Throughout this section of his book of revelations, Barnum was treading dangerous ground too recklessly for the good of his own faith. The glorious truths which some millions believed were revealed in other religions besides Christianity were to Barnum humbugs similar in nature to the great heathen god on whom some travelers had held a _post-mortem_ examination. As Barnum told the story in his book these Christians stole into the innermost sacred rooms of the heathen temple, where the awful god of a savage tribe reposed. They found the god wrapped in numerous cloths, and sacrilegiously they unwound the coverings until they had removed more than an hundred cloths. The god grew smaller and smaller, until at last, after all the coverings were removed, the fierce, great heathen god proved to be nothing but a cracked soda-water bottle. Barnum would be shocked at the investigations that, in the manner of the inquiring travelers, some liberal thinkers have made into the miracle of the Resurrection, but it would have been well for him, before denouncing an onion because it was nothing but peels, to be certain that potatoes grew in his own garden. Barnum was sincerely pious and devoutly religious, and it is significant of the narrow scope of his mind that he could stop completely and bow faithfully before his own brand of worship, while he was virulent in his attacks on any forms of religious devotion whose adherents were not patrons of the American Museum in large numbers. He even went further than this personally in his dogmatism: he narrowed the truth down to Universalism, which he accepted as his own faith early in life, and which many equally devout Christians thought one of the most flagrant forms of Christian humbug. He did not attack in _The Humbugs of the World_ other Christian sects or Judaism, for that would have been too dangerous for the welfare of the Museum; he took out his contempt upon the so-called heathen religions, with their oracles, sibyls and auguries. But even in these he saw some comfort, for they were a sign to him “how universally and naturally, and humbly and helplessly too, poor human nature longs to see into the future, and longs for help and guidance from some power higher than itself.” “Thus considered,” Barnum believed, “these shallow humbugs teach a useful lesson, for they constitute a strong proof of man’s inborn natural recognition of some God, of some obligation to a higher power, of some disembodied existence; and so they show a natural human want of exactly what the Christian revelation supplies and constitute a powerful evidence for Christianity.”