for man.

be republished from time to time, so as to defeat the hopes and wishes of those whose object it has been to suppress thein. He confidently anticipates, that when free discussion on all subjects, whether political or theological, literary or scientific, shall be tolerated, that then, and then only, will the human mind, by progressive improvement, arrive at that state, which may be deservedly termed the Age of REASON."

Gentlemen, my only reason for publishing the works of Mr. Paine has been an anxious and sincere desire to promote the cause of truth and free discussion. I am convinced in my own mind, that they are calculated to improve morality by promoting inquiry; that they tend to exalt our notions of the Deity; and lead us to a belief of his excellence and love

These were my motives for republishing his works, and these are' motives which produce a satisfaction within me, that no prosecution, that no persecution, will be able to destroy. I consider the publication as essential to the interest and welfare of the country, and having acted under that impression, I stand acquitted of all the malicious intention imputed to me by my persecutors. Gentlemen, I now proceed to call your attention to the work, which, is divided into Three Parts, and is called “ The Age of Reason, Part the First, being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, by Thomas Paine.”-It commences thus;

" It has been my intention, for several years past to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. Tintended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it, could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.”

Gentlemen, Mr. Paine was nearly 60 years of age when he wrote the paragraph I have just read to you. He was then in France, it was at the period of the French revolution, when he could not be sure of his existence for a single day; and when, having written under such circumstances, he must certainly be entitled to the praise of sincerity, and of a thorough conviction of the rectitude of his intentions.

“ The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of every thing appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest, in the general wreck of superstition, or false systems of government, and false theology,

we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.

“ As several of my colleagues, and others of my fellow citizens of France, have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.”

Gentlemen, the author now proceeds to give you his creed, a creed that must completely refute all the loose and indecent charges which have been so often made against the character of Mr. Paine. This is his creed :

“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life,

“ I believe the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.

“ But lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

“ All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and inonopolize power and profit.

Gentlemen, my sentiments are in unison with those of Mr. Paine, and I have honesty and boldness enough, even in times like the present, to declare they are so.

“ I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happines of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself." Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

“ It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a inan has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and, in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?

“Soon after I had published the pamphlet, “ COMMON SENSE," in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system

of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, whereever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of governinent should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow, human inventions and priestcraft would be detected ; and man would return to the pure, unmixed, and unadulterated belief of one God, and

no more.

“ Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles, and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

“ Each of those churches, shew certain books, which they callrevelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

“ As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation when applied to religion, means something conımunicated immediately from God to man.

“ No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not. revealed to any other

person, it is 'revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.

" It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call any thing a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication-after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same inanner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

“ When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandinents from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so.

The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts,

such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention*.

“ When am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.

When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without

any

cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said, that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this--for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so—it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

“ It is, however not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing, at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds ; the story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or Mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.

“ It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed, was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand; the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints; the Mythologists had gods for every thing; the Christian Mythologists had saints for every thing; the church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the Idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accomodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.

*“ It is, however, necessary to except the declaration which says, that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children ; it is contrary to every principle of moral justice."

" Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtu. ous and an amiable man, The morality that he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before ; by the Quakers since; and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any.

“ Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or any thing else; not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his own writing. The history of him is altogether the work of other people; and as to the account given of his resurrection and ascension, it was the necessary counterpart to the story of his birth. His historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground,

“ The wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it. The first part, that of the miraculous conception, was not a thing that admitted of publicity; and therefore the tellers of this part of the story had this advantage, that though they might not be credited, they could not be detected. They could not be expected to prove it, because it was not one of those things that admitted of proof, and it was impossible that the person of whom it was told could prove it himself.”

Gentlemen, the language of Mr. Paine speaks for itself. It has no immoral tendency whatsoever, or when it may appear to have, it is only when he either cites, or refutes, something written by other authors.

“ But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon day, to all Jerusalem at Icast. A thing which every body is required to believe, requires that ihe proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal : and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world, say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it

appears

that Thomas did not believe the resurrection; and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.

“ It is in vain to attempt to palliate or disguise this matter. The story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. Who were the