to resist a usurping king, in a patriotic cause, is not contemplated in the New Testament as under any circumstances an imaginable duty.  Patriotism has no recognised existence in the Christian records.  I am well aware of the cause of this; I do not say that it reflects any dishonour on the Christian apostles:  I merely remark on it as a calamitous fact, and deduce that their precepts cannot and must not be made the sufficient rule of life, or they will still be (as they always have hitherto been) a mainstay of tyranny.  The rights of Men and of Nations are wholly ignored[17] in the New Testament, but the authority of Slave-owners and of Kings is very distinctly recorded for solemn religious sanction.  If it had been wholly silent, no one could have appealed to its decision:  but by consecrating mere Force, it has promoted Injustice, and in so far has made that Love impossible, which it desired to establish.

It is but one part of this great subject, that the apostles absolutely command a slave to give obedience to his master in nil things, “as to the Lord.”  It is in vain to deny, that the most grasping of slave-owners asks nothing more of abolitionists than that they would all adopt Paul’s creed; viz., acknowledge the full authority of owners of slaves, tell them that they are responsible to God alone, and charge them to use their power righteously and mercifully.

3.  LASTLY:  it is a lamentable fact, that not only do superstitions about Witches, Ghosts, Devils, and Diabolical Miracles derive a strong support from the Bible, (and in fact have been exploded by nothing but the advance of physical philosophy,)—­but what is far worse, the Bible alone has nowhere sufficed to establish an enlightened religious toleration.  This is at first seemingly unintelligible:  for the apostles certainly would have been intensely shocked at the thought of punishing men, in body, purse, or station, for not being Christians or not being orthodox.  Nevertheless, not only does the Old Testament justify bloody persecution, but the New teaches[18] that God will visit men with fiery vengeance for holding an erroneous creed;—­that vengeance indeed is his, not ours; but that still the punishment is deserved.  It would appear, that wherever this doctrine is held, possession of power for two or three generations inevitably converts men into persecutors; and in so far, we must lay the horrible desolations which Europe has suffered from bigotry, at the doors, not indeed of the Christian apostles themselves, but of that Bibliolatry which has converted their earliest records into a perfect and eternal law.

IV.  “Prophecy” is generally regarded as a leading evidence of the divine origin of Christianity.  But this also had proved itself to me a more and more mouldering prop, whether I leant on those which concerned Messiah, those of the New Testament, or the miscellaneous predictions of the Old Testament.