other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the bound-
less creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a re-
deemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called
the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have
nothing else to do than to travel from world to world,
in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary
interval of life. ¹

It has been by rejecting the evidence, that the word, or
works of God in the creation, affords to our senses, and the
action of our reason upon that evidence, that so many wild
and whimsical systems of faith, and of religion, have been
fabricated and set up. There may be many systems of re-
ligion that so far from being morally bad are in many
respects morally good: but there can be but ONE that is true;
and that one necessarily must, as it ever will, be in all things
consistent with the ever existing word of God that we be-
hold in his works. But such is the strange construction of the
christian system of faith, that every evidence the heavens af-
fords to man, either directly contradicts it or renders it absurd.

It is possible to believe, and I always feel pleasure in
encouraging myself to believe it, that there have been men
in the world who persuaded themselves that what is called
a pious fraud, might, at least under particular circumstances,
be productive of some good. But the fraud being once
established, could not afterwards be explained; for it is with
a pious fraud as with a bad action, it begets a calamitous
necessity of going on.

The persons who first preached the christian system of
faith, and in some measure combined with it the morality
preached by Jesus Christ, might persuade themselves that
it was better than the heathen mythology that then pre-
vailed. From the first preachers the fraud went on to the
second, and to the third, till the idea of its being a pious
fraud became lost in the belief of its being true; and that
belief became again encouraged by the interest of those
who made a livelihood by preaching it.

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