Though a miracle, or pseudo violation of Nature's laws, be the most certain method of exciting the admiration of the vulgar, it is contrary to reason that anything of the kind should be true; but it is by no means contrary to the testimony of experience, that impostors might have lived two or three thousand years ago, and propagated falsehood. This conclusion is fully corroborated by all modern experience, in which we find that deception and falsehood form the medium through which knavery rules simple ignorance; and to such a degree do these ingredients pervade the whole of society, that they in a great measure constitute the religious and moral element in which man lives at the present day; and so besotted has the breathing of this atmosphere of error and delusion rendered him, that the more outrageous a miracle, or other theological fable, is against rational light and common sense, the more greedily has it ever been received by the unthinking and priest-ridden million, who delight in the marvellous and the incredible—believing everything, and examining nothing:—hence the success of the ludicrous medley that makes up our Christian Polytheism. Admitting, for a moment, the possibility of such physical prodigies being true, what do we gain by them,—do they either confer additional authority on moral truth, or prove it false? Can they make right wrong, or wrong right? It is a melancholy fallacy to attribute to them any such power or influence, and implies a lamentably low estimate of the dignity and greatness of moral truth. All that we gain by pretended violations of Nature's laws, is dogmatism, bigotry, spiritual fear, intolerance, and superstition; together with all the other curses which come in the train of religion, when backed by authority.
A modern philosopher has given the quietus to miracles in the following death-blow:—"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined; and, therefore, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish" This argument is absolutely invincible. The boundless plenum of Nature—the revolution of hundreds of millions of globes round a million of suns, may be called miraculous, but in all this, Nature, or the material universe in motion,* is still invariable, and acting by self-existing qualities or properties, which are therefore inviolable and immutable. If it is asked, "cannot a law that is made by the Supreme Power be suspended by its author?" we reply, that the innate or essential properties of matter, being principles, could have no author—no antecedent—no beginning:—they are co-eternal as matter and motion, or the immutable Power which we call Nature. This hypothesis is plain, simple, easy, and rational: but the theory of your personified, localised artificer, is the reverse of all this; for he himself would stand a thousand times more in need of an artificer or author than does the material universe. We know that matter exists:**—there can be only one infinite—ergo, matter must be that infinite.
* Lalande says that at the age of nineteen, he thought the
heavens proved a personified God (the anthropomorphism of
the Jews). but now, says he, I see in them nothing but
matter and motion. He said also that Materialism was beyond
the vulgar, to whom it would be neither agreeable nor
useful.
** Begging my Lord of Cloyne's pardon.
In their secret doctrines, the philosophers and priests of antiquity admitted no miraculous powers; and when they said that a certain thing was done by a god, or "the gods," they were merely using words suited to the capacity of the multitude, while the mystic or esoteric meaning was, that the thing arose from the concatenation of natural causes and effects, or the eternal order of necessity; and not, as the ignorant imagine, that the laws of nature were suspended by the interference of some personified god. With the above two classes of the initiated, all their mysteries were rooted in, and had constant allusion to zodiacal objects, and the physical powers of Nature; which objects and powers were, by the prosopopoeia, converted into abstract existences, called gods and goddesses. This was done by all the priests of antiquity, as their varied schemes of superstition gained footing so as to foster ignorance and mental blindness amongst their dupes; and herein they were imitated by their successors, the Christians, who likewise claimed a power in their gods, to suspend or make infractions in the unalterable course of Nature. Judaism was a barbarous version of some of the beautiful and lively fables of the Pagans; and the present superstition of Europe is a rude polytheistical caricature of the whole.
The miracle-working Deity of the Jews appears to have been of Egyptian extraction; and had his prototype in the god Jahouh, who held a high rank in the polytheism of the Thebans. This Jahouh was a personification of that power which giveth forms to matter (viz., motion), and organises animal and vegetable life, alias soul of the world. Moses, who is said to have been a priest of Isis, or Nature, the secret of whose mysteries was the unity of the supreme Power,* seems to have been wishful of preserving that unity in the Deity he had borrowed of the Thebans, as is stated by Strabo, in his Geography,** who informs us that Moses taught his followers to worship the god Jahouh without representing it by emblem.
* Moses borrowed this of the Egyptians. Cudworth, in his
Intellectual System, and Hyde, in his treatise on the
religion of the Persians, acknowledge that the unity of God
was the foundation of the religion of the Egyptians,
Chaldeans, and Persians.
** Strabo's account is corroborated by his contemporary,
Diodorus Siculus, and also by Plutarch. Diodorus's account
of Moses not being-agreeable to the Church, has been
suppressed.—See Translation of the Abbé Terrasson.
There can be no doubt as to the identity of this name and that of Jehovah. That Moses adopted this deity, and that the name when first introduced, was new to the Jews, appears from Exod. vi., 3. Neither Philo nor Josephus deny that the Jews borrowed circumcision from the Egyptians; why, then, might they not borrow a god also?*
As every nation had its cosmogony to account for the origin of things, the Jews must have theirs likewise; so the scribes, who compiled their legends, imitated very closely the Zoroastrian fable, according to which the gods made the world in six gahanbars, or periods; of which the story in Genesis, even to the detail of work done in each day, is a mere copy; but the Jewish compiler mistook the matter so far as to put days in place of periods, or gahanbars; which word was significant of the six summer months, when the sun, by his genial and all-powerful impulse, makes a fresh creation every year. The learned have farther declared that, in the Talmuds, the expression in the first verse of Genesis is in the plural, viz. "the Elohim" (the gods) placed in order the heavens and the earth that in the same verse, the word "barah," which signifies to arrange, to place in order, has been mistranslated "created" In like manner the words "ruh elohim," in the second verse, have been falsely rendered "spirit of God," though their true meaning is, the wind of the gods.***
* Dr. Geddes, however, is of opinion that Moses learnt the
name of Jehovah in Midian, while he resided with his father-
in-law.
** The Indians had their Vedas and Pouranas; the Egyptians,
the five books of Hermes; the Persians, the cosmogony of
Zoroaster; the Greeks, that of Hesiod; the Phoenicians, that
of Sanchoniatho. The Phoenician, though written in the style
of history, is made up of personifications of time, the sun,
the stars, earth, seasons, etc.
*** In St. John's Gospel iii, 5 and 6, the Greek word pneuma
(air or wind), is translated spirit; and in the 8th verse it
is translated, "wind" and "spirit" both. In Luke i, 85, is
not this word pneuma translated "Ghost"?
Thus, in the very first two verses of this pretended "word of God," we have no less than three instances of false translation. The learned Dr. Parkhurst has translated and shown that this word elohim or gods means the seven planetary bodies, as known to the ancients. He calls them the disposers of the affairs of men; an influence still attributed to them by the astronomical quacks called astrologers. These seven planets were the cabiri of the Egyptians and Phoenicians; of which Baal, "the Lord," was the chief, being added as the eighth. Baal (the Sun) was also one of the names of the Jewish god, Jehovah. See Hosea ii., 16. That the astro-theology of the eastern nations had exclusive allusion to physical objects—the elements, seasons, etc., was well known to all the learned Jews. Maimonides says: "We must not, like the vulgar, understand literally what is written in the book of the creation (Genesis); otherwise our men of old would not have so earnestly recommended to conceal its meaning, and refrain from raising the allegorical veil which covereth the truth under it. Understood literally, this work presenteth us with ideas of the deity which are most ridiculously absurd. The true meaning of the six days' work ought never to be divulged" The treatises of Philo Judæus have hardly any other object than the allegorical explanation of the Jewish scripture. The great Origen himself treated all these stories as astronomical emblems. "What man of sense," says he, "can persuade himself that there was a first, a second, and a third day, and that each of those days had a night, when there was yet neither sun,* moon, nor stars!!!"