* The great Warburton has shown that the Jews in the time of Moses, entertained no such opinion as the immortality of the soul. "This is admitted (says Ensor) although unwillingly, by Tillotson and Wilkins, and candidly by Le Clereq and Geddes." This platonic notion is flatly denied in Psalms cxlvi., 4; and in Eccles. iii, 19, 20.
Pythagoras and Plato seemed to have been the mere revivers of this ancient doctrine, which, as the learned, say, sprang from the Brahminism of India, the most ancient of all the mythologies, the priests of which are said to have been the first who corrupted human society, by the invention of souls, and other spiritual or celestial existences; but, unlike their imitators of' the west, they neither persecuted nor shed a drop of blood for religion's sake; nor the blood of animals for food. Christians! we know ye can very ill bear to be told, that from India through Persia ye have your cosmogony, fall of man, immortality of the soul, redemption, incarnation, future rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, desolation of all things, universal restoration, trinity in unity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence of God;* all are derived from the Vedas and Shastras, or Bible of the Brahmins, and the Sadder of the Zoroastrians. Out of these oriental materials, all the successive religions that have sprung up in the west have been fabricated, with such variations in the machinery as suited the civil and clerical despotism in the different countries, and the degree of ignorance in the people.
One of the insidious and baneful arts of theology, has ever been to make man believe that he is something else than that which nature has made him in reality; and this delusive flattery has moulded him into that self-important and credulous animal, which best suits the interests of his deceivers;** hence his proudly assumed knowledge of his personified deity. If this be true his boasted spiritual knowledge seems to have the effect of making him more wicked and vicious than any other animal, for he is not only the scourge of all the rest, but will, to gratify the pride and ambition of lay and spiritual tyrants (leagured together for his oppression), cut the throats of his own species; though, by so doing, he the more closely rivets the chains of his own subjection, and maintains those very delusions which enslave his mind, poison society, and distract the world.