enormous. Right or wrong, eminent Christian scholars here
proclaim results in complete antagonism to the ideas usually accepted as
forming the true basis of the Christian faith. They amount, in fact, to
a complete and unconditional surrender of the whole dogmatic framework
which has hitherto been held as divinely revealed, and therefore
divinely true.

Thomas Paine was a Deist. As such he believed that nature may be
compared with a clock and God with its maker. As the clock maker, under
normal conditions, has but little to do with his handiwork, so it has
been with the Creator and his universe. The theists of every name
(Christian, Jew, Mohammedan and Buddhist), not to speak of others,
believe that the universe, with all which therein is, lives, moves and
has its being as the result of the willings of their respective gods.

Though I have my god, indeed two gods, one god in the world of my
physical existence--a trinity: matter, force and motion, and another god
in the world of my moral existence--a trinity: fact, truth and life, yet
if the rejection of both deism and theism is atheism, I am an atheist.

But assuming for the sake of argument that there is a conscious personal
being who has had and is having something to do with making things what
they are, I set my seal to this arraignment:

Of all the systems of religion that were ever invented, there is
none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more
repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this
thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to
convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart
torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of
power, it serves the purpose of despotism and as a means of wealth,
the avarice of priests; but for the good of mankind it leads to
nothing here or hereafter.

--Thomas Paine.

William Rathbone Greg in his Creed of Christendom says that much of the
Old Testament which Christian divines, in their ignorance of Jewish
lore, have insisted on receiving and interpreting literally, the
informed Rabbis never dreamed of regarding as anything but allegorical.
The literalists they called fools.

Origen and Augustine, the two greatest men which Christianity has
produced, would agree with Greg in this. We have already quoted the
motto of this section from Origen, and we will now quote this from
August