works. But such is the
strange construction of the christian system of faith, that every
evidence the heavens affords to man, either directly contradicts it or
renders it absurd.

It is possible to believe, and I always feel pleasure in encouraging
myself to believe it, that there have been men in the world who
persuaded themselves that what is called a pious fraud, might, at least
under particular circumstances, be productive of some good. But the
fraud being once established, could not afterwards be explained; for
it is with a pious fraud as with a bad action, it begets a calamitous
necessity of going on.

The persons who first preached the christian system of faith, and in
some measure combined with it the morality preached by Jesus Christ,
might persuade themselves that it was better than the heathen mythology
that then prevailed. From the first preachers the fraud went on to
the second, and to the third, till the idea of its being a pious fraud
became lost in the belief of its being true; and that belief became
again encouraged by the interest of those who made a livelihood by
preaching it.

But though such a belief might, by such means, be rendered almost
general among the laity, it is next to impossible to account for the
continual persecution carried on by the church, for several hundred
years, against the sciences, and against the professors of science, if
the church had not some record or tradition that it was originally
no other than a pious fraud, or did not foresee that it could not be
maintained against the evidence that the structure of the universe
afforded.

CHAPTER XVII - OF THE MEANS EMPLOYED IN ALL TIME, AND ALMOST
UNIVERSALLY, TO DECEIVE THE PEOPLES.

HAVING thus shown the irreconcileable inconsistencies between the real
word of God existing in the universe, and that which is called the word
of God, as shown to us in a printed book that any man might make, I
proceed to speak of the three principal means that have been employed in
all ages, and perhaps in all countries, to impose upon mankind.

Those three means are Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy, The first two
are incompatible with true religion, and the third ought always to be
suspected.

With respect to Mystery, everything we behold is, in one sense, a
mystery to us. Our own existence is a mystery: the whole vegetable world
is a mystery. We cannot account how it is that an acorn, when put into
the ground, is made to develop itself a