"2nd. That the people called Jews, or Israelites, neither formed colony nor nation in that part of the earth which is now called Judea, or Holy Land, before the time of Alexander of Macedon; consequently all that is said of their dwelling in and going out of Egypt, their sojourn in the Wilderness, their warfare with the Canaanites and Philistines, their occupation of that country, their subsequent conquest, captivity, and restoration, is entirely fiction or allegory. "I read it as political and moral instruction veiled in allegory \ and as it is to be desired, that, in the removal of a system, all its defects be made apparent, so it becomes a desideratum, that we account for the origin of the sects named Jews and Christians. "This may be done in two ways---one, that they were public philosophical sects; the other, that they were degrees of order in the ancient mysteries. "The moral of the allegory belonging to each is throughout the same, and is an encouragement to the resistance and overthrow of the tyranny of man, when it appears in the open authority of a King, or in the covert authority of a Priest; and the preparing of a people to do this, and the doing it, is precisely what is meant by human salvation,--which is a sure and certain salvation from earthly evils. "The absence of a proof of personal identity in the characters sketched in the Old and New Testament, is the presence of proof (if utility of any kind there be in the form of the allegory), that the persons mentioned are like what all the gods and goddesses of ancient religion were--personifications of principles, either physical or moral, or both. "In so receiving the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, I find them pregnant with the most important political and moral instruction. In receiving them according to the literal or historical reading, I find difficulties insuperable, and such as justify all that Thomas Paine or any other straightforward critic has advanced on the subject, while the moral and the allegory were concealed from their view. "The point at which this personification of principles begins, is the point at which superstition begins; for though knowledge may justify the poetic licence taken with language, ignorance mistakes and evil design misrepresents, until the personification is extensively dwelt on as a reality. "Here I trace the fundamental errors of the present doctrine and discipline of the Established Church; the errors upon which dissent has progressed, upon which an outcry of infidelity has been raised, but upon which the Church could not defend itself and maintain its position.