The sanctity thrown around this sad nonsense; the cry of blasphemy which has been raised against any one who ventured to examine it, the horror felt by fanatics, which vented itself in persecutions the most diversified, deterred people from trusting to reason, and made them even forget that it was by reason alone they are ever able to choose one religion in preference to another. Every religious sect allows, that you may use your reason to distinguish between what they hold out to you, and what you yourself believe; you may, and you ought, they tell you, to exercise your reason so far as to give their doctrines the preference; and having thus exercised your reason, and having by its aid abandoned your former notions, and adopted theirs; having become "a child of grace," and turned to the right way, there shall be "more joy in heaven at your conversion than over ninety and nine just persons, who" having always belonged to the sect, "needed no conversion." All sects proclaim this joy, at the same moment, as each makes converts from the others; with all of them reason to choose your faith is the great the good, but having exercised it so far, there you must stop, reason must be instantly extinguished; on no account must you trust to such a "blind guide;" reason, which but just before was all but omnipotent, is now "fallible"--"_poor fallible reason_," all is now _"faith"_ examine any one of their dogmas, you are a "backslider;" doubt any one of their absurd relations, you are a "blasphemer;" and thus it is that ignorance and persecution brutalizes and degrades mankind. Had the stories of Joseph and Mary been preached to us from the sacred books of the Persians, how would every good Christian have been scandalized! "What," he would have exclaimed, "what horrid blasphemy! first to pretend that God himself (the Holy Ghost being God) had commerce with a woman, by which she became with child, and who all the time she was breeding lived with a man, lived with him, too, by command of 'an angel sent from God,' lived with him as his wife in such a way that no one seems to have suspected the child was not his own, and after the birth of God, (God the Son being God) in the ordinary way of all mankind, and still living with him, and having other children by him. 1 First God has her, then Joseph has her; These are abominable stories, indeed. Call out blasphemy at yourselves, ye fanatical persecutors of other men's opinions. Shame, pity, contempt, are the passions those terrible tales excite for you, compassion for those who are so unfortunate as to become your victims." 1 Matt. chap. xiii. ver. 55, 56. "Is not this the son of the carpenter? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, and are not all his sisters with us?"