There are other sorts of idols which have no existence but in the mere imagination of the human mind; and these are vastly the most numerous, and universally (either in the greater or less degree) dispersed over the world; the wisest of mankind are not and cannot be wholly exempt from them, inasmuch as every wrong conception of God is (as far as the error takes place in the mind) idolatrous. To give a sample, an idea of a jealous God is of this sort. Jealousy is the offspring of finite minds, proceeding from the want of knowledge; which in dubious matters makes us suspicious and distrustful; but in matters which we clearly understand, there can be no jealousy, for knowledge excludes it, so that to ascribe it to God is a manifest infringement on his omniscience.* * "The Lord thy God is a jealous God." The idea of a revengeful God is likewise one of that sort, but this idea of divinity being borrowed from a savage nature, needs no further confutation. The representation of a God, who (as we are told by certain divines) from all eternity elected an inconsiderable part of mankind to eternal life, and reprobated the rest to eternal damnation, merely from his own sovereignty, adds another to the number;--this representation of the Deity undoubtedly took its rise from that which we discovered in great, powerful, and wicked tyrants among men, however tradition may since have contributed to its support, though I am apprehensive that a belief in those who adhere to that doctrine, that they themselves constitute that blessed elect number, has been a greater inducement to them to close with it, than all other motives added together. It is a selfish and inferior notion of a God void of justice, goodness, and truth, and has a natural tendency to impede the cause of true religion and morality in the world, and diametrically repugnant to the truth of the divine character, and which, if admitted to be true, overturns all religion, wholly precluding the agency of mankind in either their salvation or damnation, resolving the whole into the sovereign disposal of a tyrannical and unjust being, which is offensive to reason and common sense, and subversive of moral rectitude in general. But as it was not my design so much to confute the multiplicity of false representations of a God, as to represent just and consistent ideas of the true God, I shall therefore omit any further observation on them in this place, with this remark, that all unjust representations, or ideas of God, are so many detractions from his character among mankind. To remedy these idolatrous notions of a God, it is requisite to form right and consistent ideas in their stead.