tree, and their eyes are opened, and they gain a knowledge of good and evil. Now the Lord God seems to be very much like the bigoted parsons of the present day, for when he finds out what Adam and Eve have done he gets in a passion and swears at them, and curses Adam and his wife and the serpent; and not satisfied with this, he curses the land too, just as if the land had had some share in the crime. This is a summary of the account of the Fall contained in the Bible. Because Adam and Eve had been guilty of the horrible crime of eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is they learnt to think and reason for themselves, God Almighty found it necessary to damn them; and depend upon it, reader, whoever you may be, that when you are guilty of the crime of thinking, speaking, and acting for yourself in religious matters, God’s vicegerents on earth, the black-coated, white-neckerchiefed, strait-haired, pious psalm-singing gentry, will do their best to crush you and damn you by every means in their power. They will calumniate you as they have done Thomas Paine and the rest of those brave men who have been courageous enough to strive for civil and religious liberty. But I fear I am guilty of digression, and therefore I will take you back to the account of the Fall. Adam having been cursed, our pastors pretend that it was necessary that there should be a redemption—for they have such a good opinion of their God, that although they tell us that without God’s help we could not live and move, they think God would damn the whole earth because one man [ate] an apple which, according to their own account, he could not have done if God had not permitted him; therefore, to use the words of Richard Carlile, they give us the horrible picture of “a merciful God sacrificing a good and pure God to appease the vengeance of a jealous and revengeful God.”