The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine [books for 8th graders .txt] 📗

better to impose this passage on the world as a prophecy of Christ, has entirely omitted the account in the book of Numbers which I have given at length word for word, and which shows, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that the person spoken of by Moses is Joshua, and no other person.

Newton is but a superficial writer. He takes up things upon hearsay, and inserts them without examination or reflection, and the more extraordinary and incredible they are the better he likes them.

In speaking of the walls of Babylon (volume the first, page 263), he makes a quotation from a traveller of the name of Tavernier, whom he calls (by way of giving credit to what he says) a celebrated traveller, that those walls were made of burnt brick, ten feet square and three feet thick. If Newton had only thought of calculating the weight of such a brick, he would have seen the impossibility of their being used or even made. A brick ten feet square, and three feet thick, contains 300 cubic feet; and allowing a cubic foot of brick to be only one hundred pounds, each of the bishop’s bricks would weigh thirty thousand pounds; and it would take about thirty cart loads of clay (one-horse carts) to make one brick.

But this account of the stones used in the building of Solomon’s temple (vol. ii., page 211), far exceeds his bricks of ten feet square in the walls of Babylon; these are but brickbats compared to them.

The stones (says he) employed in the foundation, were in magnitude forty cubits, that is above sixty feet, a cubit (says he), being somewhat more than one foot and a half (a cubit is one foot nine inches), and the superstructure (says the bishop) was worthy of such foundations. There are some stones, says he, of the whitest marble, forty-five cubits long, five cubits high, and six cubits broad. These are the dimensions this bishop has given, which in measure of twelve inches to a foot, is 78 feet 9 inches long, 10 feet 6 inches broad, and 8 feet 3 inches thick, and contains 7,234 cubic feet. I now go to demonstrate the imposition of this bishop.

A cubic foot of water weighs sixty-two pounds and a half the specific gravity of marble to water is as two and a half is to one. The weight, therefore, of a cubic foot of marble is 156 pounds, which, multiplied by 7,234, the number of cubic feet in one of those stones, makes the weight of it to be 1,128,504 pounds, which is 503 tons. Allowing, then, a horse to draw about half-a-ton, it will require a thousand horses to draw one such stone on the ground; how, then, were they to be lifted into the building by human hands?

The bishop may talk of faith removing mountains, but all the faith of all the bishops that ever lived could not remove one of those stones, and their bodily strength given in.

This bishop also tells of great guns used by the Turks at the taking of Constantinople, one of which he says was drawn by seventy yoke of oxen, and by two thousand men. Vol. iii., page 117.

The weight of a cannon that carries a ball of 48 pounds, which is the largest cannon that is cast, weighs 8,000 pounds, about three tons and a half, and may be drawn by three yoke of oxen. Anybody may now calculate what the weight of the bishop’s great gun must be, that required seventy yoke of oxen to draw it. The bishop beats Gulliver.

When men give up the use of the divine gift of reason in writing on any subject, be it religious or anything else, there are no bounds to their extravagance, no limit to their absurdities.

The three volumes which this bishop has written on what he calls the prophecies, contain about 1,200 pages, and he says in vol. iii., page 117, “I have studied brevity.” This is as marvellous as the bishop’s great gun. ↩

This footnote is not included in the French work. —⁠Conway ↩

This note is not in the French work. —⁠Conway ↩

Proverbs 30:1, and 31:1, the word “prophecy” in these verses is translated “oracle” or “burden” (marg.) in the revised version.⁠—The prayer of Agur was quoted by Paine in his plea for the officers of Excise, 1772. —⁠Conway ↩

The Hebrew word for “Seer,” in 1 Samuel 9, transliterated, is chozéh, the gazer; it is translated in Isaiah 47:13, “the stargazers.” —⁠Conway ↩

The spurious addition to Paine’s work alluded to in his footnote drew on him a severe criticism from Dr. Priestley (Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, p. 75), yet it seems to have been Priestley himself who, in his quotation, first incorporated into Paine’s text the footnote added by the editor of the American edition (1794). The American added: “Vide Moshiem’s (sic) Ecc. History,” which Priestley omits. In a modern American edition I notice four verbal alterations introduced into the above footnote. —⁠Conway ↩

This Bishop Faustus is usually styled “The Manichaean,” Augustine having entitled his book, Contra Faustum Manichaeum Libri XXXIII, in which nearly the whole of Faustus’ very able work is quoted. —⁠Conway ↩

Much abridged from the Exam. Crit. de la Vie de St. Paul, by N. A. Boulanger, 1770. —⁠Conway ↩

Colophon

The Age of Reason
was published in 1794⁠–⁠1807 by
Thomas Paine.

Threadable
sponsored the production of this ebook for
Standard Ebooks.
It was produced by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2003 by
Norman M. Wolcott and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at
Google Books.

The cover page is adapted from
Monastery Graveyard in the Snow,
a painting completed in 1819 by