not know before. For if I have done a thing,
or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or
seen it, nor to enable me to tell it, or to write it.

Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth of
which man is himself the actor or the witness; and consequently all the
historical and anecdotal part of the Bible, which is almost the whole of
it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and,
therefore, is not the word of God.

When Samson ran off with the gate-posts of Gaza, if he ever did so, (and
whether he did or not is nothing to us,) or when he visited his Delilah,
or caught his foxes, or did anything else, what has revelation to do
with these things? If they were facts, he could tell them himself; or
his secretary, if he kept one, could write them, if they were worth
either telling or writing; and if they were fictions, revelation could
not make them true; and whether true or not, we are neither the better
nor the wiser for knowing them. When we contemplate the immensity of
that Being, who directs and governs the incomprehensible WHOLE, of which
the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel
shame at calling such paltry stories the word of God.

As to the account of the creation, with which the book of Genesis opens,
it has all the appearance of being a tradition which the Israelites had
among them before they came into Egypt; and after their departure from
that country, they put it at the head of their history, without telling,
as it is most probable that they did not know, how they came by it.
The manner in which the account opens, shows it to be traditionary. It
begins abruptly. It is nobody that speaks. It is nobody that hears. It
is addressed to nobody. It has neither first, second, nor third person.
It has every criterion of being a tradition. It has no voucher. Moses
does not take it upon himself by introducing it with the formality that
he uses on other occasions, such as that of saying, "The Lords spake
unto Moses, saying."

Why it has been called the Mosaic account of the creation, I am at
a loss to conceive. Moses, I believe, was too good a judge of such
subjects to put his name to that account. He had been educated among
the Egyptians, who were a people as well skilled in science, and
particularly in astronomy, as any people of their day; and the silence
and caution that Moses observes, in not authenticating the