" Thou fool," says he, " that which thou sowest is not quickened
except it die." To which one might reply in his own lan-
guage, and say, Thou fool, Paul, that which thou sowest is
not quickened except it die not ; for the grain that dies in
the ground never does, nor can vegetate. It is only the
hving grains that produce the next crop. But the meta-
phor, in any point of view, is no simile. It is succession,
and [not] resurrection.
The progress of an animal from one state of being to an-
other, as from a worm to a butterfly, applies to the case ;
but this of a grain does not, and shews Paul to have been
what he says of others, a fool.
Whether the fourteen epistles ascribed to Paul were writ-
ten by him or not, is a matter of indifference ; they are
either argumentative or dogmatical ; and as the argument is
defective, and the dogmatical part is merely presumptive, it



THE AGE OF REASON. l8l



signifies not wlio wrote them. And the same may be said
for the remaining parts of the Testament. It is flot upon
the Epistles, but upon what is called the Gospel, contained
in the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John, and upon the pretended prophecies, that the theory
of the church, calling itself the Christian Church, is founded.
The Epistles are dependant upon those, and must follow
their fate ; for if the story of Jesus Christ be fabulous, all
reasoning founded upon it, as a supposed truth, must fall
with it.
