But by what privilege do these four Gospels, and some other similar
books, pass for Holy and Divine more than several others, which bear no
less the title of Gospels, and which have been published under the name
of some other apostles? If it is said that the reputed Gospels are
falsely attributed to the apostles, we can say the same of the first
ones; if we suppose the first ones to be falsified and changed, we can
think the same of the others. Thus there is no positive proof to make us
discern the one from the other; in spite of the Church, which assumes to
deride the matter, it is not credible.
In regard to the pretended miracles related in the Old Testament, they
could have been performed but to indicate on the part of God an unjust
and odious discrimination between nations and between individuals;
purposely injuring the one in order to especially favor the other. The
vocation and the choice which God made of the Patriarchs, Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, in order to make for Himself of their posterity a
people which He would sanctify and bless above all other peoples of the
earth, is a proof of it. But it will be said God is the absolute master
of His favors and of His benefits; He can grant them to whomsoever He
pleases, without any one having the right to complain or to accuse Him
of injustice. This reason is useless; for God, the Author of nature, the
Father of all men, ought to love them all alike as His own work, and,
consequently, He ought to be equally their protector and their
benefactor; giving them life, He ought to give all that is necessary for
the well-being of His creatures.
If all these pretended miracles of the Old and of the New Testament were
true, we could say that God would have had more care in providing for
the least good of men than for their greatest and principal good; that
He would have punished more severely trifling faults in certain persons
than He would have punished great crimes in others; and, finally, that
He would not have desired to show Himself as beneficent in the most
pressing needs as in the least. This is easy enough to show as much by
the miracles which it is pretended that He performed, as by those which
He did not perform, and which He would have performed rather than any
other, if it is true that He performed any at all. For example, it is
claimed that God had the kindness to send an angel to console and to
assist a simple maid, while He left, and still leaves every day, a
countless number of innocents to languish and starve to death; it is
claimed that He miraculously preserved during forty years the clothes
and the shoes of a few people, while He will not watch over the natural
preservation of the vast quantities of goods which are useful and
necessary for the subsistence of great nations, and that are lost every
day by different accidents. It is claimed that He sent to the first
beings of the human race, Adam and Eve, a devil, or a simple serpent, to
seduce them, and by this means ruin all men. This is not credible! It is
claimed, that by a special providence, He prevented the King of Gerais,
a Pagan, from committing sin with a strange woman, although there would
be no results to follow; and yet He did not prevent Adam and Eve from
offending Him and falling into the sin of disobedience--a sin which,
according to our Christ-worshipers was to be fatal, and cause the
destruction of the human race. This is not credible!
Let us come to the pretended miracles of the New Testament. They
consist, as is pretended, in this: that Jesus Christ and His apostles
cured, through the Deity, all kinds of diseases and infirmities, giving
sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, making the
lame to walk, curing the paralytics, driving the devils from those who
were possessed, and bringing the dead to life.
We find several of these miracles in the Gospels, but we see a good many
more of them in the books that our Christ-worshipers have written of the
admirable lives of their saints; for in these lives we nearly everywhere
read that these pretended blessed ones cured diseases and infirmities,
expelled the devils wherever they encountered them, solely in the name
of Jesus or by the sign of the cross; that they controlled the elements;
that God favored them so much that He even preserved to them His Divine
power after their death, and that this Divine power could be
communicated even to the least of their clothing, even to their shadows,
and even to the infamous instruments of their death. It is said that the
shoe of St. Honorius raised a dead man on the sixth of January; that the
staff of St. Peter, that of St. James, and that of St. Bernard performed
miracles. The same is said of the cord of St. Francis, of the staff of
St. John of God, and of the girdle of St. Melanie. It is said that St.
Gracilien was divinely instructed as to what he ought to believe and to
teach, and that he, by the influence of his prayer, removed a mountain
which prevented him from building a church; that from the sepulchre of
St. Andrew flowed incessantly a liquor which cured all sorts of
diseases; that the soul of St. Benedict was seen ascending to Heaven
clothed with a precious cloak and surrounded by burning lamps; that St.
Dominic said that God never refused him anything he asked; that St.
Francis commanded the swallows, swans, and other birds to obey him, and
that often the fishes, rabbits, and the hares came and placed themselves
on his hands and on his lap; that St. Paul and St. Pantaleon, having
been beheaded, there flowed milk instead of blood; that the blessed
Peter of Luxembourg, in the first two years after his death (1388 and
1389), performed two thousand four hundred miracles, among which
forty-two dead were brought to life, not including more than three
thousand other miracles which he has performed since; that the fifty
philosophers whom St. Catherine converted, having all been thrown into a
great fire, their whole bodies were afterward found and not a single
hair was scorched; that the body of St. Catherine was carried off by
angels after her death, and buried by them upon Mount Sinai; that the
day of the canonization of St. Antoine de Padua, all the bells of the
city of Lisbon rang of themselves, without any one knowing how it was
done; that this saint being once near the sea-shore, and calling the
fishes, they came to him in a great multitude, and raised their heads
out of the water and listened to him attentively. We should never come
to an end if we had to report all this idle talk; there is no subject,
however vain, frivolous, and even ridiculous, on which the authors of
these "LIVES OF THE SAINTS" do not take pleasure in heaping miracles
upon miracles, for they are skillful in forging absurd falsehoods.
It is certainly not without reason that we consider these things as
lies; for it is easy to see that all these pretended miracles have been
invented but by imitating the fables of the Pagan poets. This is
sufficiently obvious by the resemblance which they bear one to another.