Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0806505494, Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: deserve a better fate than that of being bound up, as they now are, with the trash that accompanies them, under the abused name of the Word of God. If we permit ourselves to conceive right ideas of things, we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeable- ness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honour with the name of the Word of God ; and therefore the Word of God cannot exist in any written or human language. The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of an universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.—The Word of God exists in something else.1 Did the book called the Bible excel in purity of ideas and expression all the books now extant in the world, I would not take it for my rule of faith, as being the Word of God ; because the possibility would nevertheless exist of my being imposed upon. But when I see throughout the greatest part of this book scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonour my Creator by calling it by his name. CHAPTER VIII. OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Thus much for the Bible; I now go on to the book called the New Testament. The new Testament! that is, the new Will, as if there could be two wills of the Creator. Had it been the object or the intention of Jesus Christ to establish a new religion, he would undoubtedly have writtenthe system himself, or pr...