It was both a wonderful and a melancholy spectacle to see two priests at the same time writing against the Christian religion. Meslier is still more violent than Woolston. He ventures to treat the devil's carrying off our Lord to the top of a mountain, the marriage of Cana, and the loaves and fishes, as absurd tales, injurious to the Supreme Being, which for three hundred years were unknown to the whole Roman Empire, and at last advanced from the dregs of the community to the throne of the emperors, when policy compelled them to adopt the nonsense of the people, in order to keep them the better in subjection. The declamations of the English priest do not approach in vehemence those of the priest of Champagne. Woolston occasionally showed discretion. Meslier never has any; he is a man so sensitively sore to the crimes to which he has been witness that he renders the Christian religion responsible for them, forgetting that it condemns them. There is not a single miracle which is not with him an object of scorn or horror; no prophecy which he does not compare with the prophecies of Nostradamus. He even goes so far as to compare Jesus Christ to Don Quixote, and St. Peter to Sancho Panza; and what is most of all to be deplored is, that he wrote these blasphemies against Jesus Christ, when he might be said to be in the very arms of death--at a moment when the most deceitful are sincere, and the most intrepid tremble. Too strongly impressed by some injuries that had been done him by his superiors in authority; too deeply affected by the great difficulties which he met with in the Scripture, he became exasperated against it more than Acosta and all the Jews; more than Porphyry, Celsus, Iamblichus, Julian, Libanius, Maximus, Simmachus, or any other whatever of the partisans of human reason against the divine incomprehensibilities of our religion. Many abridgments of his work have been printed; but happily the persons in authority suppressed them as fast as they appeared. A priest of Bonne-Nouvelle, near Paris, wrote also on the same subject; and it thus happened that at the very time the abbé Becheran and the rest of the Convulsionaries were performing miracles, three priests were writing against the genuine Gospel miracles. The most clever work that has been written against the miracles and prophecies is that of my Lord Bolingbroke. But happily it is so voluminous, so destitute of method, so verbose, and so abounding in long and sometimes complicated sentences, that it requires a great deal of patience to read him.