the work, not of improvement, but of corruption.  The Jews corrupted their pure monotheistic truths into what these writers believe the fables, legends, miracles, and absurd dogmas of the Old Testament:  and, as if that were not enough, proceeded to bury them in the huge absurdities of the Rabbinical traditions; the Christians, in like manner, corrupted the yet purer truths, which these writers affirm Christianity teaches, with what they also affirm to be the load of myth, fiction, false history, and monstrous doctrine, which make up nine tenths of the New Testament:  and, as if that were not enough, proceeded, just as did the Jews, to “expand” the New Testament itself into the worse than Rabbinical traditions of the Papacy!  From approximate “spiritual truth” to the supposed legends and false dogmas of the Pentateuch, from the supposed legends and dogmas of the Pentateuch to the absurdities of the Talmud;—­again, from the approximate “spiritual truth” of Christianity to the supposed legends and fanciful doctrines of the New Testament, and from the legends and doctrines of the New Testament to the corruptions the Papacy;—­surely these are queer proofs of a tendency to progress!  A tendency to retrogradation is rather indicated.  No sooner, it appears, does man proceed to obtain “spiritual truth” tolerably pure, as tested by such writers, than he proceeds incontinently to adulterate it!  This unhappy and uniform tendency is also a curious comment on the impotence of the internal spiritual oracle, as against the ascendency of the “historical” and “traditional.”

Similar arguments of doubt may be derived from other facts.

Over how many countries did primitive Christianity soon degenerate into such odious idolatry, that even the delusions of the “false prophet” have been considered (like the doom to “labor”) as a sort of beneficent curse in comparison!  What, again, for ages, was the history of those “Shemitic races,” in which, of all “races,” was found, according to Mr. Parker, the happiest “religious organization,” by which they discovered, earlier than other “races,” the great truths of Monotheism?  One incessant bulimia for idolatry was their master-passion for ages; while for many ages past, as has been remarked by a countryman of Mr. Parker, their “happy religious organization” has been in deplorable ruins.

I humbly venture, then, once again, to doubt whether any sober-minded man, apart from “special inspiration,” can affirm that he has any grounds to utter a word about a “progress” in religion or virtue for the race collectively.  But it is easy to see where these writers obtained the notion; they have stolen it from that Bible which as a special revelation they have abjured.