HKB
behalf! Perhaps it ought to be more strange, that it was the will of God that Jesus should ever have left that world which was the scene of his suffering.
Looking at the plan of human redemption, from the time of the birth of Jesus, and the incomplete finish made of it by his being taken up into heaven, leaving his followers ignorant of what he meant during his preaching on earth;--knowing, too, that the various sects have kept the world in an uproar, destroying each other by thousands, and that all these evils have taken place in consequence of Jesus being quietly seated by the right hand of God,--these considerations, and many others not noticed in this work, convince me, that the mission of Christ was not of Divine authority.
The following remarks will contain, in substance, the strongest objection against the divinity of Christ's mission; and are given by the author as presenting his final conclusions on that subject And here he would ask--If the God of the Bible is, as Christians believe, the Author of the universe, what are we to understand by the assertion, "That Jesus is seated at his right hand?" God is a spirit pervading all space, of whom one of the Scripture writers says, "In him we live, and move, and have our being." The same idea was expressed by the Greeks in reference to their supreme God,--"All things are full of Jupiter." How, then, can it be believed that the unknown power who is the God of all creation has a local dwelling place?
Jesus, after his resurrection, declared that he had "flesh and bone." How, then, he can be located with an universal spirit, is beyond human conception As Jesus is a being possessed of a tangible form, he must have a place of residence; and it is impossible that he can dwell with his God and Father in any other than a local habitation. The supposition, then, that the Almighty Ruler of all worlds has a palace on some fixed star, or planet, where Jesus has for eighteen hundred years resided in company with the Infinite Creator, surrounded by angels conversing and singing; the Devil, during the same time, "going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour" while Christians were cutting each other's throats in consequence of their disputes about the meaning of what Christ said, or the object of his performances on earth, is very unlikely, to say the least of it.
It seems astonishing that men, possessed of the noble faculty of reason, can believe that Jesus is now alive in some unknown world, and in company with the Sovereign Ruler of nature. In conclusion, the author of this work (over whose head seventy-three summers' suns have passed,) would say that he does not, cannot believe that the Jesus of the Christians has any existence but in the imagination of his followers.
REMARKS ON THE MORALITY OF NATURE
HAVING concluded my remarks on the Old and New Testaments, I have thought it proper to give a chapter on Morality. I do this to prevent the reader from concluding that, because I am not a believer in the Divine authority of the Old and New Testaments, I disregard all moral obligation, and do not hold myself accountable to God, Nature, or my fellow beings. Nothing can be further from truth than such a conclusion. If no such being as God exists, who will judge every man at the final day of accounts; and if no such judgment will ever take place, admitting all this, even then should I stand in the same relation to my fellow beings in a moral point of view.