ng God's religion degenerated into sordid
avarice and ambition. Every church became a theater, where orators,
instead of church teachers harangued, caring not to instruct the people,
but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn,
and to preach only novelties and paradoxes, such as would tickle the
ears of their congregation. This state of things necessarily stirred up
an amount of controversy, envy, and hatred, which no lapse of time could
appease; so that we can scarcely wonder that of the old religion nothing
survives but its outward forms (even these, in the mouth of the
multitude, seem rather adulation than adoration of the Deity), and that
faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices--aye,
prejudices too, which degrade man from rational being to beast, which
completely stifle the power of judgment between true and false, which
seem, in fact, carefully fostered for the purpose of extinguishing the
last spark of reason! Piety, great God! and religion are become a tissue
of ridiculous mysteries; men, who flatly despise reason, who reject and
turn away from understanding as naturally corrupt, these, I say, these
of all men, are thought, Oh lie most horrible! to possess light from on
High. Verily, if they had but one spark of light from on High, they
would not insolently rave, but would learn to worship God more wisely,
and would be as marked among their fellows for mercy as they now are for
malice; if they were concerned for their opponents' souls, instead of
for their own reputations, they would no longer fiercely persecute, but
rather be filled with pity and compassion.

Furthermore, if any Divine light were in them, it would appear from
their doctrine. I grant that they are never tired of professing their
wonder at the profound mysteries of Holy Writ; still I cannot discover
that they teach anything but speculation of Platonists and
Aristotelians, to which (in order to save their credit of Christianity)
they have made Holy Writ conform; not content to rave with the Greeks
themselves, they want to make the prophets rave also; showing
conclusively, that never even in sleep have they caught a glimpse of
Scripture's Divine nature. The very vehemence of their admiration for
the mysteries plainly attests, that their belief in the Bible is a
formal assent rather than a living faith: and the fact is made still
more apparent by their laying down beforehand, as a foundation for the
stu