All this is done to impair the intellect, and accounts, in part, for the extreme obstinacy and prejudice of Jesus's followers. Somebody must have sworn, Mr. Attorney General, that you should never be an Attorney-General; for this exercise of your office herein described, is not compatible with much scrupulosity. As for its being said that the child afterwards takes the oath upon itself, oaths cannot be so transferred; therefore that plea is futile. No description of people, besides Jesus's followers, ever admitted the execrable principle of the transfer of an oath. In fact, if the godfathers had sworn that the boy should turn out a pickle, after all the rest of priestly management, they would have stood a pretty good chance of having nothing fall upon their conscience from that quarter. Jesus's priests are apt to injure the intellect of young people by telling them, that if they do not believe Jesus's religion they will be damned to eternal punishments. Now as in all natural belief, when the intellect is sound and healthy, the mind is always passive in the act of giving its assent to any proposition, this trick of Jesus's priests disturbs, impairs, and disorders the understanding; and by this means also people are rendered incapable, throughout life, to reason and inquire with penetration, discernment, and impartiality on religious subjects. The natural belief of a sound mind is not determined by the will. If men could, in all cases, believe whatever they pleased, their minds would be a complete chaos; yet have Jesus's priests, in all ages since the days of the founder of their religion, offered this violence to the human intellect. Thus, I think, that I have shewn you, Mr. Attorney-General, that the young and inexperienced are not more in danger of imbibing absurd notions and depraved principles from the Deists than from Jesus's priests. I now proceed to examine a supposed assertion, rife enough among those of your side of the question that "infidelity and immorality are necessarily connected." That the Deists and other unbelievers are more immoral than Jesus's followers, is more than can be proved. And when we consider that Jesus's religion is always taken up as a prejudice, and is maintained in the world by violence, and by a pertinacious determination of Jesus's adherents to hear the reasons only on one side of the question, that side which is favourable to his pretensions, a procedure which is utterly repugnant to the love of truth, the most probable conjecture is, that the unbelievers should be, upon the whole, the more moral party. But it must be allowed to be a difficult matter to determine such a question as that to any thing like certainty. Until it be determined, however, you have no right to make the assertion alluded to.