ity of national
popes grew out of the downfall of the Pope of Christendom.

The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice
of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy. When men from custom or
fashion, or any worldly motive profess or pretend to believe what they
do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the
helm of their morality, and, being no longer honest in their own minds,
they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others. It is from the
influence of this vice, hypocrisy, that we see so many church and
meeting-going professors and pretenders to religion so full of tricks
and deceit in their dealings, and so loose in the performance of their
engagements that they are not to be trusted further than the laws of the
country will bind them. Morality has no hold on their minds, no
restraint on their actions.

One set of preachers make salvation to consist in believing. They tell
their congregations that if they believe in Christ their sins shall be
forgiven. This, in the first place, is an encouragement to sin; in the
next place, the doctrine these men preach cannot be true.

Another set of preachers tell their congregations that God predestined
and selected from all eternity a certain number to be saved, and a
certain number to be damned eternally. If this were true, the day of
judgment is past; their preaching is in vain, and they had better work
at some useful calling for their livelihood.

Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant
disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and
an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practised was of the
most benevolent kind, and, though similar systems of morality had been
preached by Confucius and by some of the Greek philosophers many years
before, by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has
not been exceeded by any.

_III.--THE BIBLE_

If we permit ourselves to conceive right ideas of things, we must
necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the
utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident
whatever, in that which we would honour with the name of God; and
therefore the word of God cannot exist in any written or human language.

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is
subject, the want of an universal language which renders translation
necessary, the errors to w