1817 Sept. 13

Not Paul

10 2

Ch. 9 Paul’s Doctrines

10

1. their object

4 Admiration

5 Asceticism

If a faith / i.e. to persuasion / to belief // considered as applied to propositions assertive of the existence of facts of an extraordinary nature of a preternatural or supernatural character and description delivered as having been / asserted by the person in question to have been / delivered to him by God, and pronouncing an assurance of the truth of those same propositions.

If to faith / such persuasion / , considered independently of the aptitude and solidity of the grounds on which it rests, any such quality as moral really attaches―and that merit, as hath been supposed, encreasing in proportion to the intensity of the / such / persuasion to / on / which the appellation of faith is applied / bestowed / and if that intensity has for its measure and thence for its proof the magnitude of the / such / sacrifice which in the shape of happiness a / the / man has been seen to make in consequence of it of the sacrifice of which in the shape of happiness of which it has been seen to be productive which has been seen to be the fruit of it no meritorious service / merit / fruit // which was ever displayed rendered by Paul in this shape no meritorious service / fruit the production of which in this shape / which in this shape was ever prescribed or recommended by him can approach to that / those / which have been so copiously displayed / produced / by and under one of those mischievous religions over which the religion of Jesus is in these our days making such rapid and beneficial conquests.

Behold the adorers of the name of Bramah some of them keeping themselves for days together suspended on hooks forced into the back between flesh and bone: others prostrating themselves under the wheels of the moveable temple of chariot of Juggernaut for the benefit of being crushed by it on its passage. JB footnote at this point: ‘ Collect a few other instances from Mill’s India’.
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    But if there be merit in faith, and in such sort that the quantity of merit is / encreases / as the quantity of faith―as the intensity of the persuasion produced by the exercise of the will it is not Trinitarianism, it is not Catholicism that is the true religion / the true religion is―not Trinitarianism not Catholicism /: it is the religion of Bramah.

    For though, neither in the religion of Bramah, nor in any still more absurd religion if there were one which a persuasion offered for absurdity could produce, can any thing more palpably absurd be found than a self contradictory proposition nor consequently than a / the / Trinitarian proposition, yet the Trinitarian proposition is but one: to this proposition add that by which transubstantiation is asserted, still there are but two of them. But the religion of Bramah is a whole ocean of absurdity, and that ocean a / an altogether / boundless one: to which ocean trinitar[ian]ism[?] and transubstantiation put together are but drops. In the whole field of Catholicism suppose a few hundred such drops capable of being gleaned: in comparison of an ocean what are a few hundred drops.

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