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enormous. Right or wrong, eminent Christian scholars here proclaim results in complete antagonism to the ideas usually accepted as forming the true basis of the Christian faith. They amount, in fact, to a complete and unconditional surrender of the whole dogmatic framework which has hitherto been held as divinely revealed, and therefore divinely true. Thomas Paine was a Deist. As such he believed that nature may be compared with a clock and God with its maker. As the clock maker, under normal conditions, has but little to do with his handiwork, so it has been with the Creator and his universe. The theists of every name (Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and Buddhist), not to speak of others, believe that the universe, with all which therein is, lives, moves and has its being as the result of the willings of their respective gods. Though I have my god, indeed two gods, one god in the world of my physical existence--a trinity: matter, force and motion, and another god in the world of my moral existence--a trinity: fact, truth and life, yet if the rejection of both deism and theism is atheism, I am an atheist. But assuming for the sake of argument that there is a conscious personal being who has had and is having something to do with making things what they are, I set my seal to this arraignment: Of all the systems of religion that were ever 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 power, it serves the purpose of despotism and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but for the good of mankind it leads to nothing here or hereafter. --Thomas Paine. William Rathbone Greg in his Creed of Christendom says that much of the Old Testament which Christian divines, in their ignorance of Jewish lore, have insisted on receiving and interpreting literally, the informed Rabbis never dreamed of regarding as anything but allegorical. The literalists they called fools. Origen and Augustine, the two greatest men which Christianity has produced, would agree with Greg in this. We have already quoted the motto of this section from Origen, and we will now quote this from August
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