According to your nations, according to the doctrines of the Jewish and the Christian churches, the sole aim of God has been to be exclusively adored, and jealousy is his prominent feature. It is not in the pursuit of knowledge, or in the practice of morality that he delights. The precepts of social virtue occasionally scattered through the Old, as well as the New Testament, can make little impression when contrasted with the vindictive cruelty of the Deity. The Jewish Jehovah requires nothing of his followers but their compliance in executing his bloody commands against nations whom he calls impious, because he has not revealed himself to them. The man after his own heart, is the murderer of thousands of innocent people. Christ orders his followers to despise the reason he has given them, to avoid pleasure, to hate the world, and to love pain, to pray, and to spend their lives in continual mortification, and in gazing over unintelligible mysteries to acquire his kingdom. If they fail to believe in him, whether from ignorance or from conviction, he punishes them with eternal damnation, or as _Saint_ Athanasius emphatically expresses it in his celebrated creed, "Whosoever believeth in these things shall be saved; and whosoever believeth not shall be damned." LETTER VII. I now bring under review a few passages from _Holy Writ_, which I leave to your Lordship to explain, and which scoffers pretend to say are undeniable proofs of the stupidity of the Jews, and gross ideas they had of God. I shall follow the order of the books without attempting an arrangement. Genesis, chap. iii. ver. 1. "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord had made; and he said unto the woman, yea hath God said," &c. This Mr. Serpent would make a fine figure in Æsop's fables. They say it means the Devil, but how does that appear? In ver. 22. and 23. "And behold the Lord said, the man is become one of us, (i. e. one of us Gods), to know good and evil, And now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever; therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken." This shows strongly that boasted attribute of God, Jealousy. Is it consistent with a Deity to punish this pair, and all their progeny, for their attempt to know good from evil? We here find that the priests have made God expressly after their own image. God's selfishness prevented men from eating of the other tree, which would make him live for ever. _Queritur,_ then, at what period of the world did the soul of man become immortal? Was it not till Jesus Christ came? And was this tree a type of him, as the bread and wine are at this day? It appears also, that it was not one, but two trees, that were prohibited!