s: be that, however, as it
may, he says in the next chapter, ver. 2, "And I took unto me faithful
witnesses to record, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of
Jeberechiah, and I went unto the prophetess, and she conceived and bare
a son."

Here then is the whole story, foolish as it is, of this child and this
virgin; and it is upon the barefaced perversion of this story that the
book of Matthew, and the impudence and sordid interest of priests in
later times, have founded a theory, which they call the gospel; and
have applied this story to signify the person they call Jesus Christ;
begotten, they say, by a ghost, whom they call holy, on the body of
a woman engaged in marriage, and afterwards married, whom they call a
virgin, seven hundred years after this foolish story was told; a theory
which, speaking for myself, I hesitate not to believe, and to say, is as
fabulous and as false as God is true. [In Is. vii. 14, it is said that
the child should be called Immanuel; but this name was not given to
either of the children, otherwise than as a character, which the word
signifies. That of the prophetess was called Maher-shalalhash-baz, and
that of Mary was called Jesus.--Author.]

But to show the imposition and falsehood of Isaiah we have only to
attend to the sequel of this story; which, though it is passed over in
silence in the book of Isaiah, is related in 2 Chronicles, xxviii;
and which is, that instead of these two kings failing in their attempt
against Ahaz, king of Judah, as Isaiah had pretended to foretel in the
name of the Lord, they succeeded: Ahaz was defeated and destroyed; an
hundred and twenty thousand of his people were slaughtered; Jerusalem
was plundered, and two hundred thousand women and sons and daughters
carried into captivity. Thus much for this lying prophet and imposter
Isaiah, and the book of falsehoods that bears his name. I pass on to the
book of Jeremiah. This prophet, as he is called, lived in the time that
Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem, in the reign of Zedekiah, the last
king of Judah; and the suspicion was strong against him that he was
a traitor in the interest of Nebuchadnezzar. Every thing relating to
Jeremiah shows him to have been a man of an equivocal character: in
his metaphor of the potter and the clay, (ch. xviii.) he guards his
prognostications in such a crafty manner as always to leave himself a
door to escape by, in case the event should be contrary to what he had
predicted