His faith once shaken in the rules of practice prescribed by the sectarian teachers, since he knew no other way of interpreting the experimental doctrines of the Scriptures than that they pursued,--his reason became gradually distasted with the Scriptures themselves,--and he easily adopted the arguments against the Bible contained in his favourite volume of French philosophy. He began to suspect, and, at length, boldly concluded, that the Jehovah of the Hebrews was, indeed, the mere mythological fiction of a rude and barbarous age,--a Deity scarcely more godlike in his character and attributes than the savage Moloch of the Ammonites. To class the garden of primeval innocence, and the forbidden fruit, and the tempting serpent, and the lapse of the first human pair, among the allegories which, he now learned, the ancient nations were wont to adopt in order to embody their conceptions of things otherwise difficult of narration, was a still easier step. The Prophecies, he thought, were evidently attributable to that prolific Oriental faculty which gave birth and authority to the pagan oracles; and the Miracles, as events opposed to general experience, were to be at once discarded from the catalogue of historic facts, by every true philosopher. Amid these rapid and decided changes of sentiment, Joe sometimes wondered that he felt none of the inward terror and the "stings of conscience," which he had so perpetually been taught to regard as the sure avenging vicegerents of a Deity, in the breasts of those who dared to doubt revealed truth. That he was tormented by none of these appalling visitings, was another proof to his mind of the fallacy of his rejected teachers. He was conscious that, in his conclusions, whether right or wrong, he was sincere: he was satisfied that his new mental condition was far preferable to the spirit-degrading and wearisome slavery he had so recently shaken off; and he had not, yet, sufficiently probed the depths of his own heart to know that his self-gratulation was also aided by the pride of thinking diversely from the mass of his fellows. The ghost story at the market, and its accompanying circumstances, often ran through his memory, and served, not a little, to enforce his persuasion that the mass of mankind were the dupes of superstition; and, at the close of every similar train of reflection, he could not refrain from indulging a self-complacent feeling on his having, himself, thrown off what he gradually deemed to be a blind and implicit trust in fables under the delusive guise of Divine inspiration.