and true religion. We do not know who are the writers of most
of the Scriptural books. Their records are at variance with science. The
account of Jehovah's determination that the carcasses of Israel should
fall in the wilderness because of disobedience, is a "savage story of
some oriental who attributed a blood-thirsty character to his God, and
made a deity in his own image, and it is a striking remnant of barbarism
that has passed away, not destitute of dramatic interest; not without
its melancholy moral."[275]

The prophets are claimed to have written nothing in general above the
reach of human faculties. The whole of the Old Testament is only a
phantom of superstition to scare us in our sleep.[276] The statements of
the evangelists have a very low degree of historical credibility.
Miracles are not impossible, because God is omnipotent; but our main
difficulty is, that we cannot believe the accounts descriptive of them.
The testimony and not the miracle is at fault. Inspiration is not at all
peculiar to the Scriptures. All nations have had their inspiration; this
is a natural result of the perfection of God, for he does not change;
and the laws of mind are like himself, unchangeable. Inspiration, being
similar to vision, must be everywhere the same thing in kind however
much it differs in degree. The quantity of our inspiration depends upon
the use we make of our faculties. He who has the most wisdom, goodness,
religion, and truth is the most inspired. This inspiration reveals
itself in various forms, modified by country, character, education,
peculiarity. Minos and Moses were inspired to make laws; David, Pindar,
Plato, John the Baptist, Gerson, Luther, Boehme, Fenelon, and Fox were
all inspired men. The sacraments of the Church were never designed to be
permanent. In illustration of them, Parker sacrilegiously quotes,

"Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw;
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite."

The Christian Church is held to be a purely human mechanism, and the
great defect of Protestantism is its limit of the power of private
inspiration. God still inspires men as much as ever, and is immanent in
spirit as in space. This doctrine, which is Spiritualism, "relies on no
church, tradition, or Scripture, as the last grand and infallible rule;
it counts these things teachers, if they teach, not maste