But the subject at present under consideration is the dispute of the Jew with the Christian, who acknowledges the Old Testament to be a Revelation, upon which a new Revelation, that of the New Testament, is founded and erected.  To him the Jew argues, that if the Old Testament be a Divine Revelation, then the New Testament cannot be a Revelation, because it contradicts, and is repugnant to, the Old Testament, the more ancient, and acknowledged Revelation.  Now God cannot be the author of two Revelations, one of which is repugnant to the other.  One of them is certainly false.  And if the Christian, conscious of the difficulty of reconciling the New, with the Old, Testament, attempts to support the New, at the expense of the Old, Testament, upon which the former is, and was, built by the founders of Christianity; then the Jew would tell him, that he acts as absurdly as would the man who should expect to make his house the firmer, by undermining, and weakening its foundation.

So that whether the Christian affirms, or denies, he is ruined either way.  For he is reduced to this fatal dilemma.  If the Old Testament contains a Revelation from God, then the New Testament is not from God, for God cannot contradict himself:  and it can be proved abundantly, that the New Testament is contradictory, and repugnant to the Old and to itself too.  If, on the other hand, the Old Testament contains no Revelation from God, then the New Testament must go down at any rate because it asserts that the Old Testament does contain a Revelation from God, and builds upon it, as a foundation.—­E.

* There was nothing which gave the author, in writing this Book, so much uneasiness, at the apprehension of being supposed to entertain disrespectful sentiments of the Founder of the Christian Religion.  I would most earnestly entreat the reader to believe my solemn assurances, that by nothing that I have said, or shall be under the necessity of saying, do I think, or mean to intimate the slightest disparagement to the moral character of one, whose purity of morals, and good intentions, deserve any thing else but reproach.  That he was an enthusiast, I do not doubt, that he was a wilful impostor I never will believe.  And I protest before God, that from the apprehensions above-mentioned alone, I would have confined the contents of this volume to myself, did I not feel compelled to justify myself for having quitted a profession:  and did I not, above all, think it my duty, to make a well meant attempt, which I hope will be seconded, to vindicate the unbelief of an unfortunate nation, who, on that account, have for almost eighteen hundred years, been made the victim of rancorous prejudice, the most infernal cruelties, and the most atrocious wickedness.  If the Christian religion be, in truth, not well founded, surely it is the duty of every honest and every humane, man, to endeavour to dispel an illusion, which certainly has been, notwithstanding any thing that can be said to the contrary, the bona fide, and real cause of unspeakable misery, and of repeated, and remorseless plunderings, and massacres, to an unhappy people; the journal of whose sufferings, on account of it, forms the blackest page in the history of the human race, and the most detestable one in the history of human superstition.—­E.