and catechised, he at last agreed to receive the sacraments of baptism and Lord’s Supper.  Nevertheless, the Priest to make everything sure and solid, still continued his instructions, and began the next day with the usual question, How many God’s are there?  None at all, replied Benedict, for that was his new name. How!  None at all? Cries the Priest. To be sure, said the honest proselyte, you have told me all along that there it but one God; and yesterday I ate him.

This is sufficiently ridiculous; and yet if we fairly consider the whole question of divinity there will be found no more absurdity in the notion of our Benedict eating the Creator, than in Jews crucifying Him.  Both notions involve materiality.  A God without body, parts, or passions, could no more be nailed upon a cross than taken into the stomach.  And if it be urged there is something awful in the blasphemy of him who talks of swallowing his God, the Author of this Apology can as conscientiously urge that there is something very disgusting in the idea of a murdered Deity.

Locke wrote rather disparagingly of ‘many among us,’ who ’will be found upon inquiry, to fancy God in the shape of a man sitting in heaven, and have other absurd and unfit conceptions of him.’  As though it were possible to think of shapeless Being, or as though it were criminal in the superstitious to believe ‘God made man after his own image.’  A ‘Philosophical Unbeliever,’ who made minced meat of Dr. Priestley’s reasonings on the existence of God, well remarked that ’Theists are always for turning their God into an overgrown Man.  Anthropomorphites has long been a term applied to them.  They give him hand and eyes, nor can they conceive him otherwise than as a corporeal Being.  We make a Deity ourselves, fall down and worship him.  It is the molten calf over again.  Idolatry is still practised.  The only difference is that now we worship idols of our own imagination before of our hands.’ [37:1]

This is bold language, but if the language of truth and soberness no one should take offence at it.  That Christians as well as Turks ’have had whole sects earnestly contending that the Deity was corporeal and of human shapes,’ is a fact, testified to by Locke, and so firmly established as to defy contradiction.  And though every sincere subscriber to the Thirty Nine Articles must believe, or at least must believe he believes in Deity without body, parts, or passions, it is well known that ‘whole sects’ of Christians do even now ’fancy God in the shape a man sitting in heaven, and entertain other absurd and unfit conceptions of him.’