to their own devices, or the intuitive convictions of their own minds, leaving them to exercise their boasted freedom of will. Theologians contend that God's moral laws do not operate in producing effects in the same latent, but unceasingly active way that material processes do; but Isaiah says, that the will of the Eternal accomplishes its inscrutable prepurposed designs just in the same way that rain, dew, and snow descend and water the ground, giving seed to the sower, and bread to the eater.

When the more recent scriptures in Greek are referred to, we find Trinitarians accusing Unitarian theologians of defective scholarship, while on the other hand Dr. Channing, a Unitarian theist, contends that "The apostles wrote in a "very peculiar dialect of the Greek language, and the "precise import of their words frequently eludes even the "most learned."

In another place he says:

"No book is so badly explained as this Bible. Men are "reconciled to superficial modes of thinking in religion "which they would scorn in any other subject; such "truths are shadowy and unreal. Faith is traditional, "lifeless, and superficial, not deliberate and profound con"viction."

Dr. Channing is not far wrong in saying that the dialect of Greek in which the New Testament is written is "very "peculiar," for it is the "Tim Bobbin" of that tongue; and to make matters worse, it is plain, from the caution given by John in his Revelations, that no small amount of patching and mending was going on in the work of writing and multiplying manuscript copies. This colouring up and toning down is evidenced here and there by critical scholarship, which has exposed the glaring fact of some amount of forgery, and indicated the possibility of a further "stock" not yet "taken." If the main facts in this new Greek testament be conceded to be true, the same cannot be allowed for theological inferences, said to have been drawn by eye witnesses, of some of these facts. The Greek must be corroborated by the Hebrew, so that wherever and when

FORGERIES IN THE GREEK SCRIPTURES.

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ever the former is contradicted by the latter, then it ought certainly to be suspected, or actually rejected, as being evidently the work of what theologians call "pious fraud!" for in the very earliest days of the church its dykes had given way, and the land was made a vast swamp of rushes and worthless weeds by the bursting in of the muddy waters of rabbinical and oriental mysticism. No sooner was the true grain sown, than side by side with this good seed-wheat, the tares were scattered broadcast over the same soil, and both wheat and tares are left to grow up side by side, until the messenger of judgment thrusts in his sickle for the harvest.

Truth, it is said, lies at the bottom of a well, and is not to be brought to the top by mere bawling for it. The great secret of man's destiny lay in the grave, and Jesus of Nazareth went down into the grave to bring that secret to light. He did not confine himself to preaching, praying, or psalm singing his mission, he acted it, for true religion is action, or the faith of active obedience. By Jesus' death and subsequent resurrection the truth of the children's inheritance of immortality in a material body was rescued from the vague, illogical, ill taught, and loosely held speculations of empirical metaphysicians, and made a positive, material, scientific, or natural fact.

Jesus' claim to be the anointed Son of the eternal Father, was not theologically maintained, for if it had been, the Jewish clergy would easily have been enabled to put him down, or he would, in his turn, have converted them. He taught naturally, not theologically, as Nicodemus found when he went to consult him by night, and was told that the regenerating theory of the rabbins was a mistake, because it was based upon the abstract metaphysical dogma of man's immortality. Jesus explained to this Rabbi that man was not an immortal or child of God until he was brought to the "second birth;" meaning that man is a mere fœtus in the womb of material and maternal nature, and so is not truly born a child of God until he has been carried by the travailing process of natural gestation to this second or real birth, and thus ushered from the womb of his maternal

parent, nature, into the great light of the Divine Father's Omnipresence.

Nicodemus was told that mankind, so far from being immortals, are perishable, and consequently they must be, in relation to the great eternal self-existence, nothing more than temporal, ephemeral, or aborted births, and unless they are carried through to the second birth must perish. This doctrine staggered the Rabbi, but he was reproached with being ignorant of natural law, while he set up as a master teacher in Israel. The Jewish clergy taught regeneration precisely as modern theologians do; for conceiving man to be an immortal soul, they believed it to be sin-stained from the fall, and that it required renewing grace to purify it, and give it salvation from condemnation to eternal punishment; but Jesus knocked this system upon the head, by showing that man is not an immortal soul at all, for that only which is born of God is truly immortal, while that which is born of man is like its parents, ephemeral, mortal, or abortive.

The Jews said that they knew God, and that he was their Father, but Jesus disputed their claim, and told them that it was forged, and that they did not know God at all; for this he uses the strongest form of denial that could be framed, He says, I know him, and if I said that I knew him not, I should be as great a liar as you when you say that you do. He was asked for proof of his claim, and he refers to their own scriptures, where it is recorded of the children of light, "I have said ye are gods;" and he argued, that if those men were begotten, self-existent, immortal beings, or gods. to whom that word of generative creation came, then he himself, begotten by the same divine word of life, must be also a Son of God; but the Jews neither could nor would see, because pre-conceived theological prejudices had blinded them.

Jesus of Nazareth, was a modern revelation of an existence that had long before been revealed on this planet and in other worlds. The hypothesis of the personality of deity in the son of man for the first and sole time in Jesus' case, can only be sustained by ignoring and misinterpreting the entire record of the Hebrew canonical scriptures.

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We are told, that God sent his Son of self-existence into this world, that all who received and accepted his word should not perish, but have, in that sonship, eternal life. Now the gloss put upon this declaration by sacerdotalism is this, namely, that the word perish is not the antithesis of eternal life, that is to say eternal death, but that perish equally refers to eternal life, but it is life in eternal misery. This theological perversion of scripture is persevered in throughout the entire Bible. Life, in theological glossaries, means life, but death does not mean death; life and death, in fact, mean theologically the self-same thing, only the former is a reward and the latter a punishment. Thus, to destroy body and soul in hell, does not mean absolute destruction, in priestly creeds; it means, actually, eternal preservation. The Bible says that eternal life is a FREE GIFT, but theologians say “No, it is a reward," thus destroying the freedom of the gift; again the Bible says, that the punishment or reward of man's sin is his death, theologians correct as usual, and assert that the punishment or reward of sin is not death eternal but life eternal, although life in eternal torment.

The witness borne by the Evangelist John, in the first chapter of the gospel bearing his name as author, respecting the character of Jesus of Nazareth, as a prophet and messenger of God, is to the effect that Jesus was truly and positively the "Anointed One," or Son of the eternal Father, who, being himself self-existent, necessarily begets, by the word of his generation, offspring self-existent in their turn, and therefore, Jesus, as a Son, possessed his Father's prerogative of self-existent vitality, and was commissioned to generate, by this inheritance of eternal or selfexistent power, incarnate in himself, as many of the sons of mankind as were prepared by the universal Father to receive his call.

But the men of his day, who had been carefully theologically trained to consider themselves children of God by birthright as lineal descendants of Abraham and the patriarchs, and being further traditionallly convinced of the

immortality of their souls, they were neither prepared to accept Jesus' authority, nor were they willing to believe his positive claim to be really and truly the anointed Son or the Christ of the eternal Father, for his teaching was not the vague slip slop discourse of conventional pietists, but he spoke authoritatively as that "Son of man," who was

missioned to pull down and build up; thus his ruthless demolition of the Jewish sacerdotal edifice, goaded the clergy to rouse the people to active hostility, and they finally determined to take his life, for in relation to their theology, he was practically an atheist, since he denied that any one of them knew God.

There is a very remarkable and unmistakeable resemblance between the day when this prophet appeared and the present times.

If any nation upon earth possessed reasonable grounds whereon to build their assumed knowledge of Deity, surely this Jewish people could claim it, for their temple had once been the spot chosen for visible manifestation of Deity, in the personality of his Son as "messenger of the Lord." These Jews had all the presumed advantages that a regularly ordained sacerdotal class could give; their atonement, purifications, absolutions, sacraments, as means and pledges of regenerating and sanctifying grace, were as theologically perfect as they appear to be now; and yet, notwithstanding all this clerical assistance, and their orthodox means of grace, they were repeatedly warned by this Son and prophet that they really knew not God. Aye, not only were they told so, but it was proved to demonstration to be the case. The Jewish priests and misguided laity condemned Jesus to death, because he knocked their national sacerdotal scaffolding from under their feet; and because he shewed them to be, from high priest down to the lowest scribe, a hypocritical, psalm-singing, canting, lying generation, whose pretended worship of God was the veriest cant, because confined to the lip service of the ritualism of repeating prayer, and the observance of effete formulas; their fasting and alms-giving being mere show for human regard, and their theology the