This Letter to Erskine contains some effective passages. In one of these he points out the sophistical character of the indictment in declaring the "Age of Reason" a blasphemous work, tending to bring in contempt the holy scriptures. "The charge should have stated that the work was intended to prove certain books not the holy scriptures. It is one thing if I ridicule a work as being written by a certain person; but it is quite a different thing if I write to prove that such a work was not written by such person. In the first case I attack the person through the work; in the other case I defend the honour of the person against the work." After alluding to the two accounts in Genesis of the creation of man, according to one of which there was no Garden of Eden and no forbidden tree, Paine says: "Perhaps I shall be told in the cant language of the day, as I have often been told by the Bishop of Llandaff and others, of the great and laudable pains that many pious and learned men have taken to explain the obscure, and reconcile the contradictory, or, as they say, the seemingly contradictory passages of the Bible. It is because the Bible needs such an undertaking, that is one of the first causes to suspect it is _not_ the word of God: this single reflection, when carried home to the mind, is in itself a volume. What! does not the Creator of the Universe, the Fountain of all Wisdom, the Origin of all Science, the Author of all Knowledge, the God of Order and of Harmony, know how to write? When we contemplate the vast economy of the creation, when we behold the unerring regularity of the visible solar system, the perfection with which all its several parts revolve, and by corresponding assemblage form a whole;--when we launch our eye into the boundless ocean of space, and see ourselves surrounded by innumerable worlds, not one of which varies from its appointed place--when we trace the power of a Creator, from a mite to an elephant, from an atom to an universe, can we suppose that the mind [which] could conceive such a design, and the power that executed it with incomparable perfection, cannot write without inconsistence; or that a book so written can be the work of such a power? The writings of Thomas Paine, even of Thomas Paine, need no commentator to explain, compound, arrange, and re-arrange their several parts, to render them intelligible--he can relate a fact, or write an essay, without forgetting in one page what he has written in another; certainly then, did the God of all perfection condescend to write or dictate a book, that book would be as perfect as himself is perfect: The Bible is not so, and it is confessedly not so, by the attempts to mend it."