"Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Corypheus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus."--_Vol. iv. p. 327._ "It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism that three are one and one is three... But this constitutes the craft, the power and profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion and they would catch no more flies."--_Ibid, p. 205._ "The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order and introduce it to profit, power and preeminence."--_Ibid, p. 242._ "The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs."--_Ibid, p. 360._ "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."--_Ibid, p. 365._ "In our Richmond there is much fanaticism, but chiefly among the women. They have their night meetings and praying parties, where, attended by their priests and sometimes by a henpecked husband, they pour forth the effusions of their love to Jesus in terms as amatory and carnal as their modesty would permit to a mere earthly lover."--_Ibid, p. 358._ "Jefferson occupied his Sundays at Monticello in writing letters to Paine (they are unpublished I believe, but I have seen them) in favor of the probabilities that Christ and his Twelve Apostles were only personifications of the sun and the Twelve signs of the Zodiac."--_Dr. Conway._ The correspondence of Jefferson and Paine would fill a volume. In these letters Jefferson unbosomed himself and gave expression to his most radical sentiments. Randolph's edition of Jefferson's works was published twenty years after Paine's death. By this time the Orthodox ghouls had about completed their work and these letters, although containing some of Jefferson's most mature thoughts and best writings, remained unpublished. In a letter to Dr. Woods, Jefferson says: "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies." "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites."--_Jefferson's Notes on Virginia._