with remorseless outrage. The simple Infidel only says, you are a man subject to error; you are deceived yourself, and you are deceiving others: I can prove your doctrine false; your creed a scandal to humanity; your whole proceedings highly inimical to society however, I only wish to clear this up, in an amicable and reasonable manner, by arguments drawn from history, and those books you call holy, divine, and sacred, but which I call obscene, foul, evil, false, and foolish. O! thou blasphemer, cries the meek, humble Christian-away with him to prison; he dares to reason against the word of God, by which I enjoy heaven on earth; and will obtain a heavenly earth in heaven: he disputes my revealed religion, which was given to Moses and Jesus Christ, and which even Mahomet, although a wild Arab, knew nothing about: he wants to open hell, and shut heaven against me: he wants to take away my dear sacred tythes and Church livings, and make me work for my bread, and listen to truth, mercy, and goodness, which thou knowest, O Lord! no Churchman can endure. Torment this disciple of truth, therefore, O gaoler, and let us fervently pray, that the day may come, when we may burn him in Smithfield, and cry hallelujah round the bonfire which roasts him. Or, O terrible Jehovah, for thou delightest in tremendous sacrifices, and the murder of thousands, and extirpation of nations, plan again, I beseech thee, another massacre of Saint Bartholomew and give our swords not three days, but, for thy glory, three weeks or months, to drink the blood of Deists, Atheists, and Materialists. Vindicate thy revealed religion, by such horrors as reduced Canaan, and unpeopled Peru and Mexico! Here is a very proper prayer for a sublime Christian; and, indeed, we had better keep a sharp look out; for, I think, I have already heard some whispers, at least, of a wish to extirpate all infidels in the realm; and we are authorized to impute no compunction to Christians of any description. That they would rejoice and offer up thanksgivings to their idol after such a slaughter, I am confident. Such is the principles instilled into the early mind by those detestable Jew books, the Bible and Testament; the first and second will of the immutable and incomprehensible God which they adore. men! for shame, so long, so obstinately, to cry up weak, wicked lies for truth; to pretend to a knowledge of what you say is incomprehensible; to pretend to sights, calls, revelations, and visions, which ye never experienced; which ye know are palpable lies, vain, childish tales, that even the most ignorant and superstitious of your followers believe not, and only admit on courtesy, that you, in return, may extend the same credit to their future visions, sights, and calls, when, matured in deceit and impudence, they bring forth some bungling figment to support their sanctity.

This fabricated, inconsistent tale of revealed religion is at ence the most daring and imposing lie that human genius and No. 2, Vol. XIII.

depravity could invent, or the credulity of fond, foolish, ignorant man swallow, without choaking. According to the Jews and Christians, God has only revealed himself to man three times since the creation, once to Noah, a second time to Moses, and a third and last time to a few Jews in Palestine through his son Jesus Christ. Now, according to the historical account of these his divine and merciful revelations, he might as well have been silent on the occasion; for, in the first place, nobody would believe Noah, and God must have known this; so he drowned the world, as he intended to do; here the revelation was of no use, and the Almighty had the satisfaction of drowning mankind, because they would not believe he was a cruel, implacable tyrant. The second time, he revealed himself to an exiled murderer on Mount Horeb; he made him (Moses) a complete conjuror, and sent him to play slight-of-hand tricks at Pharaoh's Court. God here played the most unaccountable pranks that ever the most cruel and capricious tyrant could invent, to plague poor frail man with. We are only pleased, when we reflect that the whole is a fable of Jewish invention. Whether the story of these people be truth or falsehood, it always abounds with fraud, blood, and indiscriminate slaughter: the gloomy horde always exulting in plunder; the tremendous God, Jehovah, thundering in black clouds on Sinai, or ruminating in silence in the camp, was terrible and vindictive, cruel, vengeful, jealous, and unjust. For what, we ask, did he reveal himself to the Jews. The duration of their kingdom was short, compared with other nations of the world, and during their existence, as a people, although they had the Almighty Jehovah for engineer and architect, they left no token, sign, or amusement, on earth to mark the divinity of their artificer, or the beauty of his invention. Their boasted temple was a plain house loaded and filled with barbarous figures and frieze work, in which the Bull Apis was not forgotten, and serves, at once, to shew their want of invention, and the author of their revealed religion. They seem to have been made to accumulate wealth and keep it altogether when got; and as they had then a city and house to hold gold, silver, and brass, they filled their horde to their own destruction: for their wealth drew on them kings to plunder their hive; and their atrocities, pride, and unsocial manners, cut them off from respect as prisoners of war. Where is the utility of their revelation? Their God, Jehovah, could not save them from the hand of Vespasian, nor deliver them from the Roman legions. Twice, we see, the Almighty has failed in his scheme of universal happiness, through the means of revelation. Need we pursue the thread of the third divine mission?

Behold the modern revealed religion! Consider whence it sprung. This tale concerns ourselves; therefore it ought to be carefully iuvestigated. On it, our eternal salvation, our future

woe or happiness in another life depends: therefore, we should be minute in our enquiry, and as certain, to an azimuth, of every how, and when, and why and wherefore pertaining to it. Come, then, priests and prelates-come all divines and laymen, help us to the truth; assist us with your learning, wisdom, sense, reason, and understanding, fully to comprehend this grand subject:

Priest. You must read and believe your Bible.

Answer. I can and do read the Bible; but I am candid, I do not believe its statements; for, I cannot comprehend its meaning. To me, it seems a gross collection of fables and atrocities, too foul for human practice, or too trifling for human wisdom.

Priest. You are a heretic; you are an unbeliever; you will be damned. You are unworthy of mercy. God will punish you for ever and ever in hell; for daring to disbelieve his holy word."

Answer. Holy father, this again appears very strange to me, that God will damn me for not believing what I cannot understand, and what you cannot explain to me. Why should God, if he wished me to know any thing, not tell me in such plain terms, that I could not mistake his meaning, and at the same time convince me of it himself, who was speaking to me, why not reveal himself to all mankind, in one moment, which he could do, if he thought proper, and not send men to write a book full of lies and atrocities, which nobody can understand, and which serve no purpose, but for priests to detail out for pay, under the name of revealed religion.

-I am thine,

SHEBAGO.

THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE CONSIDERED.

Of all the subjects which man has investigated; there are none so liable to error and wrong conclusions as the progress of knowledge. Any thing of general advantage or interest to mankind. would very soon spread over the world, were it not for artificial barriers designedly raised in its way to prevent or retard its motion. "Knowledge is power," says lord Bacon. Yes, it is, and those who gained it, always found it their interest, to confine it within the selfish circle, which circumscribed their private concerns; and it taught them how to do it. It furnished at once the reason and the means. Knowledge taught them to acquire power, which when obtained, gave them the means of contracting knowledge. Before the art of printing was discovered and improved in Europe, knowledge was confined within a very narrow circle, and there was scarcely an idea entertained, that it would ever enlarge its circumference, or that a single radius would project a ramifica

tion through the plebeian hordes of the enslaved multitude. Learning, then, as now, was fully in the power of the rich, and they guarded it with jealous care, as their natural right and private property; and it required great industry, perseverance, patience, and assiduity; serious application, much time and labour, either to acquire or promulge even a very moderate share of it.

Science laid dormant or only made its appearance to raise the wonder, bewilder the senses and terrify the hearts of mankind. Five hundred years ago, any man possessed only of a slight knowledge of science and capable of performing some chemical experiments, of analysing, compounding or discompounding matter, or explaining its natural properties, was denounced a necromancer, a dealer in the black art, stigmatized as a sorcerer, a disciple of Satan, the slave of Hell, and voted by general suffrage a candidate for eternal damuation.* Men who look back and behold what the world has been through a lapse of three or four thousand years and judge by analogy of time will look forward into the future and see mankind three thousand hence existing in mental and bodily slavery. But he who looks back with caution and forward with hope has to contemplate the pleasing prospect of better times near at hand. He beholds with feelings of pity and indignation what men suffered two or three thousand years ago and he marks the time when mankind began to struggle with some hopes of success against their oppressors. He will reflect with some degree of wonder, how a few individuals not possessed of either virtue or wisdom, very often too divested of courage and understanding, were masters of the world and owners of mankind, as a private inheritance. This seemingly inexplicable riddle will be explained to him by a judicious perusal of impartial history. He will find effects traced to their proper causes. He will discover the domineering propensities of pride, the intolerable invasions and vice of religion, the chilling despotism of superstition, the usurpations of power, the cruelty of bigots, the knavery of priests, the tyranny of kings, the corruptions of senates, the subversions of justice, the legal enslavings of a nation, and falsehood and vice predominating over truth and virtue. He will see with exulting hopes more just ideas of social freedom and real liberty disseminated within the last century than was produced in the preceding three thousand years, or from the heroic ages of marauding Greece to the reign of Henry the Third of France, when the overstrained chain of religious and political slavery was snapped by the tremendous efforts of Saint Bartholomew, when one hundred thousand of the best subjects of France fell in a three days and nights premeditated slaughter. Shame to the man who wilfully misrepresents this most atrocious and direful mas

Witness Friar Bacon, Beaumagarten, Dr. Foster, aud even Lord Bacon, who was considered by many more a magician, than a sage.

sacre. Shame to him who, against the impartial and corroborating evidence of history, against the truth and against reason, for the sake of party and the impure and detestable lust of gain, attempts to palliate such a dreadful transaction. And one too not wholly religious, but a compound of the worst politics founded on the worst religion that ever disgraced a ruler, stained a priest, or degraded man. This horrid tragedy was eighteen months preparing for the stage, more than two thousand actors were in rehearsal during that time, deliberately whetting their knives, preparative to unlimited and cold-blooded murder. Yet such was the irresis

tible force of the Catholic church and religious priestcraft, that none had the power to save a single life, although several shed tears in private for the butcheries they were going to commit.

There is apology necessary for introducing this subject; but I have mentioned it here, merely to shew at a single glance, the extent of priestly power over the human mind, and to exhibit at the same time, the exterminating principle of that invading vice Religion. In this, the ambition of man is more conspicuous than in any other of his innumerable pursuits or vocations. The vain pride of man would raise him above Creator and creation, would make him the first being in the universe; but not being able to accomplish this, he makes himself the second in the scale of existence and creates an omnipotent God to serve him, to cater for his wants, to preserve his being, to study and labour for his present felicity, and finally to make him a god too. Yet, withal this, we find man still subsisting like all other creatures, on the bounty of nature, and whatever he enjoys, he lies only beholden to himself for it. What his industry procures his senses enable him to enjoy. His good and evil are evidently his own'production, and although something may depend on his temperament and organization; yet his virtues and all the essentials of his happiness are obviously the result of education and experience, precept and example.

Thus we are beginning to think seriously, naturally and justly, neither to raise ourselves to a level with ideal gods, nor to sink ourselves to the degrading nature of brutes; but to consider our true condition and support with intrepid resolution the dignity of man. In order to be free and happy, we must be fearless of every thing but shame. We must dread nothing but the fear of doing bad actions, and truth must be the sacred guide of all our undertakings. This pilot will steer us clear of that Christian Evil, a bad conscience; keeping truth before us, we must be constantly reminded that she can frown as well as smile, and that the fiercest punishment she inflicts is the loss of a good opinion of ourselves. The present is the age of cant and hypocrisy. They being of the lowest order of sublunary predicaments, we conclude that the next will be the age of truth and candour.

The progress of knowledge is such that more has been dissemi