reated, and the calendar of gods
increased as fast as the calendar of saints and the calendar of courts
have increased since.

All the corruptions that have taken place, in theology and in religion
have been produced by admitting of what man calls 'revealed religion.'
The mythologists pretended to more revealed religion than the christians
do. They had their oracles and their priests, who were supposed to
receive and deliver the word of God verbally on almost all occasions.

Since then all corruptions down from Moloch to modern predestinarianism,
and the human sacrifices of the heathens to the christian sacrifice of
the Creator, have been produced by admitting of what is called revealed
religion, the most effectual means to prevent all such evils and
impositions is, not to admit of any other revelation than that which is
manifested in the book of Creation., and to contemplate the Creation as
the only true and real word of God that ever did or ever will exist;
and every thing else called the word of God is fable and
imposition.--Author.]

It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause,
that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years
to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression
of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed,
that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in
knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire
would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But
the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about
the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long
chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in
which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills
beyond.

It is an inconsistency scarcely possible to be credited, that any
thing should exist, under the name of a religion, that held it to be
irreligious to study and contemplate the structure of the universe that
God had made. But the fact is too well established to be denied. The
event that served more than any other to break the first link in this
long chain of despotic ignorance, is that known by the name of the
Reformation by Luther. From that time, though it does not appear to have
made any part of the intention of Luther, or of those who are called
Reformers, the Sciences began to revive, and Liberality, their
nat