These remarks are certainly not calculated to make ‘considering men’ put their trust in Scripture.  Coming from a Protestant Divine of such high talent and learning, they may rather be expected to breed in ‘considering men’ very unorthodox opinions as well of the authenticity as the genuineness of both Testaments, and a strong suspicion that Chillingworth was joking when he talked about their “sufficient certainty.”  The author of this Apology has searched Scripture in vain for ‘sufficient certainty,’ with respect to the long catalogue of religious beliefs which agitate and distract society.  Laying claim to the character of a ‘considering man,’ he requires that Scripture to be proved the word of a God before appealed to, as His Revelation; a feat no man has yet accomplished.  Priests, the cleverest, most industrious, and least scrupulous, have tried their hands at the pious work, but all have failed.  Notwithstanding the mighty labours of our Lardner’s and Tillemont’s and Mosheim’s, no case is made out for the divinity of either the Old or New Testament.  ‘Infidels’ have shown the monstrous absurdity of supposing that any one book has an atom more divinity about it than any other book.  Those ‘brutes’ have completely succeeded in proving that Christianity is a superstition, no less absurd than Mohammedanism, and to the full as mischievous.  To us, we candidly avow that its doctrines, precepts, and injunctions appear so utterly opposed to good sense, and good government, that we are persuaded even if it were practicable to establish a commonwealth in harmony with them at sun-rise it would infallibly go to pieces before sunset.  The author has read that Roman augurs rarely met to do the professional without laughing at each other, and he is bothered to understand how Christian priests contrive to keep their countenances, amid the many strong temptations to mirth, by which, in their official capacity they are surrounded.  No doubt very many of them laugh immoderately in private, by way of revenge for the gravity they are constrained to assume in public.  It is well known that hypocrites are most prone to an affectation of sanctity; which marvellously steads them in this world, happen what may in the world to come.  Nine-tenths of those who make a parade of their piety, are rotten at heart, as that Cardinal de Crema, Legate of Pope Calixtus 2nd, in the reign of Henry 1st, who declared at a London Synod, it was an intolerable enormity, that a priest should dare to consecrate, and touch the body of Christ immediately after he had risen from the side of a strumpet, (for that was the decent appellation he gave to the wives of the clergy), but it happened, that the very next night, the officers of justice, breaking into a disorderly house, found the Cardinal in bed with a courtezan; an incident, says Hume, [72:1] “which threw such ridicule upon him, that he immediately stole out of the kingdom; the synod broke up, and the canons against the marriage of its clergymen, were worse executed than ever.”