, is a book of riddles that requires a revelation to explain
it) are, we are told, the word of God. It is, therefore, proper for
us to know who told us so, that we may know what credit to give to the
report. The answer to this question is, that nobody can tell, except
that we tell one another so. The case, however, historically appears to
be as follows:

When the church mythologists established their system, they collected
all the writings they could find, and managed them as they pleased. It
is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings
as now appear under the name of the Old and the New Testament, are in
the same state in which those collectors say they found them; or whether
they added, altered, abridged, or dressed them up.

Be this as it may, they decided by vote which of the books out of the
collection they had made, should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should
not. They rejected several; they voted others to be doubtful, such as
the books called the Apocrypha; and those books which had a majority of
votes, were voted to be the word of God. Had they voted otherwise, all
the people since calling themselves Christians had believed otherwise;
for the belief of the one comes from the vote of the other. Who the
people were that did all this, we know nothing of. They call themselves
by the general name of the Church; and this is all we know of the
matter.

As we have no other external evidence or authority for believing these
books to be the word of God, than what I have mentioned, which is no
evidence or authority at all, I come, in the next place, to examine the
internal evidence contained in the books themselves.

In the former part of this essay, I have spoken of revelation. I now
proceed further with that subject, for the purpose of applying it to the
books in question.

Revelation is a communication of something, which the person, to whom
that thing is revealed, did 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 g