Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending
some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals.
The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their
apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God
was not open to every man alike.
Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation,
or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by
God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God
came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God
(the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those
churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve
them all.
As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed
further into the subject, offer some observations on the word revelation.
Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated
immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a
communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that
something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any
other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a
second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases
to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person
only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged
to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation
that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation
is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an
account of something which that person says was a revelation made to
him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be
incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a
revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made
to him.
When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables
of the commandments from the hand of God, they were not obliged to
believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling
them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling
me so, the commandments carrying no internal evidence of divinity with
them. They contain some good moral precepts such as any man qualified
to be a lawgiver or a legislator could produce himself, without having recourse
to supernatural intervention.1
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven, and brought to
Mahomet by an angel, the account comes to near the same kind of
hearsay evidence and second hand authority as the former. I did not see
the angel myself, and therefore I have a right not to believe it.
When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or
gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man,
and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I
have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much
stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this;
for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only
reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do
not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to
the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when the
heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and
that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost
all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology
were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing
at that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse
of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their
Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the
story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it
was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people
called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed
it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no
more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited
the story.
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