to the moral justice of God, by supposing him to make the
innocent suffer for the guilty, and also the loose morality and low
contrivance of supposing him to change himself into the shape of a man,
in order to make an excuse to himself for not executing his supposed
sentence upon Adam; putting, I say, those things aside as matter of
distinct consideration, it is certain that what is called the
christian system of faith, including in it the whimsical account of
the creation--the strange story of Eve, the snake, and the apple--the
amphibious idea of a man-god--the corporeal idea of the death of a
god--the mythological idea of a family of gods, and the christian
system of arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three, are all
irreconcilable, not only to the divine gift of reason, that God has
given to man, but to the knowledge that man gains of the power and
wisdom of God by the aid of the sciences, and by studying the structure
of the universe that God has made.

The setters up, therefore, and the advocates of the Christian system of
faith, could not but foresee that the continually progressive knowledge
that man would gain by the aid of science, of the power and wisdom of
God, manifested in the structure of the universe, and in all the works
of creation, would militate against, and call into question, the truth
of their system of faith; and therefore it became necessary to their
purpose to cut learning down to a size less dangerous to their project,
and this they effected by restricting the idea of learning to the dead
study of dead languages.

They not only rejected the study of science out of the christian
schools, but they persecuted it; and it is only within about the last
two centuries that the study has been revived. So late as 1610, Galileo,
a Florentine, discovered and introduced the use of telescopes, and by
applying them to observe the motions and appearances of the heavenly
bodies, afforded additional means for ascertaining the true structure
of the universe. Instead of being esteemed for these discoveries, he was
sentenced to renounce them, or the opinions resulting from them, as a
damnable heresy. And prior to that time Virgilius was condemned to be
burned for asserting the antipodes, or in other words, that the earth
was a globe, and habitable in every part where there was land; yet the
truth of this is now too well known even to be told. [NOTE: I cannot
discover the source of this statement concerning