TO MR. MOORE, OF NEW YORK,

COMMONLY CALLED

BISHOP MOORE.

I have read in the newspapers your account of the visit you made to the unfortunate General Hamilton, and of administering to him a ceremony of your church which you call the Holy Com

munion.

I regret the fate of General Hamilton, and I so far hope with you that it will be a warning to thoughtless man not to sport away the life that God has given him; but with respect to other parts of your letter I think it very reprehensible and betrays great ignorance of what true religion is. But you are a priest, you get your living by it, and it is not your wordly interest to undecieve yourself.

After giving an account of your administering to the deceased what you call the Holy Communion, you add, "By reflecting on this melancholy event let the humble believer be encouraged ever to hold fast that precious faith which is the only source of true consolation in the last extremity of nature. Let the infidel be persuaded to abandon his opposition to the Gospel."

To show you, sir, that your promise of consolation from scripture has no foundation to stand upon, I will cite to you one of the greatest falsehoods upon record, and which was given, as the record says, for the purpose, and as a promise, of consolation.

In the epistle called "the First Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians," (chap. 4) the writer consoles the Thessalonians as to the case of their friends who were already dead. He does this by informing them, and he does it he says, by the word of the Lord, (a most notorious falsehood) that the general resurrection of the dead, and the ascension of the living, will be in his and their days; that their friends will then come to life again; that the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we (says he, v. 17) which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with THEM in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord-wherefore comfort one another with these words."

Delusion and falsehood cannot be carried higher than they are in this passage. You, sir, are but a novice in the art. The words admit of no equivocation. The whole passage is in the first person

and the present tense, "We which are alive." Had the writer meant a future time, and a distant generation, it must have been in the third person and the future tense, "They who shall then be alive." I am thus particular for the purpose of nailing you down to the text, that you may not ramble from it, nor put other constructions upon the words than they will bear, which priests are very apt to do.

Now, sir, it is impossible for serious man, to whom God has given the divine gift of reason, and who employs that reason to reverence and adore the God that gave it, it is, I say impossible for such a person to put confidence in a book that abounds with fable and falsehood as the New Testament does. This passage is but a sample of what I could give you.

You call on those whom you style “infidels,” (and they in return might call you an idolater, a worshiper of false gods, a preacher of false doctrine) "to abandon their opposition to the Gospel." Prove, sir, the Gospel to be true, and the opposition will cease of itself; but until you do this, (which we know you cannot do) you have no right to expect they will notice your call. If by infidels you mean Deists, (and you must be exceedingly ignorant of the origin of the word Deist, and know but little of Deus, to put that construction upon it,) you will find yourself over-matched if you begin or engage in a controversy with them. Priests may dispute with priests, and sectaries with sectaries, about the meaning of what they agree to call scripture, and end as they began; but when you engage with a Deist you must keep to fact. Now, sir. you cannot prove a single article of your religion to be true, and we tell you so publicly. Do it, if you can. The Deistical article, the belief of a God, with which your creed begins, has been borrowed by your church from the ancient Deists, and even this article you dishonour by putting a dream-begotten phantom* which you call his son over his head, and treating God as if he was superannated. Deism is the only profession of religion that admits of worshipping and reverencing God in purity, and the only one on which the thoughtful mind can repose with undisturbed tranquility. God is almost forgotten in the Christian religion. Every thing, even the creation, is ascribed to the son of Mary.

In religion, as in every thing else, perfection consists in simplicity. The Christian religion of Gods within Gods, like wheels

The first chapter of Mathew, relates that Joseph, the betrothed husband of Mary, dreamed that an angel told him that his intended bride was with child by the Holy Ghost. It is not every husband, whether carpenter or priest, that can be so easly satisfied, for lo! it was a dream. Whether Mary was in a dream when this was done we are not told. It is, however, a comical story. There is no woman living can understand it.

within wheels, is like a complicated machine that never goes right, and every projector in the art of Christianity is trying to mend it. It is its defects that have caused such a number and variety of tinkers to be hammering at it, and still it goes wrong. In the visible world no time-keeper can go equally true with the sun; and in like manner, no complicated religion can be equally true with the pure and unmixed religion of Deism.

Had you not offensively glanced at a description of men whom you call by a false name, you would not have been troubled nor honoured with this address; neither has the writer of it any desire or intention to enter into controversy with you. He thinks the temporal establishment of your church politically unjust and offensively unfair; but with respect to religion itself, distinct from temporal establishments, he is happy in the enjoyment of his own, and he leaves you to make the best you can of yours.

A MEMBER OF THE DEISTICAL CHURCH,

TO JOHN MASON,

One of the Ministers of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, of New York.

With Remarks on his account of the visit he made to the late General Hamilton.

"Come now, let us REASON together, saith the Lord." This is one of the passages you quoted from your bible, in your conversation with General Hamilton, as given in your letter, signed with your name, and published in the Commercial Advertiser, and other New York papers, and I re-quote the passage to shew that your Text and your Religion contradict each other.

It is impossible to reason upon things not comprehensible by reason; and therefore, if you keep to your text, which priests seldom do, (for they are generally either above it, or below it, or forget it,) you must admit a religion to which reason can apply, and this, certainly, is not the Christian religion.

There is not an article in the Christian religion that is cognizable by reason. The Deistical article of your religion, the belief of a God, is no more a Christian article, than it is a Mahometan article. It is an universal article, common to all religions, and which is held

in greater purity by Turks than by Christians; but the Deistical' church is the only one which holds it in real purity; because that church acknowledges no co-partnership with God. It believes in him solely; and knows nothing of Sons, married Virgins, nor Ghosts. It holds all these things to be the fables of priest-craft.

Why then do you talk of reason, or refer to it, since your religion has nothing to do with reason, nor reason with that. You tell people, as you told Hamilton, that they must have faith! Faith in what? You ought to know that before the mind can have faith in’ any thing, it must either know it as a fact, or see cause to believe it on the probability of that kind of evidence that is cognizable by reason: But your religion is not within either of these cases; for, in the first place, you cannot prove it to be fact; and in the second place, you cannot support it by reason, not only because it is not cognizable by reason, but because it is contrary to reason. What reason can there be in supposing, or believing, that God put himself to death, to satisfy himself, and be revenged on the Devil on account of Adam; for tell the story which way you will it comes to this at last.

As you can make no appeal to reason in support of an unreasonable religion, you then (and others of your profession) bring yourselves off by telling people, they must not believe in reason but in revelation. This is the artifice of habit without reflection. It is putting words in the place of things; for do you not see, that when you tell people to believe in revelation, you must first prove that what you call revelation, is revelation; and as you cannot do this, you put the word which is easily spoken, in the place of the thing you cannot prove. You have no more evidence that your Gospel is revelation than the Turks have that their Koran is revelation, and the only difference between them and you is, that they preach their delusion and you preach yours.

In your conversation with General Hamilton, you say to him, "The simple truths of the Gospel which require no abstruse investigation, but faith in the veracity of God, who cannot lie, are best suited to your present condition."

If those matters you call "simple truths," are what you call them, and require no abstruse investigation, they would be so obvious that reason would easily comprehend them; yet the doctrine you preach at other times is, that the mysteries of the Gospel are beyond the reach of reason. If your first position be true, that they are simple truths, priests are unnecessary, for we do not want preachers to tell us the sun shines; and if your second be true, the case, as to effect, is the same, for it is waste of money to pay a man to explain unexplainable things, and loss of time to listen to him. That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests cannot, or that the bible does not. Did not Paul lie when he told the Thessalonians that the general res

urrection of the dead would be in his life-time, and that he should gó up alive along with them into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. 1 Thes. chap. 4. v. 27.

You spoke of what you call, "the precious blood of Christ." This savage style of language belongs to the priests of the Christian religion. The professors of this religion say they are shocked at the accounts of human sacrifices of which they read in the histories of some countries. Do they not see that their own religion is founded on a human sacrifice, the blood of man, of which their priests talk like so many butchers. It is no wonder the Christian religion has been so bloody in its effects, for it began in blood, and many thousands of human sacrifices have since been offered on the altar of the Christian religion.

It is necessary to the character of a religion, as being true, and immutable as God himself is, that the evidences of it be eqally the same through all periods of time and circumstance. This is not

the case with the Christian religion, nor with that of the Jews that preceeded it, (for there was a time, and that within the knowledge of history, when these religions did not exist) nor is it the case with any religion we know of but the religion of Deism. In this the evidences are eternal and universal." The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handy work,— Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.' But all other religions are made to arise from some local circumstance, and are introduced by some temporary trifle which its partizans call a miracle, but of which there is no proof but the story of it.

The Jewish religion, according to the history of it, began in a wilderness, and the Christian religion in a stable. The Jewish books tells us of wonders exhibited upon mount Sinai. It happened that nobody lived there to condradict the account. The Christian books tell us of a star that hung over the stable at the birth of Jesus. There is no star there now, nor any person living that saw it. But all the stars in the heavens bear eternal evidence to the truth of Deism. It did not begin in a stable, nor in a wilderness. It began every where. The theatre of the universe is the place of its birth.

* This Psalm (19) which is a Deistical Psalm, is so much in the manner of some parts of the book of Job, (which is not a book of the Jews, and does not belong to the bible) that it has the appearance of having being translated into Hebrew from the same language in which the book of Job was originally written, and brought by the Jews from Chaldea or Persia, when they returned from captivity. The contemplation of the heavens made a great part of the religious devotion of the Chaldeans and Persians, and their religious festivals were regulated by the progress of the sun through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. But the Jews knew nothing about the Heavens, or they would not have told the foolish story of the sun's standing still upon a hill, and the moon in a valley. What could they want the moon for in the day time?