pampered Oxonian professor of theology know
     more of it than the meanest cow-boy in England? Absolutely
     nothing.

     ** The deist talks of "Nature's God," that is, the powers of
     Nature personified, for it is impossible it should mean
     anything else. As a poetic figure, we have no objection to
     this.

But the priests of all religions that have at any time plagued the earth, have agreed in the absolute necessity of inventing such imbodied Gods or idols; and whether they be Jupiters or Jehovahs is no great matter, as they answer equally well as mystic sources from whence to derive the usurped power of the sacerdotal orders; and as relentless tormentors, to keep the minds of their frenzied dupes in perpetual terror. Without these pre-requisities, their trade would soon come to an end. Hence arises their well-known malignity against all who are sceptical respecting the existence of such supernatural personages; for those who have doubts about that which is indispensable to the theologians, are denounced by them as abominable Atheists, which, being explained, designates the few unfettered, ingenuous minds, who are capable of perceiving the matchless absurdity of attempting, by any entity, or personified representation whatsoever, to convey the slightest rational idea of that incomprehensible Power, by which countless millions of worlds are ruled.

LECTURE FIRST. ON MIRACLES

THE ignorance of the natural causes of the effects which man sees around him, has ever been the foundation upon which the fabricators of all religions have built the whole machinery of those delusions by which the human race in all ages has been duped.. These impostors have invariably relied on their artful jugglery in the pretended science of supenaturalism, for the success of their respective systems; and of all such means of deception, that of working miracles by legerdemain, or collusive agency, has been the most successfully palmed off upon the credulous multitude in all countries; whilst men of knowledge and reflection have in all times rejected the pretended infractions of the immutable course of nature, as the inventions of knavery to delude and thereby prey upon ignorance. The faith reposed in these delusive prodigies was always in proportion to the degree of simplicity in the deceived; they were not generally believed by those who saw, but most firmly by those who did not see, them performed; and though not true at first, that is but a trivial matter, as time has established the veracity of those of the Jews and primitive Christians; and now when they are upheld by overwhelming clerical riches and power, backed by political corruption, they will continue to degrade, and be the grossest outrage upon common sense and experience, until the great and salutary moral change shall take place, when the mind of youth shall no longer be mortgaged to the priest in education.

Though a miracle, or pseudo violation of Nature's laws, be the most certain method of exciting the admiration of the vulgar, it is contrary to reason that anything of the kind should be true; but it is by no means contrary to the testimony of experience, that impostors might have lived two or three thousand years ago, and propagated falsehood. This conclusion is fully corroborated by all modern experience, in which we find that deception and falsehood form the medium through which knavery rules simple ignorance; and to such a degree do these ingredients pervade the whole of society, that they in a great measure constitute the religious and moral element in which man lives at the present day; and so besotted has the breathing of this atmosphere of error and delusion rendered him, that the more outrageous a miracle, or other theological fable, is against rational light and common sense, the more greedily has it ever been received by the unthinking and priest-ridden million, who delight in the marvellous and the incredible—believing everything, and examining nothing:—hence the success of the ludicrous medley that makes up our Christian Polytheism. Admitting, for a moment, the possibility of such physical prodigies being true, what do we gain by them,—do they either confer additional authority on moral truth, or prove it false? Can they make right wrong, or wrong right? It is a melancholy fallacy to attribute to them any such power or influence, and implies a lamentably low estimate of the dignity and greatness of moral truth. All that we gain by pretended violations of Nature's laws, is dogmatism, bigotry, spiritual fear, intolerance, and superstition; together with all the other curses which come in the train of religion, when backed by authority.

A modern philosopher has given the quietus to miracles in the following death-blow:—"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined; and, therefore, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish" This argument is absolutely invincible. The boundless plenum of Nature—the revolution of hundreds of millions of globes round a million of suns, may be called miraculous, but in all this, Nature, or the material universe in motion,* is still invariable, and acting by self-existing qualities or properties, which are therefore inviolable and immutable. If it is asked, "cannot a law that is made by the Supreme Power be suspended by its author?" we reply, that the innate or essential properties of matter, being principles, could have no author—no antecedent—no beginning:—they are co-eternal as matter and motion, or the immutable Power which we call Nature. This hypothesis is plain, simple, easy, and rational: but the theory of your personified, localised artificer, is the reverse of all this; for he himself would stand a thousand times more in need of an artificer or author than does the material universe. We know that matter exists:**—there can be only one infinite—ergo, matter must be that infinite.

In their secret doctrines, the philosophers and priests of antiquity admitted no miraculous powers; and when they said that a certain thing was done by a god, or "the gods," they were merely using words suited to the capacity of the multitude, while the mystic or esoteric meaning was, that the thing arose from the concatenation of natural causes and effects, or the eternal order of necessity; and not, as the ignorant imagine, that the laws of nature were suspended by the interference of some personified god. With the above two classes of the initiated, all their mysteries were rooted in, and had constant allusion to zodiacal objects, and the physical powers of Nature; which objects and powers were, by