Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/465

Rh you do not perform certain gestures which you can perform." "I will punish you," says the other," if you do not believe certain dogmas, which you cannot believe." One said, "I have with my hands made a God, you shall see him, and externally worship him." The other, "I have with my fancy made a God, whom you cannot see, or a tenet which you cannot believe, which you shall worship internally." Modern atheism is incomparably the most tyrannical, and has accordingly provoked incomparably most resistance. It requires of man to mould his mind and annul his convictions.

It can also manufacture instruments for effecting its ends, infinitely more destructive than the ancient. Zeal is whetted by the imagination into the utmost keenness. Praxiteles would more easily be persuaded, that his statue of Venus was not a goddess; than Origen, that his dogmas of the pre-existence of souls, and that Christ was to be again crucified to save the devils, were errours. The stuff of which physical idols are made, may be analysed and comprehended; but that which is the basis of metaphysical idols, is always beyond human understanding, whilst it is still liable to greater agitation by the idea of a ghost, than from a real stump.

The art of governing the deity is cultivated for the sake of governing men. If a government or a church should by its mandates directly regulate the temporal and spiritual dispensations of the Almighty, the burst of derision would be universal; but laws, establishing tenets, tones, gesticulations and ceremonies, for the purpose of indirectly regulating these temporal and spiritual dispensations, are slyly resorted to, because they gratify man's lust of power, and flatter his aversion to a reliance on a life of moral rectitude for salvation. Laws, dictating the mode of influencing the deity, are declarations, that the deity shall be influenced by law. And the conspiracy between the priest and the proselyte, is founded in the compact, that the priest will learn the proselyte to govern the deity, if the proselyte will