Some savage tribes then advanced:  “What!” said they, “because a man and woman ate an apple six thousand years ago, all the human race are damned?  And you call God just?  What tyrant ever rendered children responsible for the faults of their fathers?  What man can answer for the actions of another?  Does not this overturn every idea of justice and of reason?”

Others exclaimed:  “Where are the proofs, the witnesses of these pretended facts?  Can we receive them without examining the evidence?  The least action in a court of justice requires two witnesses; and we are ordered to believe all this on mere tradition and hearsay!”

A Jewish Rabbin then addressing the assembly, said:  “As to the fundamental facts, we are sureties; but with regard to their form and their application, the case is different, and the Christians are here condemned by their own arguments.  For they cannot deny that we are the original source from which they are derived—­the primitive stock on which they are grafted; and hence the reasoning is very short:  Either our law is from God, and then theirs is a heresy, since it differs from ours, or our law is not from God, and then theirs falls at the same time.”

“But you must make this distinction,” replied the Christian:  “Your law is from God as typical and preparative, but not as final and absolute:  you are the image of which we are the substance.”

“We know,” replied the Rabbin, “that such are your pretensions; but they are absolutely gratuitous and false.  Your system turns altogether on mystical meanings, visionary and allegorical interpretations.* With violent distortions on the letter of our books, you substitute the most chimerical ideas for the true ones, and find in them whatever pleases you; as a roving imagination will find figures in the clouds.  Thus you have made a spiritual Messiah of that which, in the spirit of our prophets, is only a temporal king.  You have made a redemption of the human race out of the simple re-establishment of our nation.  Your conception of the Virgin is founded on a single phrase, of which you have changed the meaning.  Thus you make from our Scriptures whatever your fancy dictates; you even find there your trinity; though there is not a word that has the most distant allusion to such a thing; and it is an invention of profane writers, admitted into your system with a host of other opinions, of every religion and of every sect, during the anarchy of the first three centuries of your era.”

* When we read the Fathers of the church, and see upon what arguments they have built the edifice of religion, we are inexpressibly astonished with their credulity or their knavery:  but allegory was the rage of that period; the Pagans employed it to explain the actions of their gods, and the Christians acted in the same spirit when they employed it after their fashion.

At these words, the Christian doctors, crying sacrilege