tale of the Garden of Eden, the talking serpent, the fall of man, the dreams of Joseph the carpenter, the pretended resurrection and ascension, of which 'here is even no historical relation, for no historian of those times metions such a thing, he gets into the pathless region of confusion, and turns either fanatic or hypocrite.. He forces his mind, and pretends to believe what he does not believe. This is in general the case with the methodists. Their religion is all creed and no morals.

I have now my friend given you a fac simile of my mind on the subject of religion and creeds, and my wish is, that you make this letter as publicly known as you find opportunities of doing. Yours in friendship, THOMAS PAINE

N Y. Aug. 1806.

MISCELLANEOUS PIECES.

EXTRACTED FROM THE

PROSPECT, OR VIEW OF THE MORAL WORLD, A PERIODICAL WORK, EDITED AND PUBLISHED BY ELIHU PALMER, AT NEW-YORK, IN THE YEAR 1804.

The following fugitive pieces were written by Mr. Paine occasionally to pass off an idle hour, and communicated for the Prospect, to aid his friend, Mr. Palmer, in support of that publication. Perhaps, in some cases, it may appear that the same ideas have been expressed in his other work; but, if so, the various points of view, in which they are here placed, it is presumed, will not fail to give an interest to these miscellaneous remarks.

The same signatures are continued as were subscribed to the original communications.

REMARKS ON R. HALL'S SERMON.

[The following piece, obligingly communicated by Mr. Paine, for the Prospect, is full of that acuteness of mind, perspicuity of expression, and clearness of discernment for which this excellent author is so remarkable in all his writings.]

ROBERT HALL, a protestant minister in England, preached and published a sermon against what he calls "Modern Infidelity.” A copy of it was sent to a gentleman in America, with a request for his opinion thereon. That gentleman sent it to a friend of his in New-York, with the request written on the cover-and this last sent it to Thomas Paine, who wrote the follwing observations on the blank leaf at the end of the Sermon.

The preacher of the foregoing sermon speaks a great deal about infidelity, but does not define what he means by it. His harangue is a general exclamation. Every thing, I suppose, that is not in his creed is infidelity with him, and his creed is infidelity with me. Infidelity is believing falsely. If what Christians believe is not true, it is the Christians that are the infidels.

The point between deists and christians is not about doctrine, but about fact--for if the things believed by the christians to be facts, are not facts, the doctrine founded thereon falls of itself. There is such a book as the bible, but is it a fact that the bible is revealed religion? The Christians cannot prove it is. They pus tradition in place of evidence, and tradition is not proof. If it

were, the reality of witches could be proved by the same kind of evidence.

The bible is a history of the times of which it speaks, and his→ tory is not revelation. The obscene and vulgar stories in the bible are as repugnant to our ideas of the purity of a divine Being, as the horrid cruelties and murders it ascribes to him, are repugnant to our ideas of his justice. It is the reverence of the Deists for the attributes of the DEITY, that causes them to reject the bible. Is the account which the christian church gives of the person called Jesus Christ, a fact or a fable? Is it a fact that he was begotten by the holy Ghost? The christians cannot prove it, for the case does not admit of proof. The things called miracles in the bible, such for instance as raising the dead, admitted, if true, of ocular demonstration, but the story of the conception of Jesus Christ in the womb is a case beyond miracle, for it did not admit of demonstration. Mary, the reputed mother of Jesus, who must be supposed to know best, never said so herself, and all the evidence of it is, that the book of Matthew says, that Joseph dreamed an angel told him so. Had an old maid of two or three hundred years of age, brought forth a child, it would have been much better presumptive evidence of a supernatural conception, than Matthew's story of Joseph's dream about his young wife.

Is it a fact that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, and how is it proved? If a God, he could not die, and as a man he could not redeem; how then is this redemption proved to be fact It is said that Adam eat of the forbidden fruit, commonly called an apple, and thereby subjected himself and all his posterity for ever to eternal damnation. This is worse than visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. But how was the death of Jesus Christ to affect or alter the case? Did God thirst for blood? If so, would it not have been better to have crucified Adam at once upon the forbidden tree, and made a new man? Would not this have been more creatorlike, than repairing the old one? Or, did God, when he made Adam, supposing the story to be true, exclude himself from the right of making another? Or impose on himself the necessity of breeding from the old stock? Priests should first prove facts and deduce doctrines from them afterwards. But instead of this, they assume every thing, and prove nothing. Authorities drawn from the bible are no more than authorities drawn from other books, unless it can be proved that the bible is revelation.

This story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple, by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up. Deism is perfect purity compared with this. It is an established principle with the quakers not to shed bloodsuppose then all Jerusalem had been quakers when Christ lived there would have been nobody to crucify him, and in that case,

if

man is redeemed by his blood, which is the belief of the church, there could have been no redemption-and the people of Jerusalem must all have been damned, because they were too good to commit murder. The christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense. Why is man afraid to think?

Why do not the christians, to be consistent, make saints of Judas and Pontius Pilate, for they were the persons who accomphlished the act of salvation. The merit of a sacrifice, if there can be any merit in it, was never in the thing sacrificed, but in the persons offering up the sacrifice-and therefore Judas and Pontius.Filate ought to stand first on the calendar of saints. THOMAS PAINE.

OF THE WORD RELIGION,

AND OTHER WORDS OF UNCERTAIN SIGNIFICATION.

THE word religion is a word of forced application when used with respect to the worship of God. The root of the word is the Latin verb ligo, to tie or bind. From ligo, comes religo, to tie or bind over again, or make more fast-from religo comes the substantive religio, which with the addition of n makes the English substantive religion. The French use the word properly-when a woman enters a convent, she is called a noviciate, that is, she is upon trial or probation. When she takes the oath, she is call ed a religieuse, that is, she is tied or bound by that oath to the performance of it. We use the word in the same kind of sense when we say we will religiously perform the promise that, we make.

But the word, without referring to its etymology, has, in the manner it is used, no definitive meaning, because it does not designate what religion a man is of. There is the religion of the Chinese, of the Tartars, of the Bramins, of the Persians, of the Jews, of the Turks, &c.

The word Christianity is equally as vague as the word religion. No two sectaries can agree what it is. It is a lo here and lo there. The two principal sectaries, Papists and Protestants, have often cut each other's throats about it :-The Papists call the Protestants heretics, and the Protestants call the Papists idolaters. The minor sectaries have shown the same spirit of rancour, but as the civil law restrains them from blood, they content themselves with preaching damnation against each other.

The word protestant has a positive signification in the sense it is used. It means protesting against the authority of the Pope, and this is the only article in which the prostestants agree. In every other sense, with respect to religion, the word protestant is as vague as the word christian. When we say an episcopalian, a prebyterian, a baptist, a quaker, we know what those persons are, and what tenets they hold-but when we say a christain, we know he is not a Jew nor a Mahometan, but we know not if he be a trinitarian or an anti-trinitarian, a believer in what is called the immaculate conception, or a disbeliever, a man of seven sacraments, or of two sacraments, or of none. The word christian describes what a man is not, but not what he is.

The word Theology, from Theos, the Greek word for God, and meaning the study and knowledge of God, is a word, that strictly speaking, belongs to Theists or Deists, and not to the christians. The head of the christian church is the person called Christ-but the head of the church of the Theists, or Deists, as they are more commonly called, from Deus, the Latin word for God, is God himself, and therefore the word Theology belongs to that church which has Theos or God for its head, and not to the christian. church which has the person called Christ for its head. Their technical word is Christianity, and they cannot agree what christianity is.

The words revealed religion, and natural religion, require also explanation. They are both invented terms, contrived by the church for the support of priest-craft. With respect to the first, there is no evidence of any such thing, except in the universal revelation, that God has made of his power, his wisdom, his goodness, in the structure of the universe, and in all the works of creation. We have no cause or ground from any thing we behold in those works, to suppose God would deal partially by mankind, and reveal knowledge to one nation and withhold it from another, and then damn them for not knowing it. The sun shines an equal quantity of light all over the world-and mankind in all ages and countries are endued with reason, and blessed with sight, to read the visible works of God in the creation, and so intelligent is this book, that he that runs may read. We admire the wisdom of the ancients, yet they had no bibles, nor books, called revelation. They cultivated the reason that God gave them, studied him in his works, and arose to eminence.

As to the bible, whether true or fabulous, it is a history, and history is not revelation. If Solomon had seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines, and if Sampson slept in Delilah's lap, and she cut his hair off, the relation of those things is mere history, that needed no revelation from heaven to tell it; neither does it need any revelation to tell us that Sampson was a fool for his pains, and Solomon too.