tute of meaning as the tolling of a bell at the funeral; it
explains nothing to the understanding, it illustrates nothing to the
imagination, but leaves the reader to find any meaning if he can. "All
flesh," says he, "is not the same flesh. There is one flesh of men,
another of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." And what
then? nothing. A cook could have said as much. "There are also," says
he, "bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial; the glory of the celestial
is one and the glory of the terrestrial is the other." And what then?
nothing. And what is the difference? nothing that he has told. "There
is," says he, "one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and
another glory of the stars." And what then? nothing; except that he says
that one star differeth from another star in glory, instead of distance;
and he might as well have told us that the moon did not shine so bright
as the sun. All this is nothing better than the jargon of a conjuror,
who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous
people who come to have their fortune told. Priests and conjurors are of
the same trade.

Sometimes Paul affects to be a naturalist, and to prove his system of
resurrection from the principles of vegetation. "Thou fool" says he,
"that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die." To which one
might reply in his own language, and say, Thou fool, Paul, that which
thou sowest is not quickened except it die not; for the grain that dies
in the ground never does, nor can vegetate. It is only the living grains
that produce the next crop. But the metaphor, in any point of view, is
no simile. It is succession, and [not] resurrection.

The progress of an animal from one state of being to another, as from a
worm to a butterfly, applies to the case; but this of a grain does not,
and shows Paul to have been what he says of others, a fool.

Whether the fourteen epistles ascribed to Paul were written by him
or not, is a matter of indifference; they are either argumentative or
dogmatical; and as the argument is defective, and the dogmatical part is
merely presumptive, it signifies not who wrote them. And the same may
be said for the remaining parts of the Testament. It is not upon the
Epistles, but upon what is called the Gospel, contained in the four
books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and upon the pretended
prophecies, that the theory of the church, calling itself the Christian
Churc