or the
other, but something different from both; and this they have called
understanding the Bible.

It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former
part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these
pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand
the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it
best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that
Thomas Paine understands it not.

Now instead of wasting their time, and heating themselves in fractious
disputations about doctrinal points drawn from the Bible, these men
ought to know, and if they do not it is civility to inform them,
that the first thing to be understood is, whether there is sufficient
authority for believing the Bible to be the word of God, or whether
there is not?

There are matters in that book, said to be done by the express command
of God, that are as shocking to humanity, and to every idea we have of
moral justice, as any thing done by Robespierre, by Carrier, by Joseph
le Bon, in France, by the English government in the East Indies, or by
any other assassin in modern times. When we read in the books ascribed
to Moses, Joshua, etc., that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon
whole nations of people, who, as the history itself shews, had given
them no offence; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they
spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women
and children; that they left not a soul to breathe; expressions that are
repeated over and over again in those books, and that too with exulting
ferocity; are we sure these things are facts? are we sure that the
Creator of man commissioned those things to be done? Are we sure that
the books that tell us so were written by his authority?

It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth;
on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous; for the more
ancient any history pretends to be, the more it has the resemblance of
a fable. The origin of every nation is buried in fabulous tradition, and
that of the Jews is as much to be suspected as any other.

To charger the commission of things upon the Almighty, which in their
own nature, and by every rule of moral justice, are crimes, as all
assassination is, and more especially the assassination of infants, is
matter of serious concern. The Bible tells us, that those assassinations
were done by th