In concluding this chapter, let us look back to those times of ignorance and superstition. Let us place ourselves by the misortunate victims who were put to torture and death for a crime they could not commit. Could they, in their extreme pain, but have had a hope that a day would arrive when a band of master spirits would arise on the shores of the Atlantic, who, by reason and the moral fitness of things, would upset and prostrate the systems under which they so severely suffered-—could the poor, suffering victim, with his broken heart and fractured limbs, have had assurance, when his tortured mind was about to quit its lacerated boundary, that a time would soon surely come when the truth of the Bible and the existence of a Devil would cease to be made the instruments of unspeakable misery and torment, it would have been a cheerful ray of comfort amid the devouring flame. The time _has_ at length arrived, and we ought to improve it. Let us, then, with untiring perseverance and moral courage, give the death-blow to the Divinity of the Old and New Testaments, and thereby forever obliterate, not only the incentives to, but also the remembrance of all religious persecutions. CHAPTER VIII. AS this work is about to be concluded, it will be of importance to the reader that a comprehensive view be taken of the mission of Christ to the Jewish nation. In doing which, an opportunity will be given to such of my readers as may hitherto have been afraid to doubt the truth of the Divine authority of the Bible, to see, at one glance, its absurdity. In the four Gospels, which contain the sayings and doings of Jesus during his ministry among the Jews, and also in the Epistles of the Apostles, it is uniformly declared and enforced, that the main purpose of Christ’s (_the anointed of God_) coming into the world was, to die. And this death was required by the Father as an atonement for the sins of mankind, that whosoever believed in and obeyed him, their pardon should be sure, not for any thing which they had done as it related to justice, chastity, or humanity, but for the ransom paid for their sins by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. An apostle, in speaking on this subject, says—“_He (Christ) being delivered by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have, by wicked hands, crucified and slain._” This decree, then, was absolute, and every movement then made by Jesus, and also his preaching and conversation with the Jews, was so arranged, that die he must, to save a lost and ruined world. This, according to the Scriptures, was the divine arrangement between the Father and the Son. This doctrine is taught in the New Testament. And in such a lost condition were the human race, that Jesus _freely gave himself as a ransom to be completed in due time_. If the New Testament does not teach this, it is not possible to know what it does teach. To die, then, as a sacrifice for sin, included the sum and substance of the Gospel, or good news.