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MR. PAINE.

in the honey of one thousand debaucheries."-p. 14.

"The disordered state of the history" [of the four Evangelists]," the silence of one book upon matters related in the other, and the disagreement that is to be found among them, implies that they are the production of some unconnected individuals, many years after the things they pretend to relate, each of whom made his own legend." -p. 128.

"Euclid's geometry challenges universal belief; and the reason is, because it is a book of self-evident propositions. But it is quite other wise with the books ascribed to Moses and the other Jewish writers. They are books of testimony." -p. 71.

"Human language is incapable of being used as a means of unchangeable and uniform information; and therefore it is not the means that God useth in manifesting himself universally to man." —p. 31.

"The creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or language, multiplied and various as they be. It preaches to all nations, and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for him to know of God." "It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God." -p. 132.

"Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies."-p. 80.

MR. PARKER.

mutual love of Christ and the church."-p. 13.

"Some pious hearts have long felt that errors of doctrine and errors of fact may be found in many parts of the record, here and there, from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Acts."—p. 18.

"It is hard to see why the truth of Christianity should rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, must rest on the truth of his word, and not their truth on his authority."-p. 16.

"Christianity does not continue to stand through the forbearance of some critic, who can cut, when he will, the thread on which its life depends.” "To me it seems presumptuous for the believer to claim this evidence for its truth," that is, the evidence of the sacred text. -p. 18.

"Now there can be but one religion which is absolutely true, existing in the facts of human nature and the ideas of Infinite God. That, whether acknowledged or not, never changes." [Same in all nations.]-p. 10. "It is true, like the axioms of geometry, because it is true, and is to be tried by the oracle God places in the breast."-p. 19.

Of parts of the same book, Mr. Parker says, "It is an oriental story, written down nobody knows when, or by whom, or for what purpose," which make "the flesh crawl with horror."-p. 14.

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Both Mr. Paine and Mr. Parker eulogize the character of Jesus as a model of integrity and benevolence, the latter especially pouring forth some fine strains of thought on the subject; though both esteem him a mere man, and distinguished for nothing which is not accessible to the good and the diligent of all ages and nations.

MR. PAINE.

"Nothing here said can apply to the real character of Jesus. He was a virtuous and amiable man. The morality that he preached and practised, was of the most benevolent kind."-p. 15.

MR. PARKER.

"His life is the perpetual rebuke of all time since. It condemns ancient civilization; it condemns modern civilization. Wise men we have had, and good men; but this Galilean youth strode before the world whole thousands of years."―p. 21.

Both, however, agree in regarding the miraculous part of his story as fabulous.

"Between the Jews and Romans this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life." "It is upon this plain narrative of facts, that the Christian mythologists, calling themselves the Christian church, have erected their fable, which for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by any thing that is found in the mythology of the ancients." -p. 17.

"Men have been bid to close their eyes at the obvious difference between Luke and John; the serious disagreement between Paul and Peter; to believe, on the slightest evidence, accounts which shock the moral sense, and revolt the reason, and tend to place Jesus in the same series with Hercules, and Apollonius of Tyana."—pp. 14, 15.

And, as to the charge of infidelity, Mr. Paine ingeniously throws it back upon the Christians for professing to credit things that defy belief; while Mr. Parker contents himself with fulminating his shafts at the bigotry and slander of those who would impute infidelity to him and his friends, for merely separating the elements from the accidents of Christianity.

"Infidelity does not consist in believing or disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what a man does not believe."-p. 12.

"Men who cry down the absurdities of Paganism in the worst spirit of the French free-thinkers, call others infidels and atheists, who point out, though reverently, other absurdities which men have piled upon Christianity," alluding to "statements" of the Scriptures themselves.-p. 15.

Considering the difference in the character of the two men, and in the object of their writing, these coincidences are certainly among the most surprising curiosities of literature. The one, the bitterest infidel of the past age, writing to overthrow Christianity, the other, a professed successor of the holy apostles, standing in a Puritan pulpit, where, whilom, the least squinting towards skepticism would have been treated with pious horror, and, in prosecution too of the sacred functions of the place. If these two documents, one of the past and the other of the present age, were the only relics of literature that should survive to tell our story to the hundredth generation to come, how could they fail to conclude, that, if Mr. Paine had not annihilated our Christian theology, he had at least brought it round substantially to his own measure of thinking?

It is no uncommon thing for infidels to assume the aspect of benevolence, and to profess themselves influenced by the single desire of freeing the world from the shackles of a hoary superstition. Voltaire and his associates presented themselves before France and the world as the liberators of an oppressed people; while the professed representatives of Jesus and his apostles occupied the position of the scribe and priest, neither entering the gates of knowledge themselves, nor suffering them that would. Still, they never dreamed of identifying their ideal of virtue and truth with Christianity. The thought seems not to have crossed their minds, to take advantage of the public veneration for the inspired writers, by representing their own teaching as identical with all that is excellent, pure and exalted in these venerated models, and as hostile only to "their puerile conceptions of God," their pretence to a foreknowledge they did not possess, in "predicting things that have not been fulfilled;" "the cruel denunciations that disfigure their pages," "their contradictions," and to "their legends, so beautiful as fiction, so appalling as fact." See Parker's Discourse, page 19. Had it occurred to them, they would no doubt have deemed it the more direct, because the more effectual road to the attainment of their object. Even Paine, in his Age of Reason, which the world have hitherto regarded as an attack upon the Bible with intent to destroy, substantially accords to its pages all that Mr. Parker deems of permanent and universal value and obligation.

Mr. P. in common with many others of his sect, is beginning to reap a harvest, which various influences have for years been bringing to perfection. Extremes follow each other. The religion of the Pilgrim fathers was tinctured with superstition. The writings of the Mathers, the blue laws, the fate of witches under their infant polity, and the record of their criminal jurisprudence, prove this. Carrying their notions of the intervention of supernatural agency to an extreme, therefore, what is more natural than a reaction, terminating in a denial of all such intervention, and of every thing in religion which depends solely on documentary evidence? The mathematician's word is not taken for the truth of his axioms, we are told, and why should we be required to rest our religious belief on bare authority? Thus the pendulum has swung from superstition to skepticism.

And this peculiar tendency has been further strengthened by the ruin which has come over creeds, platforms and articles of faith, that now stand before our view, not as temples crowded with living multitudes paying homage at their shrines, but as the forsaken castles of a darker age, in whose dilapidated halls the bat, the owl and all doleful creatures riot undisturbed. We have learned to look with distrust and regret upon these proud monuments of superstition, and to abhor them as manacles upon the freeborn mind. Nor is it surprising, that the wreck of confidence in things that once wielded such an absolute sway over the religious convictions of mankind, should give rise to a sect whose distinguishing characteristic is the rejection of all authority, as insufficient in itself to warrant religious belief; thus consigning the Bible to the general fate of human creeds and formularies. The liberalizing tendency of science and literature, also, over the New England mind, has no doubt done much to impart to this "sect," what Mr. P. calls its "nationalizing character. These causes have been aided in their operation by that fondness for religious philosophizing, which has always been conspicuous in the divines of New England. From no part of the world have deeper works on the metaphysics of religion emanated, than from its alluvial valleys and its ironbound shores.

As Baptist reviewers, also, we might find much in the structure of the Pilgrim churches, to account for the growth of the denomination in question. Infant baptism, the half-way

covenant, union of church and state, and too little regard to piety, formerly, as a qualification in candidates for the ministry, have all had their influence. We say this from no disrespect to either of the parties upon whom our remarks have a bearing; for we are happy in living with both on terms of reciprocal friendship, and in acknowledging the many excellences by which they are adorned; but we speak honestly the convictions of our own minds, and from motives of Christian love and faithfulness. It is with religion as with poetry; it has its numbers and its soul.. Measure, rhyme, and the due adjustment of words may be attained by those who are devoid of the soul of poetry. But not more unlike the living man is his form in marble, than such productions are to the inspiring strains of the real muse. The fable of the harp of Orpheus drawing after it rocks and trees, converting the ferociousness of the lion into the mildness of the lamb, and hushing the tempest to a calm, is realized in him who has the soul of poetry. To him every thing in history, nature and the universe of thought puts on aspects of beauty, loveliness and splendor, or of deformity and terribleness, which, to an unpoetical eye, would seem foreign to their nature.

So in religion, there is an interior life, a heavenly glow, an unearthly feeling of actual contact with God, such as President Edwards describes in himself, as a sense of being somewhere in the mountains alone with God, which, when they are enjoyed, give to the Bible a vitality and power, to which another mind equally conversant with its statements, would be utterly insensible. To the first, every page, from Genesis to Revelation, is illuminated; every promise comes certified to him by the attributes of the infinite God, and he can rest his all upon it,-every fragment, however miraculous, contains the evidence of the present Divinity, vindicating his own name, redressing the wrongs of his injured people, and furthering the great designs of redemption; and every doctrine, fact and truth stands as a rock to sustain his hopes for eternity, secure from the beating storms of temptation that come over him in this bleak world. And who that has read the productions of a mind like Bunyan's, whose intellectual, as well as spiritual aliment was drawn almost exclusively from the pages of the Bible, has not been surprised by the richness, variety and compass of his thinking, and edified by the precious thoughts which he drew from the most barren

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