Thus did kings, conquerors, and corrupt rulers of nations see the justifying precedents to be drawn from these books for all their enormities; and as for the fathers or heads of the Christian sect, and other religious impostors, they could be at no loss to find in them just whatever suited their respective schemes of deception. The learned amongst the early fathers saw and acknowledged the astro-allegories about Adam, Eve, the serpent, Garden of Eden, and fall of man; but their successors, about the beginning of the 4th century, when they decided upon getting up a _new will and testament_ for Jehovah, in order to make their system hold together, thought it necessary to cause his departure from the usual practice of testators--that he should not be allowed to revoke the old Jewish will, which for good reasons, was to be retained in full force. Without this document their most essential dogmas would have had no foundation; and as it "would have been too bare-faced a fable to make Jesus die on account of an allegorical tree," the forbidden one of Genesis must be converted into a real tree; for then it would, together with its accompaniments, furnish mystical pegs upon which to hang the indispensable dogmas of original sin and redemption. * In Hosea xiii., 16, we have a declaration "That their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up"!!! This and the Midianitish slaughter and extermination, together with that of the Amalekites, will perhaps stand for ever unmatched in the history of human cruelties. These appear to have been the ruling motives of those who gradually manufactured the Christian scheme (for it was done by piecemeal, by a number of hands, and in different centuries) and in adopting the Old Testament it was necessary, by this affiliation, to connect its list of fabulous prodigies with the new code,* or fresh series of miracles which had been invented for, and are recorded in, the new will of the Jewish deity:--** "Ay, and sound ones too, Seen, heard, attested, every thing--but true" In forcing this connexion still closer, the fabricators had no difficulty in finding that, in their series of wonders, the principal violations of Nature's laws had been foretold in the Jewish prophets.*** This was a clincher which served to confirm the supernatural texture of their religion, quite as well as the cloud-conveyed Shastras did that of Brahma, the laws of Moses from the cloud-capped Sinai, or any other of the numerous human laws which have originated beyond the clouds, and been palmed upon ignorance by impostors. Clouds, shadows, phantoms, ghosts, etc., have ever been the favorite machinery of priests. According to the notoriously false prediction of St. Paul, Jesus, on his second coming, was to be cloud-delivered; and this advent, it was positively asserted, would take place during his own (Paul's) lifetime.