, if we have not
the means of comprehending something of its immensity. We can have
no idea of his wisdom, but by knowing the order and manner in which it
acts. The principles of science lead to this knowledge; for the
Creator of man is the Creator of science; and it is through that
medium that man can see God, as it were, face to face.


    Could a man be placed in a situation, and endowed with the power
of vision, to behold at one view, and to contemplate deliberately, the
structure of the universe; to mark the movements of the several
planets, the cause of their varying appearances, the unerring order in
which they revolve, even to the remotest comet; their connection and
dependence on each other, and to know the system of laws established
by the Creator, that governs and regulates the whole, he would then
conceive, far beyond what any church theology can teach him, the power,
the wisdom, the vastness, the munificence of the Creator; he would then
see, that all the knowledge man has of science, and that all the mechanical
arts by which he renders his situation comfortable here, are derived from
that source; his mind, exalted by the scene, and convinced by the fact,
would increase in gratitude as it increased in knowledge; his religion or his
worship would become united with his improvement as a man; any employment
he followed, that had any connection with the principles of the creation, as
everything of agriculture, of science and of the mechanical arts has, would
teach him more of God, and of the gratitude he owes to him, than any
theological Christian sermon he now hears. Great objects inspire great thoughts;
great munificence excites great gratitude; but the groveling tales and doctrines
of the Bible and the Testament are fit only to excite contempt.


    Though man cannot arrive, at least in this life, at the actual
scene I have described, he can demonstrate it, because he has a
knowledge of the principles upon which the creation is constructed.*
We know that the works can be represented in model, and that the
universe can be represented by the same means. The same principles
by which we measure an inch, or an acre of ground, will measure to
millions in extent. A circle of an inch diameter has the same
geometrical properties as a circle that would circumscribe the
universe. The same properties of a triangle that will demonstrate upon
paper the course of a ship, will do it on the ocean; and when
applied to what are called the heavenly bodies, will ascertain to a
minute the time of an eclipse, though these bodies are millions of
miles from us. This knowledge is of divine origin, and it is from
the Bible of the creation that man has learned it, and not from the
stupid Bible of the church, that teacheth man nothing.

    *The Bible-makers have undertaken to give us, in the first chapter
of Genesis, an account of the creation; and in doing this, they have
demonstrated nothing but their ignorance. They make there to have
been three days and three nights, evenings and mornings, before there
was a sun; when it is the presence or absence of the sun that is the
cause of day and night, and what is called his rising and setting that
of morning and evening. Besides, it is a puerile and pitiful idea, to
suppose the Almighty to say, Let there be light. It is the imperative
manner of speaking that a conjuror uses when he says to his cups
and balls, Presto, begone, and most probably has been taken from it;
as Moses and his rod are a conjuror and his wand. Longinus calls this
expression the sublime; and by the same rule, the conjuror is sublime
too, for the manner of speaking is expressively and grammatically the
same. When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how
nearly it borders on the ridiculous. The sublime of the critics, like some
parts of Edmund Burke's Sublime and Beautiful, is like a windmill just
visible in a fog, which imagination might distort into a flying mountain,
or an archangel, or a flock of wild geese.


    All the knowledge man has of science and of machinery, by the
aid of which his existence is rendered comfortable upon earth, and
without which he would be scarcely distinguishable in appearance and
condition from a common animal, comes from the great machine and
structure of the universe. The constant and unwearied observations
of our ancestors upon the movements and revolutions of the heavenly
bodies, in what are supposed to have been the early ages of the world,
have brought this knowledge upon earth. It is not Moses and the
prophets, nor Jesus Christ, nor his apostles, that have done it. The
Almighty is the great mechanic of the creation; the first
philosopher and original teacher of all science. Let us, then, learn
to reverence our master, and let us not forget the labors of our
ancestors.


    Had we, at this day, no knowledge of machinery, and were it
possible that man could have a view, as I have before described, of
the structure and machinery of the universe, he would soon conceive
the idea of constructing some at least of the mechanical works we
now have; and the idea so conceived would progressively advance in
practice. Or could a model of the universe, such as is called an
orrery, be presented before him and put in motion, his mind would
arrive at the same idea. Such an object and such a subject would,
while it improved him in knowledge useful to himself as a man and a
member of society, as well as entertaining, afford far better matter
for impressing him with a knowledge of, and a belief in, the
Creator, and of the reverence and gratitude that man owes to him,
than the stupid texts of the Bible and of the Testament from which, be
the talents of the preacher what they may, only stupid sermons can
be preached. If man must preach, let him preach something that is
edifying, and from texts that are known to be true.


    The Bible of the creation is inexhaustible in texts. Every part of
science, whether connected with the geometry of the universe, with
the systems of animal and vegetable life, or with the properties of
inanimate matter, is a text as well for devotion as for philosophy -
for gratitude as for human improvement. It will perhaps be said, that
if such a revolution in the system of religion takes place, every
preacher ought to be a philosopher. Most certainly; and every house of
devotion a school of science.


    It has been by wandering from the immutable laws of science, and
the right use of reason, and setting up an invented thing called
revealed religion, that so many wild and blasphemous conceits have
been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of
the human species to make room for the religion of the Jews. The
Christians have made him the murderer of himself and the founder of
a new religion, to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to
find pretence and admission for these things, they must have
supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable;
and the changeableness of the will is imperfection of the judgement.
The philosopher knows that the laws of the Creator have never
changed with respect either to the principles of science, or the
properties of matter. Why, then, is it supposed they have
changed with respect to man?


    I here close the subject. I have shown in all the foregoing
parts of this work, that the Bible and Testament are impositions and
forgeries; and I leave the evidence I have produced in proof of it, to
be refuted, if any one can do it: and I leave the ideas that are
suggested in the conclusion of the work, to rest on the mind of the
reader; certain as I am, that when opinions are free, either in
matters of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully
prevail.


                         END OF THE SECOND PART.


                                THE END