the dream, and after a few minutes it will sometimes happen that the principal passages of the dream will occur to us more fully. The cause of this is, that the memory will sometimes continue slumbering or sleeping after we are awake ourselves, and that so fully, that it may and sometimes does happen, that we do not immediately recollect where we are, nor what we have been about, or what we have to do. But when the memory starts into wakefulness, it brings the knowledge of these things back upon us like a flood of light, and sometimes the dream with it.

But the most curious circumstance of the mind in a state of dream, is the power it has to become the agent of every person, character, and thing of which it dreams. It carries on conversation with several, asks questions, hears answers, gives and receives information, and it acts all these parts itself.

But however various and eccentric the imagination may be in the creation of images and ideas, it cannot supply the place of memory, with respect to things that are forgotten when we are awake. For example, if we have forgotten the name of a person, and dream of seeing him, and asking him his name, he cannot tell it; for it is ourselves asking ourselves the question.

It

But though the imagination cannot supply the place of real memory, it has the wild faculty of counterfeiting memory. dreams of persons it never knew, and talks with them as if it remembered them as old acquaintances. It relates circumstances that never happened, and tells them as if they had happened. It goes to places that never existed, and knows where all the streets and houses are, as if it had been there before. The scenes it cre ates often appear as scenes remembered. It will sometimes act a dream within a dream, and in the delusion of dreaming tell a dream it never dreamed, and tell it as if it was from memory. It may also be remarked, that the imagination in a dream has no idea of time as time. It counts only by circumstances; and if a succession of circumstances pass in a dream that would require a great length of time to accomplish them, it will appear to the dreamer that a length of time equal thereto has passed also.

As this is the state of the mind in dream, it may rationally be said that every person is mad once in twenty-four hours; for were he to act in the day as he dreams in the night, he would be con fined for a lunatic. In a state of wakefulness, those three faculties being all active, and acting in unison, constitute the rational man, In dreams it is otherwise, and, therefore, that state which is called insanity appears to be no other than disunion of those faculties and a cessation of the judgment, during wakefulness, that we so often experience during sleep; and idiocy, into which some persons have fallen, is that cessation of all the faculties of which we can be sensible when we happen to wake before our memory.

In this view of the mind, how absurd is it to place reliance upon dreams, and how much more absurd to make them a foun

dation for religion! yet the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, begotten by the Holy Ghost, a being never heard of before, stands on the story of an old man's dream. "And behold the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph, in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." Matt. chap. i. ver. 20.

After this we have the childish stories of three or four other dreams; about Joseph going into Egypt; about his coming back again; about this, and about that: and this story of dreams has thrown Europe into a dream for more than a thousand years. All the efforts that nature, reason, and conscience, have made to awaken man from it, have been ascribed by priestcraft and superstition to the workings of the devil; and had it not been for the American revolution, which, by establishing the universal right of conscience, first opened the way to free discussion, and for the French revolution which followed, this religion of dreams had continued to be preached, and that after it had ceased to be believed. Those who preached it and did not believe it, still believed the delusion necessary. They were not bold enough to be honest, nor honest enough to be bold.

Every new religion, like a new play, requires a new apparatus of dresses and machinery, to fit the new characters it creates. The story of Christ in the New Testament brings a new being upon the stage, which it calls the Holy Ghost; and the story of Abraham the father of the Jews, in the Old Testament, gives existence to a new order of beings it calls angels. There was no Holy Ghost before the time of Christ, nor angels before the time of Abraham. We hear nothing of these winged gentlemen, till more than two thousand years, according to the Bible chronology, from the time they say the heavens, the earth, and all therein were made. After this, they hop about as thick as birds in a grove. The first we hear of pays his addresses to Hagar in the wilderness; then three of them visit Sarah; another wrestles a fall with Jacob: and these birds of passage, having found their way to earth and back, are continually coming and going. They eat and drink, and up again to heaven. What they do with the food they carry away in their bellies the Bible does not tell us. Perhaps they do as the birds do, discharge it as they fly; for neither the Scripture nor the church hath told us there are necessaryhouses for them in heaven.

One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as scripture religion is, could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism could do, and credulity believe.

From angels in the Old Testament we get to prophets, to witches, to seers of visions, and dreamers of dreams, and sometimes we are told, as in 1 Sam. chap. ix. ver. 15, that God whispers in the ear. At other times we are not told how the impulse

was given, or whether sleeping or waking. In 2 Sam. chap. xxiv. ver. 1, it is said, "And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, to say, Go number Israel and Judah."-And in 1 Chron. chap. xxi. ver. 1, when the same story is again related, it is said, " And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel."

Whether this was done sleeping or waking we are not told, but it seems that David, whom they call " a man after God's own heart," did not know by what spirit he was moved; and as to the men called inspired penmen, they agree so well about the matter, that in one book they say that it was God, and in the other that it was the devil.

Yet this is the trash the church imposes upon the world as the word of God! this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the Holy Bible! this is the rubbish called revealed religion!

The idea that writers of the Old Testament had of a God was boisterous, contemptible, and vulgar. They make him the Mars of the Jews, the fighting God of Israel, the conjuring God of their priests and prophets. They tell as many fables of him as the Greeks told of Hercules.

They put him against Pharaoh, as it were to box with him; and as Moses carries the challenge, they make their God to say, insultingly, "I will get me honour upon Pharaoh, and upon his host, upon his chariots, and upon his horsemen." And that he may keep his word, they make him set a trap in the Red Sea, in the dead of the night, for Pharaoh, his host, and his horses, and drown them as a rat-catcher would do so many rats. Great honour indeed! The story of Jack the Giant-killer is better told !

They match him against the Egyptian magicians to conjure with him; and after bad conjuring on both sides, (for where there is no great contest, there is no great honour,) they bring him off victorious. The three first essays are a dead match; each party turns his rod into a serpent, the rivers into blood, and creates frogs; but upon the fourth, the God of the Israelites obtains the laurel-he covers them all over with lice! The Egyptian magicians cannot do the same, and this lousy triumph proclaims the victory!

They make their God to rain fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and belch fire and smoke upon mount Sinai, as if he was the Pluto of the lower regions. They made him salt up Lot's wife like pickled pork; they make him pass, like Shakspeare's Queen Mab, into the brains of their priests, prophets, and prophetesses, and tickles them into dreams: and after making him play all kind of tricks, they confound him with Satan, and leave us at a loss to know what God they meant.

This is the descriptive God of the Old Testament; and as to the New, though the authors of it have varied the scene, they continued the vulgarity.

Is man ever to be the dupe of priestcraft, the slave of supersti

tion? Is he never to have just ideas of his Creator! It is better not to believe that there is a God than to believe of him falsely. When we behold the mighty universe that surrounds us, and dart our contemplation into the eternity of space, filled with innumerable orbs, revolving in eternal harmony, how paltry must the tales of the Old and New Testaments, profanely called the word of God, appear to thoughtful man! The stupendous wisdom and unerring order that reign and govern throughout this wondrous whole, and call us to reflection, put to shame the Bible!-The God of eternity and of all that is real is not the God of passing dreams and shadows of man's imagination! The God of truth is not the God of fable; the belief of a God begotten and a God crucified is a God blasphemed. It is making a profane use of reason.

I shall conclude this Essay on Dreams with the two first verses of the 34th chapter of Ecclesiasticus, one of the books of the Apocrypha.

Ver. 1, "The hopes of a man void of understanding are vain and false! and dreams lift up fools.--Whoso regardeth dreams is like him that catches at a shadow, and followeth after the wind."

I now proceed to an examination of the passages in the Bible called prophecies of the coming of Christ, and to shew there are no prophecies of any such person; that the passages clandestinely styled prophecies are not prophecies, and that they refer to circumstances the Jewish nation was in at the time they were written or spoken, and not to any distance or future time or person.

APPENDIX.

CONTRADICTORY DOCTRINES

IN THE

NEW TESTAMENT

BETWEEN

MATTHEW AND MARK.

BY THOMAS PAINE.

In the New Testament, Mark, chap. xvi. ver. 16, it is said, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." This is making salvation, or, in other words, the happiness of man after this life, to depend entirely on believing, or on what Christians call faith.

But the 25th chapter of The Gospel according to Matthew makes Jesus Christ to preach a direct contrary doctrine to The Gospel according to Mark; for it makes salvation, or the future happiness of man, to depend entirely on good works; and those good works are not works done to God, for he needs them not, but good works done

to man.

The passage referred to in Matthew is the account there given of what is called the last day, or the day of judgment, where the whole world is represented to be divided into two parts, the righteous and the unrighteous, metaphorically called the sheep and the goats.

To the one part, called the righteous, or the sheep, it says, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me. I was in prison, and ye came unto me.