We can say that the prophecies of the Old Testament adjusted to the New, would be very absurd and puerile things. For example, Abraham had two wives, of which the one, who was but a servant, represented the synagogue, and the other one, his lawful wife, represented the Christian Church; and that this Abraham had two sons, of which the one born of Hagar, the servant, represented the Old Testament; and the other, born of Sarah, the wife, represented the New Testament. Who would not laugh at such a ridiculous doctrine?
Is it not amusing that a piece of red cloth, exhibited by a prostitute as a signal to spies, in the Old Testament is made to represent the blood of Jesus Christ shed in the New? If—according to this manner of interpreting allegorically all that is said, done, and practiced in the ancient law of the Jews—we should interpret in the same allegorical way all the discourses, the actions, and the adventures of the famous Don Quixote de la Mancha, we would find the same sort of mysteries and ridiculous figures.
It is nevertheless upon this absurd foundation that the whole Christian religion rests. Thus it is that there is scarcely anything in this ancient law that the Christ-worshiping doctors do not try to explain in a mystical way to build up their system. The most false and the most ridiculous prophecy ever made is that of Jesus, in Luke, where it is pretended that there will be signs in the sun and in the moon, and that the Son of Man will appear in a cloud to judge men; and this is predicted for the generation living at that time. Has it come to pass? Did the Son of Man appear in a cloud?
VII.—ERRORS OF DOCTRINE AND OF MORALITY.
The Christian Apostolical Roman Religion teaches, and compels belief, that there is but one God, and, at the same time, that there are three Divine persons, each one being God. This is absurd; for if there are three who are truly God, then there are three Gods. It is false, then, to say that there is but one God; or if this is true, it is false to say that there are really three who are God, for one and three can not be claimed to be one and the same number. It is also said that the first of these pretended Divine persons, called the Father, has brought forth the second person, which is called the Son, and that these first two persons together have produced the third, which is called the Holy Ghost, and, nevertheless, these three pretended Divine persons do not depend the one upon the other, and even that one is not older than the other. This, too, is manifestly absurd; because one thing can not receive its existence from another thing without some dependence on this other; and a thing must necessarily exist in order to give birth to another. If, then, the Second and the Third persons of Divinity have received their existence from the First person, they must necessarily depend for their existence on this First person, who gave them birth, or who begot them, and it is necessary also that the First person of the Divinity, who gave birth to the two other persons, should have existed before them; because that which does not exist can not beget anything. Nevertheless, it is repugnant as well as absurd to claim that anything could be begotten or born without having had a beginning. Now, according to our Christ-worshipers, the Second and Third persons of Divinity were begotten and born; then they had a beginning, and the First person had none, not being begotten by another; it therefore follows necessarily that one existed before the other.
Our Christ-worshipers, who feel these absurdities and can not avoid them by any good reasoning, have no other resource than to say that we must ignore human reason and humbly adore these sublime mysteries without wishing to understand them; but that which they call faith is refuted when they tell us that we must submit; it is telling us that we must blindly believe that which we do not believe. Our Christ-worshipers condemn the blindness of the ancient Pagans, who worshiped several Gods; they deride the genealogy of those Gods, their birth, their marriages, and the generating of their children; yet they do not observe that they themselves say things which are much more ridiculous and absurd.
If the Pagans believed that there were Goddesses as well as Gods, that these Gods and Goddesses married and begat children, they thought of nothing, then, but what is natural; for they did not believe yet that the Gods were without body or feeling; they believed they were similar to men. Why should there not be females as well as males? It is not more reasonable to deny or to recognize the one than the other; and supposing there were Gods and Goddesses, why should they not beget children in the ordinary way? There would be certainly nothing ridiculous or absurd in this doctrine, if it were true that their Gods existed. But in the doctrine of our Christ-worshipers there is something absolutely ridiculous and absurd; for besides claiming that one God forms Three, and that these Three form but One, they pretend that this Triple and Unique God has neither body, form, nor face; that the First person of this Triple and Unique God, whom they call the Father, begot of Himself a Second person, which they call the Son, and which is the same as His Father, being, like Him, without body, form, or face. If this is true, why is it that the First one is called Father rather than mother, or the Second called Son rather than daughter? For if the First one is really father instead of mother, and if the Second is son instead of daughter, there must be something in both of these two persons which causes the one to be father rather than mother, and the other to be son rather than daughter. Now who can assert that they are males and not females? But how should they be rather males than females, as they have neither body, form, nor face? That is not an imaginable thing, and destroys itself. No matter, they claim chat these two Persons, without body, form, or face, and, consequently, without difference of sex, are nevertheless Father and Son, and that they produced by their mutual love a third person, whom they called the Holy Ghost, who has, like the other two, no body, no form, and no face. What abominable nonsense!
As our Christ-worshipers limit the power of God the Father to begetting but one Son, why do they not desire that this Second person, and the Third, should have the same power to beget a Son like themselves? If this power to beget a son is perfection in the First person, it is, then, a perfection and a power which does not exist in the Second and in the Third person. Thus these two Persons, lacking a perfection and a power which is found in the First one, they are consequently not equal with Him. If, on the contrary, they say that this power to beget a son is no perfection, they should not attribute it, then, to the First person any more than to the other two; for we should attribute perfections only to an absolutely perfect being. Besides, they would not dare to say that the power to beget a Divine person is not a perfection; and if they claim that this First person could have begotten several sons and daughters, but that He desired but this only Son, and that the two other persons did not desire to beget any others, we could ask them, firstly, from whence they know this, for we do not see in their pretended Holy Scriptures that any One of these Divine personages reveals any such assertions; how, then, can our Christ-worshipers know anything about it? They speak but according to their ideas and to their hollow imaginations. Secondly, we could not avoid saying, that if these pretended Divine personages had the power of begetting several children, and did not wish to make use of it, the consequence would be that this Divine power was ineffectual. It would be entirely without effect in the Third person, who did not beget or produce any, and would be almost without effect in the two others, because they limited it. Then this power of begetting or producing an unlimited number of children would remain idle and useless; it would be inconsistent to suppose this of Divine Personages, One of whom had already produced a Son.
Our Christ-worshipers blame and condemn the Pagans because they attribute Divinity to mortal men, and worship them as Gods after their death; they are right in doing this. But these Pagans did only what our Christ-worshipers still do in attributing Divinity to their Christ; doing which, they condemn themselves also, because they are in the same error as these Pagans, in that they worship a man who was mortal, and so very mortal that He died shamefully upon a cross.