Either the Christian religion is true, or it is false:  if true, it comes from God, and its authenticity can admit of doubt and dispute no further than its omnipotent author is willing to allow.  Either the power or the goodness of God is called in question, if He leaves those doctrines most essential to the well-being of man in doubt and dispute; the only ones which, since their promulgation, have been the subject of unceasing cavil, the cause of irreconcilable hatred.  IF GOD HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?

There is this passage in the Christian Scriptures:  ’Those who obey not God, and believe not the Gospel of his Son, shall be punished with everlasting destruction.’  This is the pivot upon which all religions turn:—­they all assume that it is in our power to believe or not to believe; whereas the mind can only believe that which it thinks true.  A human being can only be supposed accountable for those actions which are influenced by his will.  But belief is utterly distinct from and unconnected with volition:  it is the apprehension of the agreement or disagreement of the ideas that compose any preposition.  Belief is a passion, or involuntary operation of the mind, and, like other passions, its intensity is precisely proportionate to the degrees of excitement.  Volition is essential to merit or demerit.  But the Christian religion attaches the highest possible degrees of merit and demerit to that which is worthy of neither, and which is totally unconnected with the peculiar faculty of the mind, whose presence is essential to their being.

Christianity was intended to reform the world:  had an all-wise Being planned it, nothing is more improbable than that it should have failed:  omniscience would infallibly have foreseen the inutility of a scheme which experience demonstrates, to this age, to have been utterly unsuccessful.

Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity.  Prayer may be considered under two points of view;—­as an endeavour to change the intentions of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience.  But the former case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can occasionally instruct the Creator of the world how to regulate the universe; and the latter, a certain degree of servility analogous to the loyalty demanded by earthly tyrants.  Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.

Christianity, like all other religions, rests upon miracles, prophecies, and martyrdoms.  No religion ever existed which had not its prophets, its attested miracles, and, above all, crowds of devotees who would bear patiently the most horrible tortures to prove its authenticity.  It should appear that in no case can a discriminating mind subscribe to the genuineness of a miracle.  A miracle is an infraction of nature’s law, by a supernatural cause; by a cause acting beyond that eternal circle within which all things are included.  God breaks through the law of nature, that He may convince mankind of the truth of that revelation which, in spite of His precautions, has been, since its introduction, the subject of unceasing schism and cavil.