But to return.  Let it be granted that no sensible miracle could authorize me so to violate my moral perceptions as to slay (that is, to murder) my innocent wife.  May it, nevertheless, authorize me to invade a neighbour country, slaughter the people and possess their cities, although, without such a miracle, the deed would be deeply criminal?  It is impossible to say that here, more than in the former case, miracles[5] can turn aside the common laws of morality.  Neither, therefore, could they justify Joshua’s war of extermination on the Canaanites, nor that of Samuel on the Amalekites; nor the murder of misbelievers by Elijah and by Josiah.  If we are shocked at the idea of God releasing Mohammed from the vulgar law of marriage, we must as little endure relaxation in the great laws of justice and mercy.  Farther, if only a small immorality is concerned, shall we then say that a miracle may justify it?  Could it authorise me to plait a whip of small cords, and flog a preferment-hunter out of the pulpit? or would it justify me in publicly calling the Queen and her ministers “a brood of vipers, who cannot escape the damnation of hell"[6] Such questions go very deep into the heart of the Christian claims.

I had been accustomed to overbear objections of this sort by replying, that to allow of their being heard would amount to refusing leave to God to give commands to his creatures.  For, it seems, if he did command, we, instead of obeying, should discuss whether the command was right and reasonable; and if we thought it otherwise, should conclude that God never gave it.  The extirpation of the Canaanites is compared by divines to the execution of a criminal; and it is insisted, that if the voice of society may justify the executioner, much more may the voice of God—­But I now saw the analogy to be insufficient and unsound.  Insufficient, because no executioner is justified in slaying those whom his conscience tells him to be innocent; and it is a barbarous morality alone, which pretends that he may make himself a passive tool of slaughter.  But next, the analogy assumes, (what none of my very dictatorial and insolent critics make even the faintest effort to prove to be a fact,) that God, like man, speaks from without:  that what we call Reason and Conscience is not his mode of commanding and revealing his will, but that words to strike the ear, or symbols displayed before the senses, are emphatically and exclusively “Revelation.”  Besides all this, the command of slaughter to the Jews is not directed against the seven nations of Canaan only, as modern theologians often erroneously assert:  it is a universal permission, of avaricious massacre and subjugation of “the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations,” Deut, xx. 15.