It is an inconsistency, scarcely possible to be credited, that anything should exist under the name of a religion that held it to be irreligious to study and contemplate the structure of the universe that God had made.  But the fact is too well established to be denied.  The event that served more than any other to break the first link in the long chain of despotic ignorance is that known by the name of the Reformation by Luther.  From that time, though it does not appear to have made part of the intention of Luther, or of these who are called Reformers, the sciences began to revive, and liberality, their natural associate, began to appear.  This was the only public good the Reformation did; for with respect to religious good it might as well not have taken place.  The mythology still continued the same; and the multiplicity of national popes grew out of the downfall of the Pope of Christendom.

The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy.  When men from custom or fashion, or any worldly motive profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and, being no longer honest in their own minds, they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others.  It is from the influence of this vice, hypocrisy, that we see so many church and meeting-going professors and pretenders to religion so full of tricks and deceit in their dealings, and so loose in the performance of their engagements that they are not to be trusted further than the laws of the country will bind them.  Morality has no hold on their minds, no restraint on their actions.

One set of preachers make salvation to consist in believing.  They tell their congregations that if they believe in Christ their sins shall be forgiven.  This, in the first place, is an encouragement to sin; in the next place, the doctrine these men preach cannot be true.

Another set of preachers tell their congregations that God predestined and selected from all eternity a certain number to be saved, and a certain number to be damned eternally.  If this were true, the day of judgment is past; their preaching is in vain, and they had better work at some useful calling for their livelihood.

Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ.  He was a virtuous and an amiable man.  The morality that he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind, and, though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius and by some of the Greek philosophers many years before, by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any.

III.—­THE BIBLE

If we permit ourselves to conceive right ideas of things, we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honour with the name of God; and therefore the word of God cannot exist in any written or human language.