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are equally well supported by it. If we add to these considerations that of the infinite number of copies, of version, and of versions of versions, which have given occasion to many alterations and interpolations, that are to be found, without going to Spinoza, to Hobbes, or to the fanciful author of the pre-adamitical system, we must be, I think, convinced that the Bible, which we call the word of God, is as little fit, by the manner in which it has been preserved, to be a uniform foundation of universal religion, as by the manner in which it was written and first published to the world.

Divines have their answer ready, and I hear, methinks, a great bishop of your church ask me, with that air of superiority to which no man of his age had a better claim, whether the authenticity of these books diminishes, because some explanatory additions may have been inserted, because some errors may have slipped by accident into the text, or because the mistakes of copyists have given occasion to various readings? Show me, says the right reverend person, if you can, any law, any doctrine, any ceremony, any miracle, or any prophecy, that has been added! Are not all the writings of the profane authors, whom you deem authentic, come down to you in the same manner as those of the holy penmen? I reply, my objection and my complaint are, that the manner in which these books were written, were published, and have been preserved, make it impossible to do this. Could we do it, could we distinguish between what is original and what not, the objection would vanish and the complaint cease. But both will remain in force till then; because of the vast difference that there is between the importance of these and of all other writings. The laws of Plato, the odes of Horace, and the history of Livy, may have been corrupted without any ill consequences to those who read them. But the same cannot be said of the laws of Moses, of the psalms of David, and of the history of the Old Testament.

I have been long enough on the defensive. It is time I should attack in my turn, and show you for what reasons I cannot believe that the Pentateuch, and the other books of the Old Testament, were written under a divine influence, and have any right to be called the word of God. There may be some defects in human laws, some falsities or mistakes in human histories, and yet both of them may deserve all the respect and all the credit, on the whole, that the writings of fallible men can deserve. But any one defect, any one falsity, or mistake, is sufficient to show the fraud and imposture of writings that pretend to contain the infallible word of God. Now there are gross defects, and palpable falsehoods, in almost every page of the Scriptures, and the whole tenor of them is such as no man, who acknowledges a Supreme,

All-perfect Being, can believe it to be his word. This I must prove; and when I have done so, divines may call me theist, or atheist, if they please. I shall not be ashamed of the first character, and shall leave them to purge themselves of one as absurd as the last. That the Jews held the unity of God is true, and that their father Abraham might have learned this doctrine among the Egyptians, though it has been said, very foolishly, that he acquired great wealth by instructing that people in philosophy and the other sciences, is true likewise; but it will not follow that he, or his posterity, adored the true God. There are many passages in Job, in Isaiah, in the Psalms, and in other parts of the Old Testament, which give most sublime ideas of the majesty of the Supreme Being, and which have been sounded, for that reason, very high. But it will not be hard to quote Mahometan, and even Pagan writers, who have spoken of him with as much nobleness of style, and with as much dignity, as any of these; whilst, on the other hand, it will be easy to quote many things, imputed to the Supreme Being by these, at least as unworthy of him, as any which the Mahometans, or even the most extravagant of the Pagans, invented. Sublime expressions, concerning the Deity, may serve to show, that the imaginations of those who used them, were heated by the enthusiasm of poetry and devotion; they will not prove the writers to have been divinely inspired; and it will become nothing less than blasphemy to assert that they were so, when they impute, at the same time, such things to the Divinity as would bring disgrace on humanity.

I know, for I can demonstrate by connecting the clearest and most distinct of my real ideas, that there is a God, a first intelligent Cause of all things, whose infinite wisdom and power appear evidently in all his works, and to whom, therefore, I ascribe, most rationally, every other perfection, whether conceivable or not conceivable by me. A book is put into my hands, which is, I am told, and have been told from my youth, the word of this God, and wherein I shall find the whole scheme of things which he has established, and the whole economy of his providence.What I learned before by rote, I consider with more attention, and am far from finding in it the Supreme Being, whose existence and attributes I demonstrate. The scene opens, indeed, by the creation, and this creation is ascribed to one God; that of the material world, at least: for when this God proceeds to the creation of man, he calls on other Beings, we know not by the text how many, to co-operate with him, and to make man in his and their likeness. This seems to lay a foundation for polytheism, and I am startled at it, because it is inconsistent with that unity of the Godhead which my reason shows me, and which the general tenor even of the Mosaic law and history asserts. The divine,

on the contrary, triumphs in the passage; because he drags it, against reason and this revelation both, to signify the three coequal Persons in one Godhead, which no reason can comprehend, which no revelation affirms explicitly, and which has no foundation, except that of a theology much more modern than this.

The more I compare what Moses says of this God, and by a supposed inspiration from him, the more repugnant I find the whole to be demonstrated, and even to obvious truth. Nothing can better resemble modern rabbinical traditions, than these ancient and Mosaical traditions: the same ignorance of nature, physical and moral, the same irreverent conceptions of the Supreme Being prevails in both. Moses, they say, was divinely inspired, and yet Moses was as ignorant of the true system of the universe, as any of the people of his age. I need not descend into particulars to show this ignorance. To evade the objection drawn from it, we are told that he conformed himself to that of the people. He did not write to instruct the Israelites in natural philosophy, but to imprint strongly on their minds a belief of one God, the Creator of all things. Was it necessary to that purpose that he should explain to them the Copernican system? No, most certainly. But it was not necessary to this purpose, neither, that he should give them an absurd account, since he thought fit to give them one, of the creation of our physical, and we may say, of our moral system. It was not necessary he should tell them, for instance, that light was created, and the distinction of night and day, of evening and morning, were made before the sun, the moon, and the stars, which were "set in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night, and to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years." It was not necessary that he should tell them, how this moral system was destroyed, by the wiles of a serpent, and by the eating of an apple, almost as soon as it began, against the intention, as well as command, of the Creator. Besides, Moses must be considered as appointed, and inspired by God, to write, not only for his own age, but for all future ages; for the most enlightened as well as for the most ignorant: in which case, that his history might answer all the designs of Eternal Wisdom, it should have been proportioned to the ignorance of the Israelites, as little able to understand one system of philosophy as another, without giving so much reason to people, better informed, to believe him as ignorant as any uninspired person could be.

If the ignorance and the errors, which betray themselves very grossly in the writings ascribed to Moses, make it impossible to believe such an author divinely inspired, the confused, inconsistent, and unworthy notions of a Supreme Being, which appear in his writings, show very evidently, that the true God was un

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known to him. He acknowledged but one God, and the people were forbid to worship any other. But then he puts this one God to as many and as unworthy uses, in the service of man, as the heathens put their many gods, of different orders, and he was, therefore, in this respect, more inconsistent than they were. The God of Moses creates the world, makes man, and repents of it immediately, for a reason which he might have prevented by a little less indulgence to, what is called, free will. As soon as this indulgence had given an opportunity to the serpent to tempt Eve, and to Eve to tempt Adam, who should have known the nature of serpents better, since he had just given to all animals the names that were proper to them; in short, as soon as they had eat the forbidden apple, and were fallen, they heard the voice of God, who was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. He condemned them for their disobedience; he cursed the earth, for their sakes, and the serpent above all other beasts. were then opened, they knew that they were naked, and they made themselves aprons of fig-leaves, which served to cover their nudity, till God made them coats of skins, for that purpose, and then drove them out of paradise. Thus death and sin entered into the world, and the crime of this unhappy pair was punished in their whole posterity. This strange story, so trifling and so serious, and wherein God is made a principal actor with the serpent and Adam and Eve, has given occasion to much silly pains that have been taken, both by Jews and Christians, to lessen the absurdity of it, if that were possible. Since it is impossible, some have attempted to explain the whole allegorically, and it may not seem improbable that this allegory had been invented, among other Egyptian mysteries, to signify the introduction of physical and moral evil into the world, by the fault of man, and against the design of God. This however cannot be admitted by Christians; for if it was, what would become of that famous text whereon the doctrine of our redemption is founded? The whole therefore must be understood literally, and in that case the God who made the world and man, that is, the Supreme Being, is the same God who walks in the garden, to enjoy the cool of the evening, who tries this famous cause, and insults our first parents by irony and sarcasm.

Thus again, and to show in another instance what inconsistency, as well as absurdity, Moses imputed to his one God, let us observe, that he makes this God repent a second time that he had made man on the earth, because "he also was flesh, every imagination of his heart was evil, and all flesh had corrupted his way." For this reason he resolved to drown the whole world, and every living creature in it, except one man, called Noah, his family, and as many birds, and beasts, and

creeping things as were necessary to replenish the earth. This resolution taken, the God of Moses orders Noah to build an ark, or clumsy chest, in the fashion and in the proportions he prescribes very minutely. This done, he crowds all the living creatures, he intended to save, men, and birds, and beasts, and insects, into the ark; though great scholars pretend to show, by a fair calculation, that far from being crowded, there was ample room for them all in it. As soon as they were in, God shut the door upon them, the deluge began, and had its full effect. When it was over, and as soon as God smelled the sweet savor of a burnt offering, on the altar Noah had erected, he repented again, and resolved not to curse the ground any more for man's sake, nor for a reason, which should have hindered him from doing it at all, though he had done it twice already. He established a covenant with Noah, with his sons, and with their posterity, and that he might remember this covenant, between him and the earth, or every living creature upon the earth, which he had promised to drown no more, he declares to them the institution of a rainbow, designed to put him in mind of his promise, whenever he should bring a cloud over the earth.

Abraham descended from Noah by Shem, and God made a new covenant with him and his posterity. The Supreme Being condescended to be the tutelary God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and under this character he acted a part which a sensible heathen, not transported by presumptuous notions of his own importance, nor by the impudence of enthusiasm, would have thought too mean and too low for any of his inferior gods or demons. The whole history, from Noah to Abraham, and from Abraham to the Exode, is a series of tales that would appear fit to amuse children alone, if they were found in any other book, though they served two great purposes of pride and ambition among an ignorant and barbarous people. They served to give Jacob the preference, over a much better man, over his brother Esau. He acquired indeed this birth-right, and the prior blessing of a doating father, by a most infamous fraud; but the fraud was sufficient, even in the eye of God, to give the descendants of the younger brother, the Israelites, an entire preference over the descendants of the elder brother, the Edomites, and to set the former in the place of his favorite people. The same tales served the ambition, as well as the pride of the former, who claimed on their authority, as the legitimate offspring of Abraham, a right to the land of Canaan, which God had given to Abraham, and to all the glorious promises, which he had made to that patriarch. The other nations of the earth were plunged in idolatry; God left them in it; he neglected them, and thought it enough to preserve the knowledge of himself, and the purity

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