After his death, his disciples being frustrated in their fondest hopes, made a virtue of necessity. Banished as they were from every place, and persecuted by the Jews, who were eager to treat them as they had treated their master, they wandered into the neighboring countries; in which, on the evidence of some women, they set forth the resurrection of Christ, his divinity, and the other fables wherewith the gospels are filled. It was their want of success among the Jewish people which led to the resolution of seeking their fortune among the Gentiles; but as a little more knowledge than they possessed was necessary for the accomplishment of their design--the Gentiles being philosophically trained, and consequently too much the friends of truth and reason to be duped by trifles--the sectaries of Jesus gained over to their cause a young man [56] of ardent temperament and active habits, somewhat better instructed than the illiterate fishermen of Galilee, and more capable of drawing audiences to listen to his talk. He being warned from heaven (miraculously of course), leagued himself with them, and drew over some partizans by the threat of "fabled hell," (a plagiarism from the ancient poets), and by the hope of the joys of paradise, into which blessed abode he was impudent enough to assert that he had at one time been introduced. These disciples then, by strength of delusion and lying, procured for their master the honor of passing for a god--an honor at which, in his life-time, Jesus could never have arrived. His destiny was no better than that of Homer, nor even so good; inasmuch as seven cities which had despised and starved the latter in his lifetime, struggled and fought with each other, in order to ascertain to which was due the merit of having given him birth. § 21. It may be judged now, from what has been advanced, that Christianity, like every other religion, is only a complicated imposture--the success and progress of which would astonish the inventors themselves, could they revisit this world. Without bewildering ourselves, however, in a labyrinth of error and contradiction, such as we have alluded to, we go to Mahomet, who founded his law on maxims entirely opposite to those of Jesus Christ. § 22. MAHOMET.