You see that I have said what has been said, on a supposition that, however obscure theology may be, the Christian religion is extremely plain, and requires no great learning nor deep meditation to develop it.  But if it was not so plain, if both these were necessary to develop it, is great learning the monopoly of the clergy since the resurrection of letters, as a little learning was before that era?  Is deep meditation and justness of reasoning confined to men of that order by a peculiar and exclusive privilege?  In short, and to ask a question which experience will decide, have these men who boast that they are appointed by God “to be the interpreters of His secret will, to represent His person, and to answer in His name, as it were, out of the sanctuary”—­have these men, I say, been able in more than seventeen centuries to establish an uniform system of revealed religion—­for natural religion never wanted their help among the civil societies of Christians—­or even in their own?  They do not seem to have aimed at this desirable end.  Divided as they have always been, they have always studied in order to believe, and to take upon trust, or to find matter of discourse, or to contradict and confute, but never to consider impartially nor to use a free judgment.  On the contrary, they who have attempted to use this freedom of judgment have been constantly and cruelly persecuted by them.

The first steps towards the establishment of artificial theology, which has passed for Christianity ever since, were enthusiastical.  They were not heretics alone who delighted in wild allegories and the pompous jargon of mystery; they were the orthodox Fathers of the first ages, they were the disciples of the Apostles, or the scholars of their disciples; for the truth of which I may appeal to the epistles and other writings of these men that are extant—­to those of Clemens, of Ignatius, or of Irenaeus, for instance—­and to the visions of Hermes, that have so near a resemblance to the productions of Bunyan.

The next steps of the same kind were rhetorical.  They were made by men who declaimed much and reasoned ill, but who imposed on the imaginations of others by the heat of their own, by their hyperboles, their exaggerations, the acrimony of their style, and their violent invectives.  Such were the Chrysostoms, the Jeromes, an Hilarius, a Cyril, and most of the Fathers.

The last of the steps I shall mention were logical, and these were made very opportunely and very advantageously for the Church and for artificial theology.  Absurdity in speculation and superstition in practice had been cultivated so long, and were become so gross, that men began to see through the veils that had been thrown over them, as ignorant as those ages were.  Then the schoolmen arose.  I need not display their character; it is enough known.  This only I will say—­that having very few materials of knowledge and much subtilty of wit they wrought