Any attempt to rouse the ignorant, uncultivated mind to free inquiry, is almost a hopeless task, and it is altogether so when besotted religious prejudice stands in the way; but we ask the man who has got a vestige of mind he can call his own, whether his evidence is as satisfactory that Nature has been put out of her course by the working of miracles, as it is, on the contrary, that such violations of her laws have never in truth taken place! Has any such thing happened in his own, his father's, his grandfather's, or his great grandfather's time? He must answer in the negative, and thus far he has evidence from experience, we shall say, for 150 years, giving a succession of proof, which rests on the immutable order of things; and will he abandon that invariable director for the worthless and self-convicted testimony of a few strolling vagabonds, known only as the lawless disturbers of the peace in the countries where they were vagrants, and who lived nearly two thousand years ago? When legends and traditions are found inconsistent with nature, common sense, and experience, does their antiquity alone prove their truth against all these guides? On the contrary, antiquity can never be divested of the mantle of fable. We know that besides the marks of falsehood which the stories alluded to bore at the time of their fabrication, the true characters of the propagators were so well known to men of sense and education among the Pagans, that their impostures were utterly despised; and as the Jew books called the "Testaments," abundantly show that they were compiled throughout by men of similar character, to credit them is to give up all confidence in our senses, and to give the lie to natural light and reason. Whence comes the anomaly that it is in supenaturals alone we find man departing totally from the common rules of evidence, and the respect which he owes to himself? In this case, denying as he does the authority of his own senses, and the reason which arises from them, he has rendered himself inferior to all other animals, and this is evidently owing to his not being allowed the exercise of his intellectual powers, priestcraft having decoyed him into the regions of non-reality and delusion, where everything congenial to his nature, where all entities, or things comprehensible, can have no admittance: there theological deception holds her dominion under the dark mask of mystery;* and out of the fears of ignorance forges mental chains for the human race, as they come into existence, the child succeeding to the woful inheritance of the father.