continue to exist.

It is evident that both of these questions were put to the reason of the
person to whom they are supposed to have been addressed; and it is only
by admitting the first question to be answered affirmatively, that the
second could follow. It would have been unnecessary, and even absurd, to
have put a second question, more difficult than the first, if the first
question had been answered negatively. The two questions have different
objects; the first refers to the existence of God, the second to his
attributes. Reason can discover the one, but it falls infinitely short
in discovering the whole of the other.

I recollect not a single passage in all the writings ascribed to the men
called apostles, that conveys any idea of what God is. Those writings
are chiefly controversial; and the gloominess of the subject they dwell
upon, that of a man dying in agony on a cross, is better suited to the
gloomy genius of a monk in a cell, by whom it is not impossible they
were written, than to any man breathing the open air of the Creation.
The only passage that occurs to me, that has any reference to the works
of God, by which only his power and wisdom can be known, is related to
have been spoken by Jesus Christ, as a remedy against distrustful care.
"Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin."
This, however, is far inferior to the allusions in Job and in the 19th
Psalm; but it is similar in idea, and the modesty of the imagery is
correspondent to the modesty of the man.

CHAPTER XI - OF THE THEOLOGY OF THE CHRISTIANS; AND THE TRUE THEOLOGY.

As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of
atheism; a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a
man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of man-ism with
but little deism, and is as near to atheism as twilight is to darkness.
It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls
a redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth
and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious or an irreligious
eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.

The effect of this obscurity has been that of turning everything upside
down, and representing it in reverse; and among the revolutions it has
thus magically produced, it has made a revolution in Theology.

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle
of scien