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EXAMINATION OF PROPHECIES.
[NOTE: This was the last work that Paine ever gave to the
press. It appeared in New York in 1807 with the following
title: "An Examination of the Passages in the New Testament,
quoted from the Old and called Prophecies concerning Jesus
Christ. To which is prefixed an Essay on Dream, showing by
what operation of the mind a Dream is produced in sleep, and
applying the same to the account of Dreams in the New
Testament. With an Appendix containing my private thoughts of
a Future State. And Remarks on the Contradictory Doctrine in
the Books of Matthew and Mark. By Thomas Paine, New York:
Printed for the Author." pp. 68.
This work is made up from the unpublished Part III, of the
"Age of Reason," and the answer to the Bishop of Landaff. In
the Introductory chapter, on Dream, he would seem to have
partly utilized an earlier essay, and this is the only part of
the work previously printed. Nearly all of it was printed in
Paris, in English, soon after Paine's departure for America.
This little pamphlet, of which the only copy I have seen or
heard of is in the Bodleian Library, has never been mentioned
by any of Paine's editors, and perhaps he himself was not
aware of its having been printed. Its title is: "Extract from
the M.S. Third Part of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. Chapter
the Second: Article, Dream. Paris: Printed for M. Chateau,
1803." It is possible that it was printed for private
circulation. I have compared this Paris pamphlet closely with
an original copy of Paine's own edition, (New York, 1807) with
results indicated in footnotes to the Essay,
Dr. Clair J. Grece, of Redhill, has shown me a copy of the
"Examination" which Paine presented to his (Dr. Grece's)
uncle, Daniel Constable, in New York, July 21, 1807, with the
prediction, "It is too much for the priests, and they will not
touch it." It is rudely stitched in brown paper cover, and
without the Preface and the Essay on Dream. It would appear
from a note, which I quote at the beginning of the
"Examination," by an early American editor that Paine detached
that part as the only fragment he wished to be circulated.
This pamphlet, with some omissions, was published in London,
1811, as Part III. of the "Age of Reason," by Daniel Isaacs
Eaton, for which he was sentenced to eighteen months
imprisonment, and to stand in the pillory for one hour in each
month. This punishment drew from Shelley his celebrated letter
to Lord Ellenborough, who had given a scandalously prejudiced
charge to the jury. -- Editor.]
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
To the Ministers and Preachers of all Denominations of
Religion.
IT is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to
detect and expose delusion and error. But nature has
Bank of Wisdom
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AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
not given to everyone a talent for the purpose; and among those to
whom such a talent is given, there is often a want of disposition
or of courage to do it.
The world, or more properly speaking, that small part of it
called christendom, or the christian world, has been amused for
more than a thousand years with accounts of Prophecies in the Old-
Testament about the coming of the person called Jesus Christ, and
thousands of sermons have been preached, and volumes written, to
make man believe it.
In the following treatise I have examined all the passages in
the New-Testament, quoted from the Old, and called prophecies
concerning Jesus Christ, and I find no such thing as a prophecy of
any such person, and I deny there are any. The passages all relate
to circumstances the Jewish nation was in at the time they were
written or spoken, and not to anything that was or was not to
happen in the world several hundred years afterwards; and I have
shown what the circumstances were to which the passages apply or
refer. I have given chapter and verse for every thing I have said,
and have not gone out of the books of the Old and New Testament for
evidence that the passages are not prophecies of the person called
Jesus Christ.
The prejudice of unfounded belief, often degenerates into the
prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy. When men,
from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to
believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for
believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no
longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in
being unjust to others. It is from the influence of this vice,
hypocrisy, that we see so many church-and-meeting-going professors
and pretenders to religion so full of trick and deceit in their
dealings, and so loose in the performance of their engagements that
they are not to be trusted further than the laws of the country
will bind them. Morality has no hold on their minds, no restraint
on their actions.
One set of preachers make salvation to consist in believing.
They tell their congregations that if they believe in Christ their
sins shall be forgiven. This, in the first place, is an
encouragement to sin, in a similar manner as when a prodigal young
fellow is told his father will pay all his debts, he runs into debt
the faster, and becomes the more extravagant. Daddy, says he, pays
all, and on he goes: just so in the other case, Christ pays all,
and on goes the sinner.
In the next place, the doctrine these men preach is not true.
The New Testament rests itself for credibility and testimony on
what are called prophecies in the Old-Testament of the person
called Jesus Christ; and if there are no such things as prophecies
of any such person in the Old-Testament, the New-Testament is a
forgery of the Councils of Nice and Laodicea, and the faith founded
thereon delusion and falsehood. [NOTE by PAINE: The councils of
Nice and Laodicea were held about 350 years after the time Christ
is said to have lived; and the books that now compose the New
Testament, were then voted for by YEAS and NAYS, as we now vote a
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AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
law. A great many that were offered had a majority of nays, and
were rejected. This is the way the New-Testament came into being.
-- Author.]
Another set of preachers tell their congregations that God
predestinated and selected, from all eternity, a certain number to
be saved, and a certain number to be damned eternally. If this were
true, the 'day of Judgment' IS PAST: their preaching is in vain,
and they had better work at some useful calling for their
livelihood.
This doctrine, also, like the former, hath a direct tendency
to demoralize mankind. Can a bad man be reformed by telling him,
that if he is one of those who was decreed to be damned before he
was born his reformation will do him no good; and if he was decreed
to be saved, he will be saved whether he believes it or not? For
this is the result of the doctrine. Such preaching and such
preachers do injury to the moral world. They had better be at the
plough.
As in my political works my motive and object have been to
give man an elevated sense of his own character, and free him from
the slavish and superstitious absurdity of monarchy and hereditary
government, so in my publications on religious subjects my
endeavors have been directed to bring man to a right use of the
reason that God has given him, to impress on him the great
principles of divine morality, justice, mercy, and a benevolent
disposition to all men, and to all creatures, and to inspire in him
a spirit of trust, confidence, and consolation in his creator,
unshackled by the fables of books pretending to be 'the word of
God.'
THOMAS PAINE.
**** ****
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
As a great deal is said in the New Testament about dreams, it
is first necessary to explain the nature of Dream, and to shew by
what operation of the mind a dream is produced during sleep. When
this is understood we shall be the better enabled to judge whether
any reliance can be placed upon them; and consequently, whether the
several matters in the New Testament related of dreams deserve the
credit which the writers of that book and priests and commentators
ascribe to them.
In order to understand the nature of Dream, or of that which
passes in ideal vision during a state of sleep, it is first
necessary to understand the composition and decomposition of the
human mind.
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AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
The three great faculties of the mind are IMAGINATION,
JUDGMENT, and MEMORY. Every action of the mind comes under one or
the other of these faculties. [NOTE: This sentence is not in Paris
edition. -- Editor.] In a state of wakefulness, as in the day-time,
these three faculties are all active; but that is seldom the case
in sleep, and never perfectly: and this is the cause that our
dreams are not so regular and rational as our waking thoughts.
The seat of that collection of powers or faculties that
constitute what is called the mind, is in the brain. There is not,
and cannot be, any visible demonstration of this anatomically, but
accidents happening to living persons shew it to be so. An injury
done to the brain by a fracture of the skull, will sometimes change
a wise man into a childish idiot, -- a being without a mind. But so
careful has nature been of that Sanctum Sanctorum of man, the
brain, that of all the external accidents to which humanity is
subject, this occurs the most seldom. But we often see it happening
by long and habitual intemperance.
Whether those three faculties occupy distinct apartments of
the brain, is known only to that ALMIGHTY POWER that formed and
organized it. We can see the external effects of muscular motion in
all the members of the body, though its premium mobile, or first
moving cause, is unknown to man. Our external motions are sometimes
the effect of intention, sometimes not. If we are sitting and
intend to rise, or standing and intend to sit or to walk, the limbs
obey that intention as if they heard the order given. But we make
a thousand motions every day, and that as well waking as sleeping,
that have no prior intention to direct them. Each member acts as if
it had a will or mind of its own. Man governs the whole when he
pleases to govern, but in the interim the several parts, like
little suburbs, govern themselves without consulting the sovereign.
And all these motions, whatever be the generating cause, are
external and visible. But with respect to the brain, no ocular
observation can be made upon it. All is mystery; all is darkness in
that womb of thought.
Whether the brain is a mass of matter in continual rest
whether it has a vibrating pulsative motion, or a heaving and
falling motion like matter in fermentation; whether different parts
of the brain have different motions according to the faculty that
is employed, be it the imagination, the judgment, or the memory,
man knows nothing of. He knows not the cause of his own wit. His
own brain conceals it from him.
Comparing invisible by visible things, as metaphysical can
sometimes be compared to physical things, the operations of these
distinct and several faculties have some resemblance to a watch.
The main spring which puts all in motion corresponds to the
imagination; the pendulum which corrects and regulates that motion,
corresponds to the judgment; and the hand and dial, like the
memory, record the operation.
Now in proportion as these several faculties sleep, slumber,
or keep awake, during the continuance of a dream, in that
proportion the dream will be reasonable or frantic, remembered or
forgotten.
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AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
If there is any faculty in mental man that never sleeps, it is
that volatile thing the imagination. The case is different with the
judgment and memory. The sedate and sober constitution of the
judgment easily disposes it to rest; and as to the memory, it
records in silence and is active only when it is called upon.
That the judgment soon goes to sleep may be perceived by our
sometimes beginning to dream before we are fully asleep ourselves.
Some random thought runs in the mind, and we start, as it were,
into recollection that we are dreaming between sleeping and waking.
[If a pendulum of a watch by any accident becomes displaced, that
it can no longer control and regulate the elastic force of the
spring, the works are instantly thrown into confusion, and continue
so as long as the spring continues to have force. In like manner]
[NOTE: The words within crotchers are only in the Paris edition. In
the New York edition (1807) the next word "If" begins a new
paragraph. -- Editor.] if the judgment sleeps whilst the
imagination keeps awake, the dream will be a riotous assemblage of
misshapen images and ranting ideas, and the more active the
imagination is the wilder the dream will be. The most inconsistent
and the most impossible things will appear right; because that
faculty whose province it is to keep order is in a state of
absence. The master of the school is gone out and the boys are in
an uproar.
If the memory sleeps, we shall have no other knowledge of the
dream than that we have dreamt, without knowing what it was about.
In this case it is sensation rather than recollection that acts.
The dream has given us some sense of pain or trouble, and we feel
it as a hurt, rather than remember it as vision.
If the memory slumbers we shall have a faint remembrance of
the dream, and after a few minutes it will some-times 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
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.
Yet however various and eccentric the imagination may be in
the creating 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.
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AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
But though the imagination cannot supply the place of real
memory, it has the wild faculty of counterfeiting memory. It dreams
of persons it never knew, and talks to them as if it remembered
them as old acquaintance. 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 we had been there before. The scenes it creates are often 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 tune. 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 a 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
confined for a lunatic. In a state of wakefulness, those three
faculties being all active, and acting in unison, constitute the
rational man. In dream it is otherwise, and, therefore, that state
which is called insanity appears to be no other than a dismission
of those faculties, and a cessation of the judgment during
wakefulness, that we so often experience during sleep; and
idiocity, 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 it is to place reliance
upon dreams, and how much more absurd to make them a foundation 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 foolish story of an old man's dream. "And behold the angel
of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son
of David, fear not thou to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that
which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." -- Matt. 1. 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
working of the devil, and had it not been for the American
Revolution, which, by establishing the universal right of
conscience, [NOTE: The words "right of" are not in the Paris
edition. -- Editor.] first opened the way to free discussion, and
for the French Revolution that 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.
[NOTE: The remainder of this essay, down to the last two
paragraphs, though contained in the Paris pamphlet, was struck
out of the essay by Paine when he published it in America; it
was restored by an American editor who got hold of the
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AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
original manuscript, with the exception of two sentences which
he supposed caused the author to reserve the nine paragraphs
containing them. It is probable, however, that this part was
omitted as an interruption of the essay on Dream. The present
Editor therefore concludes to insert the passage, without any
omission, in this footnote:
"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 necessary houses 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. ix. 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. xxiv. 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.
xxi. I, when the same story is again related, it is said, "And
Satan stood up against Israel, and moved 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 trash that 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 us as many fables of him as the
Greeks told of Hercules. They pit him against Pharaoh, as it were
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AN ESSAY ON DREAM.
to box with him, and Moses carries the challenge. They make their
God to say insultingly, "I will get me honor upon Pharaoh and upon
all 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 honor indeed!
the story of Jack the giant-killer is better told!
They match him against the Egyptian magicians to conjure with
them, and after hard conjuring on both sides (for where there is no
great contest there is no great honor) they bring him off
victorious. The first three 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 make him salt up Lot's wife
like pickled pork; they make him pass like Shakespeare's Queen Mab
into the brain of their priests, prophets, and prophetesses, and
tickle them into dreams, [NOTE: "Tickling a parson's nose as 'a
lies asleep, Then dreams he of another benefice." (Rom. and Jul.)
-- Editor.] and after making him play all kinds 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 have
continued the vulgarity.
Is man ever to be the dupe of priestcraft, the slave of
superstition? Is he never to have just ideas of his Creator? It is
better not to believe 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. -- Author.]
I shall conclude this Essay on Dream with the first two verses
of Ecclesiastics xxxiv. one of the books of the Apocrypha. "The
hopes of a man void of understanding are vain and false; and dreams
lift up fools. Whoso regardeth dreams is like him that catcheth 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 show 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 of future time or
person.
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