is unintelligible to us; but as we clearly see that they have no
intellectual privileges above the rest of the species, we are
compelled to conclude, that their faith, like the faith of other
Christians, is a blind acquiescence in opinions derived, without
examination, from their predecessors; and that they must be hypocrites
when they pretend to _believe_ in doctrines of the truth of which they
cannot be _convinced_, since these doctrines have been shown to be
destitute of that degree of evidence which is necessary to impress the
mind with a feeling of their probability, much less of their
certainty.

It will be said that faith, or the faculty of believing things
incredible, is the gift of God, and can only be known to those upon
whom God has bestowed the favor. My answer is, that, if that be the
case, we have no alternative but to wait till the grace of God shall
be shed upon us--and that in the mean time we may be allowed to doubt
whether credulity, stupidity, and the perversion of reason can
proceed, as favors, from a rational Deity who has endowed us with the
power of thinking. If God be infinitely wise, how can folly and
imbecility be pleasing to him? If there were such a thing as faith,
proceeding from grace, it would be the privilege of seeing things
otherwise than as God has made them; and if that were so, it follows,
that the whole creation would be a mere cheat. No man can believe the
Bible to be the production of God without doing violence to every
consistent notion that he is able to form of Deity! No man can believe
that one God is three Gods, and that those three Gods are one God,
without renouncing all pretension to common sense, and persuading
himself that there is no such thing as certainty in the world.

Thus, Madam, we are bound to suspect that what the church calls a gift
from above, a supernatural grace, is, in fact, a perfect blindness, an
irrational credulity, a brutish submission, a vague uncertainty, a
stupid ignorance, by which we are led to acquiesce, without
investigation, in every dogma that our priests think fit to impose
upon us--by which we are led to adopt, without knowing why, the
pretended opinions of men who can have no better means of arriving at
the truth than we have. In short, we are authorized in suspecting that
no motive but that of blinding us, in order more effectually to
deceive us, can actuate those men who are eternally preaching to us
about a virtue which, if it could