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but your relinquishment of your devotion to your sacred books, your acknowedgement that they are fables, would be a powerful blow struck at the remains of Christianity, and afford you something like retaliation for the oppressions and persecutions which these Christians have heaped upon you and your fathers." (2.) AND FURTHER, time and place particularly above libelled, you the said James Affleck did wickedly and feloniously publish, vend, and circulate, by then and there giving to the said John Nugent, in consideration of the sum of sixpence, or some other small sum of money then and there paid by the said John Nugent to you as the price thereof, a profane, impious, and blasphemous book or printed work entitled, "The Prayer of Nang-si, a Disciple of Confucius, translated from the original Chinese, with Notes," tending to asperse, vilify, ridicule, and bring into contempt the Holy Scriptures and the Christian Religion, and full of impious blasphemies against God, conceived in the following terms:-"O Tien, the adorable! we worship thee, although we have no proof of thine existence, seeing thou art inaccessible to our senses; neither can it be demonstrated by those who talk to us in thy name. But as our legislators have made unbelief of thee criminal, we prostrate our understanding at the altar of their power, and bow submissive before thy throne. O Tien, the unknown! our doctors call thee a pure spirit, which is nothing that we know. They term thee infinite, occupying all space, which is matter. They say thou art eternal; for no one can conceive a time when matter did not exist. They entitle thee omnipotent; for nature's laws cannot be broken. They give thee the appellation of immutable,—as the course of things never change. Again, O Tien the Holy!-thy priests and favourites tell us of having seen thee; and they say that thou art possessed of human parts, together with human passions. But yet, O Tien, who inhabits the thick darkness! all allow that thy nature is inscrutable, and thy essence incomprehensible. Accordingly, they have formed thee of negations, and clothed thee with inconsistent qualities and contradictory attributes. And thus, O Tien! thou becomest all things to all men.

"O Tien, who fillest all space! let us approach thy throne, and humble ourselves before thee, who does not regard the attitude of men. O thou, who knowest all things, condescend to be informed of our wants; and we will inform thee how things go on here below. From thy omniscience nothing can be bid; therefore do we come to confess our faults

before thee, and make known our transgressions, because we have sinned and offended against thy holy law, in consequence of thy foreordaining every action of our lives. Yea, thou art an independent and Almighty Being, who cannot be offended, or want any of our futile offices. O Tien, who art unchangeable, the same yesterday, to day, and for ever, change, we pray thee, the eternal laws of nature, which alter not; let events become uncertain and fluctuating,-destroy the necessary connexion between cause and effect, to gratify our whim and caprice. O Tien, the immutable! change, we pray thee, the nature of the elements, stop the gravitation of bodies, and alter the weather, so as to suit us; and we sincerely hope thou would hear us in these respects, as we have been told that thou hast often repented and changed thy mind. Infinitely wise Tien, who pronounced every thing very good, we thy mole-eyed children have sagacity enough to see that the plans of thy infinite wisdom are not suited to our circumstances to procure us that happiness we so ardently wish; and we believe that thou once intended to destroy thy own work, because it pleased thee not. We beseech thee be pleased to patch and mend this work of thine as we shall give directions, and comply with all the contradictory demands of the human race to please the folly of man. Ŏ Tien! we know that justice is a human virtue; allow us to call thee just, and, as a consequence, act contrary to all our conception of justice; fall out with thy children, the work of thine hands, and condemn them to eternal torments, for acting according to the laws of that nature thou gave them; for describing that course thou caused them to pursue; impute the sins thou predestinated them to commit to thy dear Son Fo (who is also thyself) whom thou sent to suffer for man's disobedience; then forgive them freely all they owe thee, after being paid to the very utmost, still retaining the far greatest number as victims of thy everlasting vengeance, for thy mercy endureth for ever!!

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"Ŏ Thou, who art the Father of All! take a liking for only a few of thy creatures; pick out the most barbarous and wicked people on earth for thy chosen; communicate thy secrets, and reveal thy will to the most worthless among this banditti; and may these favourites of thine become patterns of moral conduct for all nations to, imitate. For thy loving kindness and tender mercy sake, O Tien! and because thou hast made of one flesh all the nations of the earth, pour out thy wrath and indignation, we pray thee, on the

rest of thy children; make them slaves to toil and sweat for thy chosen people; or harden their hearts to defend their lives and property; and thus give thy favourites an opportunity of killing them with impunity, and destroying every thing that breatheth, that thy infinite goodness may be manifest to all people. O Tien! fountain of reason,-prevent us, we pray thee, from being guided by its dictates in any of our religious concerns. May we continue blind, and obstinately attached to the most ridiculous follies and glaring absurdities, if recommended to us by thy priests as coming from thee. May we never be so impious as to compare the works which we see with the stories they tell concerning thee. O Tien! who made us what we are,-gave us a nature we cannot change,-governs us by circumstances we cannot alter, and has placed us in a situation we cannot mend, pardon all our sins, we pray thee, through the merits of the atoning blood of thy Son Fo;-for thy grace faileth never!!

"O Tien! we know thou created every thing for thine own glory; thou must therefore be vain and fond of flattery as we are; accept, we beseech thee, of our adulation, and be highly pleased with the fine things we shall call thee. We thank thee, O Tien! for the bounties of nature; and that, by a wise dispensation of thy providence, a few tyrants devour the choicest of these blessings, leaving the rest of their fellow men to toil, hunger, and want. We thank thee, O Tien! that, being a good father, thou put thy innocent Son to death to satisfy thy justice, and thus gave us a grand example of paternal affection; this we praise thee for, and call it the wonders of redeeming love. O Tien! we laud and praise thy name for calling all, and electing only some, to the enjoyment of eternal felicity. We also thank thee that, disregarding merit and virtue, thou hast set wide the gates of heaven to blind credulity and bigot zeal, and has made the belief of whims and absurdities the only sure passport to the celestial regions; and has made that undefinable quality, faith, which we can never acquire, unless it is given us by thyself, the only sure road to heaven,-reason and virtue being no guides to that blessed place. And, as thou hast thus been pleased to people paradise with the scourges of the human race, we hope, O Tien! few men of sense or virtue will choose such company. All glory, honour, and praise, be thine, O Tien! evermore. AMEN." (3.) AND FURTHER, on the 20th, or on one or other of the days of the said month of February, 1824, or of January immediately

preceding, or of March immediately following, in the place particularly above libelled, you the said James Affleck did. wickedly and feloniously publish, vend, and circulate, by then and there giving to the said John Nugent, in exchange for the sum of three shillings, or some other sum of money then and there paid by the said John Nugent to you as the price thereof, a profane, impious, and blasphemous book or printed work, entitled "Jehovah Unveiled, or the Character of the Jewish Deity delineated, with Strictures on the Lives of Hebrew Saints, and Remarks on the Theocracy, to which is prefixed a Letter to the Bishop Landaff," and which book or printed work contains many passages denying the truth and authority of the Holy Scriptures and of the Christian Religion, and tending to asperse, vilify, ridicule, and bring into contempt the Holy Scriptures and the Christian Religion; and particularly the following passage:-" I have found the Bible attributing to the Jewish Deity attributes repugnant to holiness, truth, justice, goodness; but whether the Jews or your Reverence take him for the Supreme Being or not, I will not pretend to say. Besides, I have found it representing him with human parts, as well as human passions and infirmities. If it does not exclude him from the government of the world, it makes him ignorant of what is going on in it; and represents him as partial, arbitrary, and capricious. It makes him a ferocious monster, cruel, unjust, and deceitful; making those miserable whom his omnipotence caused to exist. And if it does not assign the origin of the world to chance, it constructs one very different from this we live in, and as ridiculous as an eternal conflict of atoms can be supposed to do:" As also the following passage:-" Your Reverence affects great concern about the interest of morality, if ever Deism should become prevalent. To be sure you have displayed a good deal of priestly eloquence to persuade us that Judaism and Christianity are godly systems, and of their beneficial tendency. But whoever will read ecclesiastical history will soon perceive their fatal influence on the happiness of mankind; they may there see Christian and Jewish saints' emulate, in the transcendant flagitiousness of their lives, the impure morals of the Bible Deity.' Unhappily. it is not in Christianity that we must look for the friend of morality. Were it necessary to enter into a discussion of the merits of the two systems of nature and revelation, permit me to state to you what, in my opinion, would have been a better mode of proceeding than writing an Apology for the Bible, better suited to the

character of an impartial enquirer after truth. If sincere in your desire to distinguish the true character of Deism, you would have examined if it had raised any wars, set on foot any crusades, destroyed any villages, or sacked towns, burnt any cities, or had any inquisitions and auto de fes; if its history recorded any massacres and rebellions; if it requires a tenth of the produce of cultivated nature, the prejudices of education, and a number of artifices to keep up its semblance among mankind. Having found none of those things in Deism, but finding them all in Christianity, you would also examine the pure and simple precepts of reason, and contrast them with the absurdities, contradictions, and inconsistencies of revelation, which have occasioned ten thousand stupid sects, contending with each other about the most contemptible follies, who have convulsed society, and deluged the world with blood. Recollect the maxim of your God, by their fruits ye shall know them.'

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My Lord, this little work has a peculiar claim to your patronage; it was in compliance with your better mode' of examining the Bible that ever it had an existence; it, therefore, flies for protection to your reverence, to shelter itself under the wings of your Episcopal dignity. It is true, I have not found that character of holiness, truth, justice, goodness,' ascribed to the Deity, which you so confidently maintain; and I am persuaded it cannot be found there. So far from that, it ascribes to God cruelty, unjustice, deceit, fraud, and the worst of human vices:" As also the following passage:-" But, setting aside these objections, we shall endeavour to draw the character of the Jewish God from the Bible only, which, his votaries say, is his own word. There, instead of a just and merciful God, the benevolent father of his children, the universal parent, and the rewarder of virtue, and punisher of vice,-we find a being cruel, unjust, angry, vindictive, and fluctuating: In short, a being made up of every bad passion, and the worst of human vices. The baneful effects that these representations of the Divinity have had upon the happiness of social life, have been too fatally evinced in instigating the ignorant and unthinking to deeds of bloodshed and horror, under the false pretext of being serviceable to God and Religion. these they have been inspired with a spirit of animosity and party rage, mutually hating each other. Hence those numerous and destructive wars on account of opinions and religious ceremonies; those horrid massacres and sanguinary executions which have so often stained the annals of eccle

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