or divine power. God and Moses, in these books, are said to have sanctioned both; it follows, therefore, that God and Moses are both bad characters, or else the books are not true. The latter, however, is the fact, and the character of the real God of Nature remains unimpeached.

The character of Mahomet is of a savage, military, and tyrannical cast; but he speaks in the name of heaven, and like Moses, pretends that his murders, cruelties, and assassinations, have been sanctioned by the divinity. which he adores. He frequently begins his chapters, in the name of the most merciful God; but, in the course of the chapter, is sure to consign to damnation those who do not accede to the system of revelation which he has received from God. The chosen people of the Most High, under the Jewish dispensation, took the liberty of exer cising a principle of indiscriminate extirpation toward all heathen nations; the Mahometans pursued a similar course in the destructive wars wherever they have been engaged, and to which they have been conducted by their fanatic leaders. The Christian world is not a whit behind either of these two grand divisions in the exercise of a censorious and military spirit. The crusades and the domestic quarrels of the Christian church will furnish an abundant verification of this remark.

The character of Jesus, considered in an individual and personal point of view, is of a less frightful and destructive nature. The first and the last of these three It was necesreligious impostors were ferocious men. sary, therefore, to present them conjointly, reserving the character and conduct of Jesus a matter of distinct inquiry. It will not be necessary, however, to say nuch upon this part of the subject; for, while it is admitted that Jesus, in a public and national point of view, has produced less misery than either Moses or Mahomet, yet it is believed that the New Testament presents us with immoral deviations from principle in the personal conduct of him whom the Christian world has declared to be the only begotten son of God. The followers of Jesus, however, have made up for his personal deficiency, and the Christian world has not been deficient

in the number of fanatic phlebotomists, disposed to destroy the moral and political plethora of the human race. Christians and Deists have sometimes coincided in their opinion, that Jesus was a good character. This opinion, so far as it was acceded to by some of the first unbelievers, was either the result of ignorance, or an effect of fear. The Christian exalted this same Jesus into the character of a God, and by their doctrines, made him equal to the Creator: such a circumstence struck terror into the human mind, and the idea of associating crimes with the divinity prevented independent inquiry. The New Testament, so far as proof of this kind goes, furnishes us with facts and circumstances which make strongly against. the moral character of Jesus. Beside the general dupli city which characterizes his answers to the multitude, he is guilty also, of seuding his disciples secretly to take and carry away a colt which did not belong either to him or his disciples. The doing of such an act in modern times would be denominated theft, even by pious Christians themselves. He is guilty of sowing the seeds of domestic and national warfare, and declaring that no man could be his disciple without hating his father and his mother, and also that he came not to send peace but a sword. If any man at the present day were to enter society with actions and avowed intentions of this kind, he would be considered as an enemy to moral virtue, and deserving of that punishment which domestic justice and public tranquillity required. It is in vain to applaud the conduct and opinions of Jesus, when the same conduct and opinions applied to another being, would be considered as criminal, and hostile to the best interesta of human existence. In the first edition of this work, and in the chapter concerning the immoralities of the scriptures, ideas and arguments were advanced that su percede the necessity of prosecuting farther the present subject. Moses, Mahomet, and Jesus, can lay as little claim to moral merit, or to the character of the bene. factors of mankind, as any three men that ever lived upon the face of the earth. They were all of them impostors; two of them notorious murderers in practice, and the other a murderer in principle; and their existence

united, has, perhaps, cost the human race more blood, and produced more substantial misery, than all the other fanatics of the world.

CHAP. XXII.

Prejudices.

THE discovery and the developement of truth as it really exists in the system of nature, is of the highest importance to the true interests of mankind; but how to present this truth to the view of the mind in a manner calculated to attract its attention, is difficult to say; for although the uncorrupted faculties of man cannot be opposed to the attractive charms of truth, or the brilliant beauties of her native appearance, yet so numerous are the causes, and so powerful their operation, which serve to mislead the mind and produce injurious impressions upon it, that perspicuity and regularity of thought are essentially deranged, and the clearness of scientific deductions are swallowed up in the gulf of error and deception. This process, prejudicial to our mental operations, com. mences in the early stages of our existence, and proceeds with a regularity of mischievous consequences, to the period when man assumes the dignity of intellectual independence; and fortunate indeed is that individual, who arrives to this elevated predicament of mental existence. The energy of thought when applied to the discovery of truth, is naturally calculated to sweep away the rubbish of error, and cut up those deep-rooted prejudices, which have so long retarded the useful improvement of our species. The grand object of philosophic philanthropists should be, to extend the sphere of mental energy, to enlarge the circle of its influence, and to oppose a persere. ring activity of mind to the fallen rancour of superstition, and the destroying fury of fanaticism. Religious enthu siasm, bigotry, and superstition, conjoined with the strong arm of political despotismn, have rendered man in the past ages of the world, the degraded instrument of their own pernicious and destructive purposes; it is here we must

seek for the source of many human misfortunes, and the perpetuation of those prejudices by which the body and mind are both enslaved; it is true that the natural imbecility and imperfection of our faculties, and the extensive nature and variety of those moral and physical combinations, from which science is to be deduced, evince the strong probability that man may frequently be erroneous in the conclusions which he draws from certain premises, because the force of his faculties is not adequate to a full and complete investigation of the compounded and diversified relations of existence; but these natural obstacles to the clear deductions of science, are neither of a discouraging or an insurmountable nature. The energy of the human mind is prodigious in the disclosure of natural principles, and its activity must be measured on a scale of endless progression. Nature is correct and righteous in all her operations; man is wrong only when he deviates from her laws. Our errors, our prejudices, and our vices, are so many instances of a departure from the beneficial laws of moral and physical existence, and our education is calculated to favour this unfortunate dereliction. The idle and foolish stories of nurses, and the still more rui. nous tales and doctrines of priests, are calculated only to corrupt the heart, and bury the human mind in the gulf of the most destructive prejudices. How is it pos sible that man should have any clear conceptions of natural truth, when his understanding is constantly insulted with a thousand incongruous and non-existent relations, such as ghosts, witches, and devils, which perpetually disturb the imagination, and draw the rational faculties into the vortex of fancy and fanaticism? and this will ever be the case so long as superstition, or, which is the same thing, a religion claiming a supernatural birth, shall spread its bloody and baneful influence among intelligent beings. The faculties of man ought to be cir cumscribed only by that extensive circle which embraces the full extent of their native and accumulated activity. When religious prejudices are permitted to mingle their gloomy effects with the exalted conceptions of enlight ened reason, the important cause of truth and the dearest interests of humanity become perceptibly retrograde, and