The same process of reasoning, which led man, in the infancy of his reason, to personify the power who presided over the human race, induced him to infer that his pain and misfortune emanated from a malignant being, who delighted to do him harm. He then, by the simple process of his imagination, concluded that there must be two opposing powers which governed the affairs of mortals. The good, proceeded from a being who showered down blessings on mortals; and all evil and pain, from a being who took pleasure in the unhappiness of the human race; and his residence, to correspond with his evil disposition, was by them fixed in the gloomy regions of darkness and horror. This, then, Christians, appears to have been the origin of your God and Heaven; and also your Devil and Hell. That both heaven and hell are of heathen origin, there can be no doubt; and it is also equally clear, that the Jews, when they returned from captivity, brought these doctrines back with them into Judea. They then made part of the Jewish faith, and Jesus embraced them; for he pretended to cast out devils, and the Devil enticed him in the wilderness to rebel against God and enlist into the service of his Satanic Majesty. And this heaven, which originated in heathenism, Jesus promised as the reward of his faithful followers; and with this very hell he threatened the disobedient.
What can Christians say (after this) of the divinity or the antiquity of the New Testament? Its doctrines originated in an age unknown, among a people more ancient than Moses, or than Adam, who is said to have been the first man. Yes! ye ministers of grace, your heaven and hell, by the proclaiming of which you alarm the good man, but make the wicked man worse, have no more existence in reality than the heaven and hell of Mahomet. But if there be a heaven, such as you preach up, and the road to it be as difficult as Jesus declared it to be, many of you will have to put up at the half-way house; you will never reach the end of your journey.
The following account of witchcraft in Sweden, is extracted from "Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers:"--"The story of witchcraft, as it is reported to have passed in Sweden, in the year 1670, and has many times been reprinted in this country, (England,) is, on several accounts, one of the most interesting and deplorable that has ever been recorded. The scene lies in Dalecarlia, a country forever memorable as having witnessed some of the earliest adventures of Gustavus Vasa, his deepest humiliation, and the first commencement of his prosperous fortune. The Dalecarlians are represented to us as the simplest, the most faithful, and the bravest of the sons of men;--men, undebauched and unsuspicious, but who devoted themselves in the most disinterested manner for a cause that appeared to them worthy of support, the cause of liberty and independence against the cruellest of tyrants. At least, such they were in 1520, one hundred and fifty years before the date of the story we are going to recount. The site of these events was at Mohra and Elfdale, in the province that has just been mentioned. The Dalecarlians, simple and ignorant, but of exemplary integrity and honesty, who dwelt amid impracticably mountains and spacious mines of copper and iron, were distinguished for superstition among the countries of the north, where all were superstitious. They were probably subject, at intervals, to the periodical visitation of alarms of witches, when whole races of men became wild with the infection, without any one's being able to account for it.