Chapter IX: Part 4: The purpose continued and concluded... "that they may receive

forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me." Good. But this is not doctrine; this is not gospel; this is not itself the promised doctrine: but it is a description of the effect, of which the promised doctrine was to be the cause.

Now it is, as we have just seen, that Paul is represented as commencing his preaching, or sallying forth upon his mission; preaching, from _instructions_ received in a supernatural way--received by revelation. Yet, after all, no such _instructions_ has he received. Thrice has the historian--once in his own person, twice in that of his hero--undertaken to produce those instructions. But by no one, from first to last, have they anywhere been produced.

Truly, then, of his own making was this Gospel which Paul went preaching; of his own making, as well as of his own using; that Gospel, which he himself declares to his Galatians was not of man, was not, therefore, of those Apostles, to whom the opposition made by him is thus proclaimed.

When, after having given in his own person an account of a supposed occurrence,--an historian, on another occasion, takes up the same occurrence; and, in the person of another individual, gives of that same occurrence another account different from, and so different from, as to be irreconcileable with it; can this historian, with any propriety, be said to be himself a believer in this second account which he thus gives? Instead of giving it as a true account, does he not, at any rate, in respect of all the several distinguishable circumstances in which it differs from the account given in his own person--give it in the character of a fable? a fable invented on the occasion on which the other person is supposed to speak--invented in the intent that it shall promote the purpose for which this speech is supposed to be made? Yet this account, which in the eyes of the very man by whom it is delivered to us, is but a fable, even those to whom in this same character of a fable it is delivered--this account it is that _Christians_ have thus long persisted in regarding, supporting, and acting upon, as if it were from beginning to end, a truth--a great body of truth!--O Locke! O Newton! where was your discernment!

On such evidence would any Judge fine a man a shilling? Would he give effect to a claim to that amount? Yet such is the evidence, on the belief of which the difference between happiness and misery, both in intensity as well as duration, infinite, we are told, depends!