And such are men and gods compared to Jove.”

1986. But when a book is made the word of God, which patronizes men as belonging to a chosen seed who are guilty of cruelty, robbery, fraud, massacre in cold blood, it becomes a more active and mischievous idol than any dumb beast, image, or statue can be. An idolater worships a silent idol as the representative of God. The idol cannot say, “I am a jealous God: I wax hot in my wrath.”

1987. Mr. Mahan urges, that the sufferings undergone by martyrs to Christianity is evidence of its truth, whereas, it seems to me that it only proves the conviction of the parties, which, if displayed by a dervise or a fakir, would be called bigotry. But if suffering in a cause is evidence in its favour, there have been sufferers on the other side, as well as on that which this author has undertaken to uphold. It is but fair, if those who suffer for one side should have their suffering held up as proof of their conscientiousness, the same conscientiousness should be conceded to those who have suffered for the other. The author of the pages I am about to quote, the Rev. Robert Taylor, was, for want of a better answer to his publication, condemned to Oakam Jail, in England, for one year. It was there he wrote his Diagesis, copies of which may be had of Mr. Curtis, No. 34 Arch street, as well as other books which may assist readers to form an opinion for themselves. I shall quote some pages from this work, which, being studied after reading Mahan’s arrogant allegations, will make good the old saying, that “One story is good until another is told.”

1988. “The ordinary notion, that the four gospels were written by the persons whose names they bear, and that they have descended to us from original autographs of Matthew and John, immediate disciples, and of Mark and Luke, contemporaries and companions, of Christ, in like manner as the writings of still more early poets and historians have descended to us from the pens of the authors to whom they are attributed, is altogether untenable. It has been entirely surrendered by the most able and ingenuous Christian writers, and will no longer be maintained by any but those whose zeal outruns their knowledge, and whose recklessness and temerity of assertion can serve only to dishonour and betray the cause they so injudiciously seek to defend.

1989. “The surrender of a position which the world has for ages been led to consider impregnable, by the admission of all that the early objection of the learned Christian Bishop, Faustus the Manichean, implied, when he pressed Augustine with that bold challenge which Augustine was not able to answer, that,[47] ‘It was certain that the New Testament was not written by Christ himself, nor by his apostles, but a long while after them, by some unknown persons, who, lest they should not be credited when they wrote of affairs they were little acquainted with, affixed to their works the names of apostles, or of such as were supposed to have been their companions, asserting that what they had written themselves was written ACCORDING TO those persons to whom they ascribed it.’

1990. “This admission has not been held to be fatal to the claims of divine revelation, nor was it held to be so even by the learned Father himself who so strenuously insisted on it, since he declares his own unshaken faith in Christ’s mystical crucifixion, notwithstanding.

1991. “Adroitly handled as the passage has been by the ingenuity of theologians, it has been made rather to subserve the cause of the evidences of the Christian religion than to injure it. Since, though it be admitted that the Christian world has ‘all along been under a delusion’ in this respect, and has held these writings to be of higher authority than they really are; yet the writings themselves and their authors are innocent of having contributed to that delusion, and never bore on them, nor in them, any challenge to so high authority as the mistaken piety of Christians has ascribed to them, but did all along profess no more than to have been written, as Faustus testifies, not BY, but ACCORDING to, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; and by persons of whom indeed it is not known who or what they were, nor was it of any consequence that it should be, after the general acquiescence of the church had established the sufficient correctness of the compilations they had made.

1992. “And here the longo post tempore (the great while after) is a favourable presumption of the sufficient opportunity that all persons[48] had, of knowing and being satisfied that the gospels which the church received were indeed all that they purported to be; that is, faithful narrations of the life and doctrines of Christ according to what could be collected from the verbal accounts which his apostles had given, or by tradition been supposed to have given, and, as such, ‘worthy of all acceptation.’

1993. “The objection of Faustus becomes from its own nature the most indubitable and inexceptionable evidence, carrying us up to the very early age, the fourth century, in which he wrote, with a demonstration that the gospels were then universally known and received under the precise designation, and none other, than that with which they have come down to us, even as the gospels, respectively, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

1994. “Of course there can be no occasion to pursue the inquiry into the authenticity of the Christian Scriptures lower down than the fourth century.