Paine had accumulated a mass of fragmentary writings on religious subjects, and had begun publishing them in a journal started in 1804 by Elihu Palmer,--_The Prospect; or View of the Moral World_. This succeeded the paper called _The Temple of Reason_. One of Paine's objects was to help the new journal, which attracted a good deal of attention. His first communication (February 18, 1804), was on a sermon by Robert Hall, on "Modern Infidelity," sent him by a gentleman in New York. The following are some of its trenchant paragraphs: "Is it a fact that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, and how is it proved? If a God he could not die, and as a man he could not redeem: how then is this redemption proved to be fact? It is said that Adam eat of the forbidden fruit, commonly called an apple, and thereby subjected himself and all his posterity forever to eternal damnation. This is worse than visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. But how was the death of Jesus Christ to affect or alter the case? Did God thirst for blood? If so, would it not have been better to have crucified Adam upon the forbidden tree, and made a new man?" "Why do not the Christians, to be consistent, make Saints of Judas and Pontius Pilate, for they were the persons who accomplished the act of salvation. The merit of a sacrifice, if there can be any merit in it, was never in the thing sacrificed, but in the persons offering up the sacrifice--and therefore Judas and Pilate ought to stand first in the calendar of Saints." Other contributions to the _Prospect_ were: "Of the word Religion"; "Cain and Abel"; "The Tower of Babel"; "Of the religion of Deism compared with the Christian Religion"; "Of the Sabbath Day in Connecticut"; "Of the Old and New Testaments"; "Hints towards forming a Society for inquiring into the truth or falsehood of ancient history, so far as history is connected with systems of religion ancient and modern"; "To the members of the Society styling itself the Missionary Society"; "On Deism, and the writings of Thomas Paine"; "Of the Books of the New Testament" There were several communications without any heading. Passages and sentences from these little essays have long been a familiar currency among freethinkers. "We admire the wisdom of the ancients, yet they had no bibles, nor books, called revelation. They cultivated the reason that God gave them, studied him in his works, and rose to eminence." "The Cain and Abel of Genesis appear to be no other than the ancient Egyptian story of Typhon and Osiris, the darkness and the light, which answered very well as allegory without being believed as fact." "Those who most believe the Bible are those who know least about it."