containing the book of the law for the people, inspired by an omnipotent god, and watched over by him from a seat immediately above where it was treasured up and concealed, was surreptitiously abstracted from under the very nose of the omnipotent and all-seeing author and owner, and the thief permitted to escape; while 50,000 men had, for simply peeping into the box, been slain! Though no one was permitted to look in and live, this thief, we are told, escaped the divine eye, looked in, stole the sacred scroll, and lived to conceal it! If Maccabees was the culprit who had circumvented the deity, how was it that he lived, and long enough to hide it in a cave? How was it that, on the discovery of the loss, the divine "cloud" filled the Temple, so that "the priests could not stand to minister, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord" (1 Kings viii. 11), yet no voice to expose and denounce the man who had so cleverly circumvented his god and the priests? Then how did these priests go about their work in finding out whether the scroll of Hilkiah was genuine or not? They took it for inspection to a witch or prophetess called Huldah (2 Kings xxii. 14), who, by order "of the Lord God of Israel," commenced cursing "the place and the inhabitants." And we are asked to believe again that the omnipotent, allseeing, all-wise god "of justice and mercy," unable to discover who had stolen his scroll, flew into a rage and cursed the people during whose lifetime the scroll was found, and the place in which it was found, and let the thief and the people of his time (350 years before) escape. This conduct of the Hebrew god is certainly not in accordance with our ideas of justice, or even of decency, let alone mercy. This scroll was eventually destroyed by fire at the destruction of Jerusalem.

About a century and a half after Hilkiah's time-about B.C. 400-Ezra wrote his copy of the Law from memory. He says (2 Esdras xiv.) that he was the only man who knew it by heart, and that, after the return from captivity in Babylon (where he was seventy years), he was ordered by his God, in a dream, to retire to a field for forty days, and, aided by five scribes, to write the five books erroneously attributed to Moses. He was also given to drink (in his dream) "a cupful of strong liquor of the substance of water, but the colour of fire"!

According to Spinoza, Ezra wrote the "Pentateuch," and the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings; and this is made very probable by the frequent mention of the Sabbath, the observance of which he would have learned from the Babylonians during his captivity. There is abundant proof that the books of the O. T. were fabricated at various periods between the return from captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem in the time of Vespasian. But "Nehemiah" could not have been written till some centuries after the former event, for the writer of that book mentions Darius, King of Persia; and between Cyrus and Darius there reigned fourteen kings. Most of the so-called "Prophecies were written after the events had taken place. The pious fraud of calling the Pentateuch the "Five Books of Moses is, of course, obvious. are told in Deut. xxxi. 9 that "Moses wrote the Law and delivered it," which shows that he could not have written it, any more than he could transcribe the account of his own death, which is related in that book. The book of Joshua also describes Joshua's death; which proves another pious fraud. But Ezra's fabrications also were lost; they were placed in the Temple, which was destroyed when Jerusalem was taken by Titus, about 70 C.E., and Ezra's writings were then sent to Vespasian at Rome, but have never been heard of since.

We

There were three other so-called copies of the Hebrew Scriptures the "Septuagint," containing, besides the Pentateuch, Daniel, a few Psalms, and a portion of Isaiah. It was supposed to have been translated from the original Hebrew by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus (B.C. 270), by seventy persons-evidently Essene monks-into Greek. These were placed, so the story goes, into seventy separate cells, and completed their work in seventy-two days, when it was found that the copies agreed exactly with each other! A very pretty story for the credulous! Although the original of this Septuagint edition was destroyed during the burning of the Bruchium Library (B.C. 47), other copies were in existence; but, as "a great number of mistakes crept into the text," Origen undertook to rectify them! We are thus brought down to post-Apostolic times, and to a copy, or copies, full of errors, but rectified by Origen. The Apostles themselves—if they ever existed at all—were

simple, ignorant, and illiterate fishermen, ready to receive, and credulous enough to believe, anything coming from the monks, the only men of that day pretending to any education. This monastic production, doctored up by Origen, "bears upon its face the marks of imperfect knowledge of Hebrew, and exhibits the forms and phrases of the Macedonian Greeks then prevalent at Alexandria, with a plentiful sprinkling of Egyptian words." It was supposed to be translated into Greek for the benefit of the resident Jews at Alexandria--then a large colony. Every quotation of Scripture put into the mouth of Jesus came from this version. The L. V. of the Jewish Scriptures (of which the Douai Version is a translation), from which was derived our A. V. of King James, flowed from this Essenian Greek translation. The Samaritan Roll" of the Pentateuch was a copy of only a portion, and was never considered of value, though it harmonised more with the Septuagint than the "Massorah," or Hebrew version with traditionary notes; this is considered hopelessly corrupt, and is the version from which the R. V. is taken. This and the L. V. are not more than seven or eight centuries old.

The originals of all, as we have seen, are lost, together with about a hundred and fifty other old MSS. supposed to be inspired by the Spirit of God. Fifty-three were formerly considered by the Christian Church as "canonical"; but in 1380 fourteen were decided to be uncanonical, and were classed as "apocryphal" by Wicliffe, the Reformer and Bible translator. These fourteen books were omitted from the Protestant Bibles, though they are said in the Articles of Religion of the English State Church to be useful "for example of life and instruction of manners." So that we have no authenticated copy of the divinely-inspired bookthe same "inspired word" which Jesus is said to have "expounded" to his followers, and which he told them were able to make them wise unto salvation (Luke xxiv. 25); and "given by inspiration of God" (2 Tim. iii. 15), "as profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness "; and for the non-acceptance of which he reproves them (Luke xvi. 31; John vi. 39, 46); and containing "the Law" which he said he had "not come to destroy." We have no originals, and man is left to the mercies of pretended and faked-up copies !-copies, too,

in which the writers were so much "inspired

" that they

copied from each other. The following, placed side by side, are copied word for word from each other :

2 Kings xviii. 2 and Isaiah xxxvi. 2.

ANONYMITY Oof N. T. WRITINGS-THE MANUFACTURE OF GOSPELS--THE EARLIEST GOSPEL, ESSENIAN-SELECTION OF GOSPELS-THE FOUR CANONICAL GOSPELS— PIOUS FORGERIES-THE EPISTLES-GREEK ORIGINALS -THE DARK AGES, AND AFTER INSPIRATION BIBLICAL ACTS ATTRIBUTED TO DIVINE COMMAND-PUNISHMENT BY DEATH FOR TRIVIAL OFFENCES-Bible OBSCENITY-IMMORAL TEACHING OF THE N. T.- BORN IN SIN A SMELL OF COOKING-INSPIRED ERRORS IN SCIENCE.

AFTER noticing the legendary character of the O. T. writings, it may not surprise our readers to hear that the Gospels and Epistles of the N. T. are equally legendary, and that these are anonymous as to authorship, dates, and places. Two facts, however, are made very clear to us-viz, first, that they were not written by the persons whose names they bear, in contrast to the great antiquity of the sacred books and theologies of Paganism, and are worse than anonymous, being written many years after the lifetime of the reputed writers, and rendered almost undecipherable by the numerous additions and erasures. This was admitted by a Christian Bishop, Faustus (died 320), who says: "It is certain that the N. T. was not written either by Christ or his Apostles, but a long time after them, by some unknown persons." Yet he is satisfied to take these writings-admitted forgeries. -as inspired. Marvellous credulity! Second, that no reliance can be placed upon any single fact of history or date previous to the sixteenth century.

The fabrication of Gospels was going on to such an enormous extent in the monasteries, chiefly of Egypt and Greece, during the first four centuries of the Christian era,