o write it. It is ignorance, or imposition, to apply
the term revelation in such cases; yet the Bible and Testament are
classed under this fraudulent description of being all revelation.

Revelation then, so far as the term has relation between God and man,
can only be applied to something which God reveals of his will to man;
but though the power of the Almighty to make such a communication is
necessarily admitted, because to that power all things are possible,
yet, the thing so revealed (if any thing ever was revealed, and which,
by the bye, it is impossible to prove) is revelation to the person only
to whom it is made. His account of it to another is not revelation; and
whoever puts faith in that account, puts it in the man from whom the
account comes; and that man may have been deceived, or may have dreamed
it; or he may be an impostor and may lie. There is no possible criterion
whereby to judge of the truth of what he tells; for even the morality of
it would be no proof of revelation. In all such cases, the proper
answer should be, "When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be
revelation; but it is not and cannot be incumbent upon me to believe
it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should take the
word of man as the word of God, and put man in the place of God." This
is the manner in which I have spoken of revelation in the former part of
The Age of Reason; and which, whilst it reverentially admits revelation
as a possible thing, because, as before said, to the Almighty all things
are possible, it prevents the imposition of one man upon another, and
precludes the wicked use of pretended revelation.

But though, speaking for myself, I thus admit the possibility of
revelation, I totally disbelieve that the Almighty ever did communicate
any thing to man, by any mode of speech, in any language, or by any kind
of vision, or appearance, or by any means which our senses are capable
of receiving, otherwise than by the universal display of himself in the
works of the creation, and by that repugnance we feel in ourselves to
bad actions, and disposition to good ones. [A fair parallel of the then
unknown aphorism of Kant: "Two things fill the soul with wonder and
reverence, increasing evermore as I meditate more closely upon them:
the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." (Kritik
derpraktischen Vernunfe, 1788). Kant's religious utterances at the
beginning of the French Revolution brought