A Letter to Sir Samuel Shepherd, Knt., His Majesty's Attorney General: Upon the Subject of His Prosecutions of Richard Carlile, for Publishing Paine's Age of ReasonAnonymous
Philosophy
A Letter to Sir Samuel Shepherd, Knt., His Majesty's Attorney General: Upon the Subject of His Prosecutions of Richard Carlile, for Publishing Paine's Age of Reason
Anonymous
Blasphemy -- Great Britain; Paine, Thomas, 1737-1809. Age of reason; Shepherd, Samuel, Sir, 1760-1840; Trials (Blasphemy) -- Great Britain
I know that the moderns being ashamed of it, wish to abrogate it, and to
throw it off from themselves upon the early heretics. But we shall not
allow you to escape that way. If you advance any principle, you must
admit all the consequences which necessarily flow from it; and we will
not suffer your evasions in this particular. When pressed hard, you
followers of Jesus want to pass off the Devil upon us for a mere angel,
and tell us of his war in Heaven, and that he was cast out upon the
earth. This will not do, we shall not allow you this subterfuge, for in
other places your received canon of Scripture maintains the ubiquity of
the Devil; this extravagant notion with which we charge you, we shall
bring home to you. In 2 Cor. chap. iv. ver. 4, you have, "In whom
the God of this world hath blinded the eyes of them that believe not."
implying, that the Devil, i. e. the God of this world, is present in all
unbelievers. This is still further confirmed by 1 John chap. v. ver. 19,
"The whole world lieth in the wicked one," i.e. the Devil. I know that
it is translated, "lieth in wickedness." But this is a sneaking
evasion of Jesus's followers, who are ashamed of the notion of the two
principles. That is an extraordinary vicious translation of the passage.
A man who knows the least of Greek at all must be sensible that the
passage will only admit of the rendering which I have here, and others
have before me, given to it. The Devil is said by Jesus's followers
to pervade the whole unbelieving world. If you complain, Mr.
Attorney-General, that this is pressing a lawyer too far on a
theological question, I shall lay the blame on you, and those who have
held your office, for starting this particular subject; and whenever an
Attorney-General advances a position he takes the risks attending it.
The story of the Devil's fall from Heaven in Revelations, chap. xii. may
establish and show an inconsistency in Jesus's religion, but it does
not get you nor his followers clear of the silly notion of the two
principles, when your canon of Scripture has once advanced what clearly
implies that groundless notion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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