concerning the infancy of
Jesus;--was I sinful in feeling that I had no longer any guarantee
against _other_ possible error in these writers? or ought I to have
persisted in obtruding on the two evangelists on infallibility of
which Luke shows himself unconscious, which Matthew nowhere claims,
and which I had demonstrative proof that they did not both possess? A
thorough-going Bibliolater will have to impeach me as a sinner on this
count.

After Luke and Matthew stood before me as human writers, liable to and
convicted of human error, was there any reason why I should look on
Mark as more sacred? And having perceived all three to participate in
the common superstition, derived from Babylon and the East, traceable
in history to its human source, existing still in Turkey and
Abyssinia,--the superstition which mistakes mania, epilepsy, and other
forms of disease, for possession by devils;--should I have shown love
of truth, or obstinacy in error, had I refused to judge freely of
these three writers, as of any others who tell similar marvels? or
was it my duty to resolve, at any rate and against evidence, to acquit
them of the charge of superstition and misrepresentation?

I will not trouble the reader with any further queries. If he has
justified me in his conscience thus far, he will justify my proceeding
to abandon myself to the results of inquiry. He will feel, that the
Will cannot, may not, dare not dictate, whereto the inquiries of the
Understanding shall lead; and that to allege that it _ought_, is
to plant the root of Insincerity, Falsehood, Bigotry, Cruelty, and
universal Rottenness of Soul.

The vice of Bigotry has been so indiscriminately imputed to the
religious, that they seem apt to forget that it is a real sin;--a sin
which in Christendom has been and is of all sins most fruitful, most
poisonous: nay, grief of griefs! it infects many of the purest and
most lovely hearts, which want strength of understanding, or are
entangled by a sham theology, with its false facts and fraudulent
canons. But upon all who mourn for the miseries which Bigotry has
perpetrated from the day when Christians first learned to curse; upon
all who groan over the persecutions and wars stirred up by Romanism;
upon all who blush at the overbearing conduct of Protestants in their
successive moments of brief authority,--a sacred duty rests in this
nineteenth century of protesting against Bigotry, not from a love of
ease, but from a spir