1821 March 2.

Jug. Util and True

9

Plan of the Work

Part III. Revealed Verity apart

9

III. In Part the third, the question of usefulness in the present life having been examined by arguments that apply at the same time to Natural and to supposed Revealed Religion, the question of verity is now considered: not now apparent, but real verity. But in this Part it is considered in the most general and abstract point of view, abstraction made of all supposed /particular/ revealed religion in general and the supposed revealed religion of Jesus in particular: but at the same time by arguments the tendency of which is to disprove the existence of all such imagined as well as all other imaginable revelation in the [...?]: applying to all of them alike.

This part is indeed compleatly at issue with the advocates of the religion of Jesus: and by it the whole of the ground they maintain is attacked, and in case of success taken from them. But still nothing is done to produce that peculiar irritation which an attack directed against an individual object of reverence individually and separately considered, can not but excite. The hold he possessed on their affections is by this means more or less weakened, antecedently to the period at which the direct, individual, direct, and in the highest degree irritative, attack is made.

On this occasion, all other supposed Revealed Religions being comprized in the attack, that which has Religion reprisals to him as false, as well as those which it represents to him as true—the religion of Mahomet and that of Bramah for example, as well as that of Jesus and that of Moses—by this circumstance likewise will the irritation be naturally diminished. As the attack proceeds, he may /to the last continue/ for a greater or less length of time continuing indulging himself in the hope that while all other religions are simultaneously or successively laid prostrate, his own may by its peculiar excellence be preserved to the end of the engagement from the destructive fire. In the mean time the force of reason and the habit /practice/ of applying attention[?] to it has /found entrance into/ gained possession of his mind.