It was the strikingly eloquent saying of Mr. Paine, that "prejudice is the spider that spins its web on the mind." This entangling web is so interwoven into the tender and plastic mind of youth by systematized deception, that even the strongest intellect can hardly extricate itself during life; and this spell holds equally good with Jew, Christian, Mahommedan, or in any other of all the heaven-derived superstitions that have afflicted the human race. These are the universal plagues--the fatal barriers which stand perpetually between man and the harmonious union which he would ever maintain with nature. All religions have in succession sprung out of the superstitions which preceded them, and there is no difficulty in proving that the Christian scheme is no exception to the rule; for, on its very front, it carries the most conclusive evidence of having been drawn out of the exhaustless ethnical magazines of Paganism,* and metamorphosed there is not a vestige--not an iota of Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, that did not belong to Paganism, thousands of years before the reign of Tiberius; and that all the "religion" practised in Europe is merely the exoteric quackery of the old universal solar mythos. In like manner, it was only the initiated Jews of their cabbala, who knew the secret of the same mythos. This was called Gnosticism. * Beyond the limits of the papal conclave of cardinals, there is every reason to believe that very little true, or esoteric Christianity is known; and that only among the learned and most laborious in fearless research. In that modern cabbala of the initiated, the secret is guarded with the most solemn and profound vigilance; and the sacred trust is, that into that unsightly and distorted texture of wild and irrational superstition, which has deluded men by teaching them to overlook the moral and physical realities of nature--fixing their minds upon imaginary existence; and by an intercourse which surpliced magicians have pretended to, with a place called heaven, everything that is good and congenial to man upon earth has been destroyed. "For the the craft of priesthood that hath shaped A future world,--the kings of distant days Have countenanced the fraud, that fools content, Might look for blessings in another scene, And bear the yoke more tranquilly in this."