nown. The creation is the Bible of
the deist. He there reads, in the hand-writing of the Creator himself,
the certainty of his existence, and the immutability of his power; and
all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries. The probability
that we may be called to account hereafter, will, to reflecting minds,
have the influence of belief; for it is not our belief or disbelief that
can make or unmake the fact. As this is the state we are in, and which
it is proper we should be in, as free agents, it is the fool only, and
not the philosopher, nor even the prudent man, that will live as if
there were no God.

But the belief of a God is so weakened by being mixed with the strange
fable of the Christian creed, and with the wild adventures related in
the Bible, and the obscurity and obscene nonsense of the Testament, that
the mind of man is bewildered as in a fog. Viewing all these things in
a confused mass, he confounds fact with fable; and as he cannot believe
all, he feels a disposition to reject all. But the belief of a God is
a belief distinct from all other things, and ought not to be confounded
with any. The notion of a Trinity of Gods has enfeebled the belief of
one God. A multiplication of beliefs acts as a division of belief; and
in proportion as anything is divided, it is weakened.

Religion, by such means, becomes a thing of form instead of fact; of
notion instead of principle: morality is banished to make room for
an imaginary thing called faith, and this faith has its origin in a
supposed debauchery; a man is preached instead of a God; an execution is
an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood,
like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives
them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then
praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing
it.

A man, by hearing all this nonsense lumped and preached together,
confounds the God of the Creation with the imagined God of the
Christians, and lives as if there were none.

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none
more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant
to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called
Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too
inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only
atheists and fanatics. As an engine of powe