self, can be subject to death. I reply,
also, that it is impossible to perceive such a grave fault and sin in
taking an apple, and that we can find very little proportion between
the crime committed against the Deity by eating an apple and his Son's
death.

I know well enough I shall be told that these are all mysteries; but
I, in my turn, shall reply, that mysteries are imposing words,
imagined by men who know not how to get themselves out of the
labyrinth into which their false reasonings and senseless principles
have once plunged them.

Be this as it may, we are assured that the Messiah, or the deliverer
of the Jews, had been clearly predicted and described by the
prophecies contained in the Old Testament. In this case, I demand why
the Jews have disowned this wonderful man, this God whom God sent to
them. They answer me, that the incredulity of the Jews was likewise
predicted, and that divers inspired writers had announced the death of
the Son of God. To which I reply, that a sensible God ought not to
have sent him under such circumstances, that an omnipotent God ought
to have adopted measures more efficacious and certain to bring his
people into the way in which he wished them to go. If he wished not to
convert and liberate the Jews, it was quite useless to send his Son
among them, and thereby expose him to a death that was both certain
and foreseen.

They will not fail to tell me, that in the end the divine patience
became tired of the excesses of the Jews; that the immutable God, who
had sworn an eternal alliance with the race of Abraham, wished at
length to break the treaty, which he had, however, assured them should
last forever. It is pretended that God had determined to reject the
Hebrew nation, in order to adopt the Gentiles, whom he had hated and
despised nearly four thousand years. I reply, that this discourse is
very little conformable to the ideas we ought to have of a God who
_changes not_, whose mercy is _infinite_, and whose goodness is
_inexhaustible_. I shall tell them, that in this case the Messiah
announced by the Jewish prophets was destined for the Jews, and that
he ought to have been their liberator, instead of destroying their
worship and their religion. If it be possible to unravel any thing in
these obscure, enigmatical, and symbolical oracles of the prophets of
Judea, as we find them in the Bible,--if there be any means of
guessing the meaning of the obscure riddles, which have been dec