To what miserable shifts is folly driven to support superstition; what miserable pretexts does roguery have recourse to, to propagate and uphold imposition! Not one word is there to warrant this pretended conference with Mary, which the learned Doctor has so circumstantially related. That Joseph was ignorant of the intercourse Mary had had with the angel, could not be concealed from the reader, who believed Matthew's relation, according to which Mary had said nothing to Joseph of the communication and commerce she had had with the angel, neither is there the least reason from that account to suppose that Matthew knew any thing of the decently told story of Elizabeth, or of Mary's going and remaining three months with her; but, according to Luke, she hurried off in her exultation of being with child, and there they communed together in a state of the highest enthusiasm. Elizabeth, being filled with the Holy Ghost, and the babe leaping for joy in her womb, spake out in a loud voice,--and Mary followed in the same manner, and in the same strain. But notwithstanding this, notwithstanding the exultation between the women, Joseph was not to be let into the secret; all the rapturous feelings of Mary were now subdued; she not only suppressed her joy which seemed unbounded, but she kept the whole matter a profound secret, even at a risk of being turned out of doors as a strumpet, and an angel is obliged to be sent from God to Joseph in a dream, to prevent the catastrophe; the deception is approved by God, who sends the "angel from heaven" to reconcile Joseph to his wife's perfidy. According to Matthew, a certain man had a dream. According to Luke, an angel called privately on a young woman, who, in consequence of the visit, was with child. And this is all there is to establish the divinity of Jesus Christ. It cannot be called evidence, for by whom it was given, whether by the man himself, or the woman herself, nobody knows; to whom it was given, if it was given, nobody knows; when it was given, nobody knows; where it was given, nobody knows; and the learned are even disputing to this very time about the language in which the stories were originally written, and by whom they were written. And yet not literally to believe either or both of these worse than "old wives' tales," is to subject a man to persecution; not to affect to believe that which, when stripped of the absurd reverence which has been cast round it, no man ever did or ever can believe, is to be imputed to him as a reproach of so horrible a nature, that, thousands, who treat it as it deserves in their own minds, dare not avow their disbelief; not to commit the immoral act of self-delusion and debasement is imputed as a crime, and men are shunned because they are moral.