“The first man yielded to this temptation; and to satisfy Divine Justice the whole of his posterity must have been eternally burned in hell, if God had not sent his only Son on earth, to save those few whose salvation had been foreseen and determined before the creation of the world.”

The hero of this fabulous episode, beneath which a great truth lies hidden, the Christian Ahrimanes or Typhon, the Devil, as painted by Milton, he considered a moral being, far superior to the God depicted by the same author, and who, under the form of the second person of the Christian Trinity, Shelley tells us of coming humbly,

    “Veiling his horrible God-head in the shape
    Of man, scorn’d by the world, his name unheard,
    Save by the rabble of his native town,
    Even as a parish demagogue.  He led
    The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace,
    In semblance; but he lit within their souls
    The quenchless flame of zeal, and blest the sword
    He brought on earth to satiate with the blood
    Of truth and freedom his malignant soul.”

Elsewhere, in extension of the same, he puts the accompanying words in the mouth of God the Father, to illustrate the doctrine of Christian Atonement: 

    “I will beget a son, and he shall bear
    The sins of all the world; he shall arise
    In an unnoticed corner of the earth,
    And he shall die upon a cross, and purge
    The universal crime; so that the few
    On whom my grace descends, those who are marked
    As vessels to the honor of their God,
    May credit this strange sacrifice, and save
    Their souls alive.  Millions shall live and die,
    Who ne’er shall call upon their Saviour’s name,
    But unredeem’d go to the gaping grave;
    Thousands shall deem it an old woman’s tale,
    Such as the nurses frighten babes withal;
    These, in a gulf of anguish an I of flame,
    Shall curse their reprobation endlessly,
    Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow,
    Even on their beds of torment, where they howl,
    My honor and the justice of their doom. 
    What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts
    Of purity, with radiant genius bright,
    Or lit with human reason’s earthly ray? 
    Many are call’d but few will I elect.”

The popular faith of Europe and America, which experience demonstrates to this age has, even as a means of reforming humanity, been a complete failure, Shelley correctly believed, had the same human foundation and origin as that of other revealed theologies—­he sums up the proofs on which Christianity rests, miracles, prophecies, and martyrdoms, with great clearness; proves the absurdity of the doctrine of miracles, as taught by Christian writers, shows the falseness