kins expressly mentions it in a note in the Bhagvat
Geeta. All agree that Krisna, Fot, and Jesus have the same
characteristic features: but religious prejudice has stood
in the way of drawing from this circumstance the proper and
natural inference. To time and reason must it be left to
display the truth.

At these words, the Christians set up a general cry, and a new dispute
was about to begin; when a number of Chinese Chamans, and Talapoins of
Siam, came forward and said that they would settle the whole
controversy. And one of them speaking for the whole exclaimed: "It is
time to put an end to these frivolous contests by drawing aside the veil
from the interior doctrine that Fot himself revealed to his disciples on
his death bed.*

* The Budsoists have two doctrines, the one public and
ostensible, the other interior and secret, precisely like
the Egyptian priests. It may be asked, why this distinction?
It is, that as the public doctrine recommends offerings,
expiations, endowments, etc., the priests find their profit
in preaching it to the people; whereas the other, teaching
the vanity of worldly things, and attended with no lucre, it
is thought proper to make it known only to adepts. Can the
teachers and followers of this religion be better classed
than under the heads of knavery and credulity?

"All these theological opinions," continued he, "are but chimeras. All
the stories of the nature of the gods, of their actions and their lives,
are but allegories and mythological emblems, under which are enveloped
ingenious ideas of morals, and the knowledge of the operations of nature
in the action of the elements and the movement of the planets.

"The truth is, that all is reduced to nothing--that all is illusion,
appearance, dream; that the moral metempsychosis is only the figurative
sense of the physical metempsychosis, or the successive movement of
the elements of bodies which perish not, but which, having composed one
body, pass when that is dissolved, into other mediums and form other
combinations. The soul is but the vital principle which results from
the properties of matter, and from the action of the elements in those
bodies where they create a spontaneous movement. To suppose that this
product of the play of the organs, born with them, matured with them,
and which sleeps with them, can subsist when they cease, is the romance
of a