well-authenticated scene that took place between that prince and the high priest of Jupiter Ammon. From the times of Porphyry, Celsus, and Hierocles, to the present day, it has been the wonder of the rational philosopher, how a disjointed collection of writings, made by an obscure and barbarous race of people, came to have such mighty importance attached to them, more especially as their tendency has ever been inimical to, and subversive of, human happiness; but this sad anomaly may be accounted for. All such tyrants as Constantine saw in these books examples of the most unqualified despotism; and knew that, through the medium of carefully fostered ignorance, man is an animal that can be made to believe and bear anything, however absurd and tyrannical. Conquerors and devastators of countries found in them justifying precedents for all their enormities, and the rivers of blood which ambition and Christian fanaticism have shed in every part of the world. The Crusades, where millions upon millions of fanatics perished, are never-dying witnesses of this. Would any unshackled mind believe that the Spaniards could have been guilty of such inhuman and monstrous cruelties towards the simple and unoffending natives of America, if such horrid butcheries had not been sanctioned, nay, commanded, and pompously set forth, in the detailed massacres of the Bible? Here we have the exploits of some generals of banditti--blood-thirsty robbers, who blasphemously declare that their unequalled cruelties were committed by command of the ruling power of the universe! That the Spaniards thought themselves justified by the Bible, appears by the book which Sepulvado wrote for the express purpose of vindicating them in the murder of twelve millions of Indians, "_by the example of the Israelites towards the people of Canaan_." Las Casas says: "I have seen in the Islands of St. Domingo and Jamaica, gibbets erected all over the country to hang thirteen Indians at a time, _in honor of the thirteen apostles_.--I have seen," continues he, "young children thrown to dogs* to be devoured alive." In charging the shocking barbarities of the Bible upon the Jewish deity, the fanatic devoutly accuses him of crimes and acts of wicked injustice that are hardly ever committed, even by the worst of men, such as visiting the offences of the fathers upon the children, and requiring the sacrifice of the innocent to expiate the crimes of the guilty. To what a state of mental degradation, O man, have thy priests and thy superstition reduced thee!