nate it at all!
For I am asked to believe that man, such as I know him through all
history, such as he appears in so many forms of religion which have been
his undoubted and most worthy fabrication, did, whether fraudulently or
not, whether designedly or unconsciously, frame a religion which is in
striking contrast with all his ordinary handiwork of this sort! This
religion enjoins the austerest morality; human religions generally
enjoin a very lax one:--this demands the most refined purity, even of
the thoughts and desires; other religions usually attach to external
and ceremonial observances greater weight than to morality itself;--this
is singularly simple in its rites; they for the most part consist of
little else;--this exhibits a singular silence and abstinence in relation
to the future and invisible; they amply indulge the imagination and
fancy, and are full of delineations calculated to gratify man's most
natural curiosity;--this takes under its special patronage those
virtues which man is least likely to love or cultivate, and which men
in general regard as pusillanimous infirmities, if not vices; they
patronize the must energetic passions,--the passions which made the
demigods and heroes of antiquity. I am not saying which is the belief
in these respects; I am only saying that human nature appears more
true to itself in the last. And so notorious is all this, that the
corruptions of Christianity, as years rolled on, have ever been to
assimilate it to the other religions of the earth; to abate its
spirituality; to relax its austere code of morals; to commute its proper
claims for external observances; to encumber its ritual with an
infinity of ceremonies; and, above all, to uncover the future and
invisible, on which it left a veil, and add a purgatory into the
bargain! Thus, whether contrasted with other religions or with its
corrupted self, Christianity does not seem a religion which human
nature would be pleased to invent.

Again, is it like the other religious products of human nature, in
daring to aspire to universal dominion, and that too founded on moral
power alone? Never, till Christianity appeared, had such an imagination
ever entered the mind of man! Other religions were national affairs;
their gods never dreamed of such an enterprise as that of subduing all
nations. They were naturally contented with the country that gave them
birth, and the homage of the race that worshipped them. They were, when
n