It is but one part of this great subject, that the apostles absolutely command a slave to give obedience to his master in nil things, "as to the Lord." It is in vain to deny, that _the most grasping of slave-owners asks nothing more of abolitionists than that they would all adopt Paul's creed_; viz., acknowledge the full authority of owners of slaves, tell them that they are responsible to God alone, and charge them to use their power righteously and mercifully. 3. LASTLY: it is a lamentable fact, that not only do superstitions about Witches, Ghosts, Devils, and Diabolical Miracles derive a strong support from the Bible, (and in fact have been exploded by nothing but the advance of physical philosophy,)--but what is far worse, the Bible alone has nowhere sufficed to establish an enlightened religious toleration. This is at first seemingly unintelligible: for the apostles certainly would have been intensely shocked at the thought of punishing men, in body, purse, or station, for not being Christians or not being orthodox. Nevertheless, not only does the Old Testament justify bloody persecution, but the New teaches[18] that God will visit men with fiery vengeance _for holding an erroneous creed_;--that vengeance indeed is his, not ours; but that still the punishment is deserved. It would appear, that wherever this doctrine is held, possession of power for two or three generations inevitably converts men into persecutors; and in so far, we must lay the horrible desolations which Europe has suffered from bigotry, at the doors, not indeed of the Christian apostles themselves, but of that Bibliolatry which has converted their earliest records into a perfect and eternal law. IV. "Prophecy" is generally regarded as a leading evidence of the divine origin of Christianity. But this also had proved itself to me a more and more mouldering prop, whether I leant on those which concerned Messiah, those of the New Testament, or the miscellaneous predictions of the Old Testament. 1. As to the Messianic prophecies, I began to be pressed with the difficulty of proving against the Jews that "Messiah was to suffer." The Psalms generally adduced for this purpose can in no way be fixed on Messiah. The prophecy in the 9th chapter of Daniel looks specious in the authorized English version, but has evaporated in the Greek translation and is not acknowledged in the best German renderings. I still rested on the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, as alone fortifying me against the Rabbis: yet with an unpleasantly increasing perception that the system of "double interpretation" in which Christians indulge, is a playing fast and loose with prophecy, and is essentially dishonest _No one dreams of a "second" sense until the primary sense proves false_: all false prophecy may be thus screened. The three prophecies quoted (Acts xiii. 33--35) in proof of the resurrection of Jesus, are simply puerile, and deserve no reply.--I felt there was something unsound in all this.