"And thirdly, that I should keep God's holy will and commandments." Then they must swear that the boy shall never be a godfather.
All this is done to impair the intellect, and accounts, in part, for the extreme obstinacy and prejudice of Jesus's followers. Somebody must have sworn, Mr. Attorney General, that you should never be an Attorney-General; for this exercise of your office herein described, is not compatible with much scrupulosity. As for its being said that the child afterwards takes the oath upon itself, oaths cannot be so transferred; therefore that plea is futile. No description of people, besides Jesus's followers, ever admitted the execrable principle of the transfer of an oath. In fact, if the godfathers had sworn that the boy should turn out a pickle, after all the rest of priestly management, they would have stood a pretty good chance of having nothing fall upon their conscience from that quarter.
Jesus's priests are apt to injure the intellect of young people by telling them, that if they do not believe Jesus's religion they will be damned to eternal punishments. Now as in all natural belief, when the intellect is sound and healthy, the mind is always passive in the act of giving its assent to any proposition, this trick of Jesus's priests disturbs, impairs, and disorders the understanding; and by this means also people are rendered incapable, throughout life, to reason and inquire with penetration, discernment, and impartiality on religious subjects. The natural belief of a sound mind is not determined by the will. If men could, in all cases, believe whatever they pleased, their minds would be a complete chaos; yet have Jesus's priests, in all ages since the days of the founder of their religion, offered this violence to the human intellect. Thus, I think, that I have shewn you, Mr. Attorney-General, that the young and inexperienced are not more in danger of imbibing absurd notions and depraved principles from the Deists than from Jesus's priests.
I now proceed to examine a supposed assertion, rife enough among those of your side of the question that "infidelity and immorality are necessarily connected." That the Deists and other unbelievers are more immoral than Jesus's followers, is more than can be proved. And when we consider that Jesus's religion is always taken up as a prejudice, and is maintained in the world by violence, and by a pertinacious determination of Jesus's adherents to hear the reasons only on one side of the question, that side which is favourable to his pretensions, a procedure which is utterly repugnant to the love of truth, the most probable conjecture is, that the unbelievers should be, upon the whole, the more moral party. But it must be allowed to be a difficult matter to determine such a question as that to any thing like certainty. Until it be determined, however, you have no right to make the assertion alluded to.
When you declaim upon the too great prevalence of infidelity, you speak a language which implies the insane and monstrous notion that natural belief is dependent upon the will; whereas it is the known and suggested reasons which always naturally determine the assent. A man is no more culpable merely for what he believes, than he is for discovering by the taste that sugar is sweet and aloes bitter. Your slang when you speak of infidelity and belief, as virtues or vices, reprehensible or laudable, would be quite unintelligible to us, if we were not already acquainted with the tricks and machinations of priests to create prejudice, or frighten people into an assent to points, which they dare not trust and submit to the test of fair inquiry.
If the Creator were to require an assent without a sufficient reason to determine it, he would demand what is contrary to the structure of the human mind, which was formed by himself: thus he would disorder his own work, which is a thing incredible. If he has suggested reasons which would not have been otherwise thought of, let Jesus's priests produce them, and let them be examined. Then the prosecutions of Deists would be superfluous, for they would be forced to: believe when the reasons were found cogent enough. But no such reasons have been hitherto produced: reason or no reason, the assent is still required. And how shall such an assent without reasons sufficient be distinguished from what is universally allowed, by physicians and all others, to be insanity and mental derangement?
"That the propagators of infidelity are instigated by the Devil." This assertion, very usual from men in your office, Mr. Attorney-General, you are unable to prove. And hereby you remind us, that Jesus's followers universally admit the very absurd notion of two principles in the universe, a good and a bad one.
I know that the moderns being ashamed of it, wish to abrogate it, and to throw it off from themselves upon the early heretics. But we shall not allow you to escape that way. If you advance any principle, you must admit all the consequences which necessarily flow from it; and we will not suffer your evasions in this particular. When pressed hard, you followers of Jesus want to pass off the Devil upon us for a mere angel, and tell us of his war in Heaven, and that he was cast out upon the earth. This will not do, we shall not allow you this subterfuge, for in other places your received canon of Scripture maintains the ubiquity of the Devil; this extravagant notion with which we charge you, we shall bring home to you. In 2 Cor. chap. iv. ver. 4, you have, "In whom the God of this world hath blinded the eyes of them that believe not." implying, that the Devil, i. e. the God of this world, is present in all unbelievers. This is still further confirmed by 1 John chap. v. ver. 19, "The whole world lieth in the wicked one," i.e. the Devil. I know that it is translated, "lieth in wickedness." But this is a sneaking evasion of Jesus's followers, who are ashamed of the notion of the two principles. That is an extraordinary vicious translation of the passage. A man who knows the least of Greek at all must be sensible that the passage will only admit of the rendering which I have here, and others have before me, given to it. The Devil is said by Jesus's followers to pervade the whole unbelieving world. If you complain, Mr. Attorney-General, that this is pressing a lawyer too far on a theological question, I shall lay the blame on you, and those who have held your office, for starting this particular subject; and whenever an Attorney-General advances a position he takes the risks attending it. The story of the Devil's fall from Heaven in Revelations, chap. xii. may establish and show an inconsistency in Jesus's religion, but it does not get you nor his followers clear of the silly notion of the two principles, when your canon of Scripture has once advanced what clearly implies that groundless notion.
"The jury are conjured." Since the detection and exposition of that infamous list of jurors, out of which a jury used to be packed for the Crown whenever it was prosecutor, some sort of reformation has taken place in the manner of appointing a jury, so as to leave a better chance of having disinterested men on the jury. Before Hone's trial the scene which used to take place in prosecutions for alledged blasphemy was scandalous and detestable. The legislature take upon themselves to assign a revelation to the Almighty, but as a revelation is a delineation of his character, they assign to him a character of their own choosing; and as they labour to suppress and hide the objections started against it, that character which they have given to the Supreme Being must of course be a bad one, because concealment in this case implies guilt in the concealing party: so that the charge of blasphemy is justly retorted upon the legislature and upon the prosecuting party in this case of R. Carlile, and also in the preceding cases of Houston, the reputed author of Ecce Homo, of Williams, who was
Paine's printer of the Age of Reason, of Daniel Isaac Eaton, too, and others. The legislative bodies, I repeat, and their accomplices, are the real blaspheming party, who have given, as they testify by their concealing practices, a bad and slanderous character to the Almighty, and whose guilt is aggravated by their endeavours to hinder other men from vindicating him from their foul aspersions.