There were once many atheists among the Christians; they are now much fewer. It at first appears to be a paradox, but examination proves it to be a truth, that theology often threw men's minds into atheism, until philosophy at length drew them out of it. It must indeed have been pardonable to doubt of the Divinity, when His only announcers disputed on His nature. Nearly all the first Fathers of the Church made God corporeal, and others, after them, giving Him no extent, lodged Him in a part of heaven. According to some, He had created the world in Time; while, according to others, He had created Time itself. Some gave Him a Son like to Himself; others would not grant that the Son was like to the Father. It was also disputed in what way a third person proceeded from the other two. It was agitated whether the Son had been, while on earth, composed of two persons. So that the question undesignedly became, whether there were five persons in the Divinity--three in heaven and two for Jesus Christ upon earth; or four persons, reckoning Christ upon earth as only one; or three persons, considering Christ only as God. There were disputes about His mother, His descent into hell and into limbo; the manner in which the body of the God-man was eaten, and the blood of the God-man was drunk; on grace; on the saints, and a thousand other matters. When the confidants of the Divinity were seen so much at variance among themselves anathematizing one another from age to age, but all agreeing in an immoderate thirst for riches and grandeur--while, on the other hand, were beheld the prodigious number of crimes and miseries which afflicted the earth, and of which many were caused by the very disputes of these teachers of souls--it must be confessed that it was allowable for rational men to doubt the existence of a being so strangely announced, and for men of sense to imagine that a God, who could of His own free will make so many beings miserable, did not exist.