em by
our forefathers. The story of Creation in the Book of Genesis, unless we
play fast and loose either with words or with science, cannot be brought
into harmony with what we have learnt from geology. Its ethnological
statements are imperfect, if not sometimes inaccurate. The stories of
the Fall, of the Flood, and of the Tower of Babel, are incredible in
their present form. Some historical element may underlie many of the
traditions in the first eleven chapters in that book, but this we cannot
hope to recover." Canon Bonney proceeded to say of the New Testament
also, that "the Gospels are not so far as we know, strictly
contemporaneous records, so we must admit the possibility of variations
and even inaccuracies in details being introduced by oral tradition."
The Canon thinks the interval too short for these importations to be
serious, but that any question of this kind is left open proves the Age
of Reason fully upon us. Reason alone can determine how many texts are
as spurious as the three heavenly witnesses (i John v. 7), and like
it "serious" enough to have cost good men their lives, and persecutors
their charities. When men interpolate, it is because they believe their
interpolation seriously needed. It will be seen by a note in Part II. of
the work, that Paine calls attention to an interpolation introduced into
the first American edition without indication of its being an editorial
footnote. This footnote was: "The book of Luke was carried by a majority
of one only. Vide Moshelm's Ecc. History." Dr. Priestley, then in
America, answered Paine's work, and in quoting less than a page from the
"Age of Reason" he made three alterations,--one of which changed "church
mythologists" into "Christian mythologists,"--and also raised the
editorial footnote into the text, omitting the reference to Mosheim.
Having done this, Priestley writes: "As to the gospel of Luke being
carried by a majority of one only, it is a legend, if not of Mr. Paine's
own invention, of no better authority whatever." And so on with further
castigation of the author for what he never wrote, and which he himself
(Priestley) was the unconscious means of introducing into the text
within the year of Paine's publication.

If this could be done, unintentionally by a conscientious and exact man,
and one not unfriendly to Paine, if such a writer as Priestley could
make four mistakes in citing half a page, it will appear not very
wonderful when I state that