Take no notice of this idolatrous Pagan who would turn God into
a Dutch president, and offer us subordinate gods like members of
parliament.
My religion, being above nature, can have no resemblance to others.
The first difference between them and us is that the source of our
religion was hidden for a very long time from the rest of the earth.
The dogmas of our fathers were buried, like ourselves, in a little
country about a hundred and fifty miles long and sixty in width. In
this well dwelt the truth that was unknown to the whole world, until
certain rebels, going forth from among us, took from it the name of
“truth” in the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero; and
presently boasted that they were establishing a new truth.
The Chaldæans recognised Alora as their father, as you know.
The Phœnicians descended from a man named Origen, according to
Sanchoniathon. The Greeks had their Prometheus; the Atlantids had
their Ouran, called in Greek Ouranos. I say nothing of the Chinese,
Hindoos, or Scythians. We had our Adam, of whom nobody ever heard
except our nation, and we only very late. It was not the Ephaistos
of the Greeks, known to the Latins as Vulcan, who invented the
art of using metals; it was Tubalcain. The whole of the West was
astonished to hear, under Constantine, that it was not Bacchus to
whom the nations owed the use of wine, but Noah, whose name none
knew in the whole Roman Empire, any more than they knew the names of
his ancestors, which were unknown throughout the earth. The anecdote
was learned only from our Bible, when it was translated into Greek;
it began to spread about that time. The sun was then seen to be no
longer the source of light; the light was created before the sun,
and separated from the darkness, as the waters were separated from
the waters. Woman was made from a rib, which God himself took out
of a sleeping man, without awakening him, and without causing his
descendants to be short of a rib.
The Tigris, Araxis, Euphrates, and Nile all had their source in the
same garden. We do not know where the garden was, but its existence
is proved, because the gate was guarded by a cherub.
Animals speak. The eloquence of a serpent was fatal to the whole
human race. A Chaldæan prophet conversed with his ass.
God, the creator of all men, is not the father of all men, but of
one family alone. This family, always wandering, left the fertile
land of Chaldæa to wander for some time in the neighbourhood of
Sodom; from this journey it acquired an incontestable right to the
city of Jerusalem, which was not yet in existence.
Our family increases at such a rate that seventy men produce, at the
end of two hundred and fifty years, six hundred and thirty thousand
men bearing arms; counting the women, children, and old men, that
amounts to about three millions. These three millions live in a small
canton of Egypt which cannot maintain twenty thousand people. For
their advantage God puts to death in one night all the first-born of
the Egyptians; and, after this massacre, instead of giving Egypt to
his people, God puts himself at their head to fly with them dry-foot
across the sea, and cause a whole generation of Jews to die in the
desert.
We have seven times been in slavery in spite of the appalling
miracles that God works for us every day, causing the moon to stand
still in midday, and also the sun. Ten out of twelve of our tribes
perished for ever. The other two are scattered and in misery. We
have always prophets, nevertheless. God descends continually among
our people alone, and mingles only with us. He appears constantly to
these prophets, his sole confidants and favourites.
He goes to visit Addo or Iddo or Jeddo, and commands him to travel
without eating. The prophet thinks that God has ordered him to eat
that he may walk better; he eats, and forthwith he is eaten by a lion
(1 _Kings_ xiii.).
God commands Isaiah to go forth among his fellow-citizens in a most
unbecoming state of attire, _discoopertis natibus_ (_Isaiah_ xx.).
God orders Jeremiah to put a yoke on his neck and a saddle on his
back (_ch._ xxvii. according to the Hebrews).
He orders Ezekiel to have himself bound, to eat a parchment book, to
lie for two hundred and ninety days on the right side and forty days
on the left side, and then to eat filth with his bread.
He commands Hosea to take a prostitute and have three children
by her; then he commands him to pay an adulterous woman and have
children by her.
Add to all these prodigies an uninterrupted series of massacres, and
you will see that among us all things are divine, because nothing is
in accordance with what men call decent laws.
Unhappily, we were not well known to other nations until we were
nearly annihilated. It was our enemies, the Christians, who made
us known when they despoiled us. They built up their system with
material taken from a bad Greek translation of our Bible. They insult
and oppress us to this day; but our turn will come. It is well known
how we will triumph at the end of the world, when there will be no
one left on the earth.