I never read Hume on miracles; I did not need to do so; but I have always thought that the man must be very difficult to please who could not be thoroughly satisfied with the one—the unutterably great one—the miracle of the universe: made up, indeed, of millions of other miracles of its component parts, which will for ever excite the astonishment of reasoning creatures, and draw forth their adoration to the Great Author of the whole, as long as it shall please Him to gift them with the power to do so. Those who think for themselves, and can believe in one God, and reverence, adore, and worship Him, must ever feel disgusted to dwell on the endless modes of faith with which mankind have been pestered and stultified for ages past, and also feel grieved to think upon the evils—the persecutions—the wars—and the miseries, these have from time to time inflicted upon the half-civilized world. Brother has been set in enmity against brother, neighbour against neighbour, and nation against nation, fully charged with vengeance to destroy each other, and by which rivers of blood have been spilt. Jesus Christ, I believe, never said one word that could be construed into any such meaning, or to countenance any such doings; neither did any man possessed of the spirit of the Christian religion and its attendant humanity ever view all this otherwise than with horror.
It would be a tedious and an irksome task to give even a list of all the religions, as they are called, from the days of Paganism, down to the present time. Truth long struggled with error, before system after system passed away. Notwithstanding the exertions of power to keep them up, they exist now only in story. But do the laws of nature ever alter? Do the sun, moon, and stars shine in any other way than they did to the votaries of Jupiter? Do the human passions operate in any other manner than they did thousands of years ago? No, indeed! Let us, then, rejoice that true religion is independent of human caprice; it is founded upon the immutable principles of truth, reason, and common sense, and therefore must be durable as nature itself. It is not vague and mutable: it is acquired by experience, not merely the creature of chance, habit, and prejudice: it is capable of demonstration like the principles of mathematics, and its necessity is evinced by the very nature of man in society. There is a rational and an irrational belief, and how can we distinguish the one from the other without reference to the reason of the thing? If reason be abandoned, then sense and nonsense are just the same: religion becomes a chaos, and faith has no merit. I therefore believe that no faith can be acceptable to God which is not grounded on reason; nothing but truth brings us lasting and solid advantage.
But it would appear that the teachers of mankind, in this important concern, have too seldom been actuated by these pure principles, and the “caring for men’s souls” has been made only a secondary consideration. Their leading objects have been the establishment of a system of revenue and aggrandisement; and, to ensure the accomplishment of these ends, they began with children, well knowing that, when creeds and catechisms were once instilled into the infant mind, they would grow with their growth, and would acquire a firm-rooted footing; for, when early impressions and prejudices are once fixed in the mind by ignorance, they can seldom or ever be eradicated. In this state, these victims to deception might have been made Pagans in India, Mahometans in Turkey, or disciples of Confucius in China: or, have been moulded into any of the various sects of misled Christians which have, like wens and carbuncles, often disfigured the comely face of religion, and the pure and plain doctrines of Christianity.
The next important step taken by these teachers, was to get this their religion, of whatever kind it might be, interwoven deeply into all the various governments of the different countries under their influence; but, preparatory to their religion becoming firmly established, the heads of it, who were called “saints” and “fathers of the Church,” were gathered together to judge and determine upon the creeds and doctrines which were to be obeyed. Some of them might, indeed, be actuated by good and others of them by impure motives, but it always appeared to me like their own “act of parliament” to oblige people to offer to Omnipotence that kind of worship only which they had been pleased to dictate, and which by many is considered as arrogant presumption. But, when these doctrines were thus interwoven into all the different governments, they then became “part and parcel of the law of the land;” and, thus fenced, barricaded, and fortified, few ever dared to say that anything these laws promulgated was wrong; and, if any man whose mind happened to rise superior to superstition, ventured to publish his opinions of any of them, to show that they were absurd, then racks, tortures, inquisitions, and death, or fine and imprisonment, with attendant ruin, stared him in the face in this world and threateni............