d with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome
was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the
idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes
of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to
abolish the amphibious fraud.

CHAPTER III - CONCERNING THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST, AND HIS HISTORY.

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 practiced 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.

Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or
anything else. Not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his
writing. The history of him is altogether the work of other people; and
as to the account given of his resurrection and ascension, it was the
necessary counterpart to the story of his birth. His historians, having
brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to
take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story
must have fallen to the ground.

The wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds
everything that went before it. The first part, that of the miraculous
conception, was not a thing that admitted of publicity; and therefore
the tellers of this part of the story had this advantage, that though
they might not be credited, they could not be detected. They could not
be expected to prove it, because it was not one of those things that
admitted of proof, and it was impossible that the person of whom it was
told could prove it himself.

But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension
through the air, is a thing very different, as to the evidence it admits
of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection
and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public
and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or
the sun at noon day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody
is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it
should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of
this last r