TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW TIMES.

SIR,

Dorchester Gaol, Nov. 1, 1825, seventh year of imprisonment for an endeavour to improve the public morals. LET, me if you please, have a little of calm reasoning with you, about Mr. Moses Elias Levi and the print of the "God for a shilling." I have seen your yesterday's paper, and I was surprised to see, that you could justify an act of rashness on the part of a fanatic. You seem to lament, that the Alderman made the Jew pay for the damage done! How did you feel on this head, when the front of your house was demolished, from the indignation of thousands at your conduct as a public writer, towards the late Queen? Did you pocket the resentment and say "I have deserved it?" That was not the act of one, but of many, a deliberate and spontaneous attack by almost every passer by. This case, at my shop, was the act of a fanatic; and it augurs well, that this print has been exhibited for many months, before one such fanatic was found in London. I have a Jewish or Christian stone, on my desk, that was thrown in the dark and which brake three panes of glass; but this silly Jew, was the first to feel that well known holy zeal among idolators, to break the window in open day.

Alderman Thompson did very right not to listen to the charge of felony; because no one can calmly suppose that the Jew, like his forefather Micah *, meant to steal a few Gods, or rather the metal set apart to make them. But as to the exhibition of this print being a misdemeanour, it is no more so, than those exhibitions which we have imitated, the engraved descriptions. of the Indian Gods, by the Wesleyan Methodists. Let it be prosecuted as a misdemeanor and you shall have a ridiculous print for every ridiculous passage in the Bible. What think you of a print of Jehovah shewing his back parts to Moses? What think you of an exhibition of a God making fig leaved aprons for naked Adam and Eve, and fitting them on, as if he were ashamed to look at his own work? What think you of the scene of Lot and his daughters? These and a hundred such shall be forth coming, if this print be prosecuted as a misdemeanor.

*See Judges chap. 17, verses 1 to 5. Compare it with the Chinese advertisement of a manufacturer of Gods.

I shall be very glad to talk over this subject calmly with Mr. Moses Elias Levi, or with any other person. And, if any person can give me one solid reason, why the exhibition of such a print is injurious to the public morals, nothing of the kind shall again be found in a shop of mine. I see the public morals to be bad enough, and I labour, by day and by night, to mend them. My whole career has been an exertion to mend the public morals. I suffer to this end, and am content to suffer, if I cannot otherwise mend them. But you call religion a part of morality, and I have proved, and can prove at any time, before the most learned of men, that religion is a vice, inasmuch as, there is not a word of truth, not a particle of public utility, associated with it. That this is a fact, I invite discussion to prove. I will ask it from you. I will ask it from any member of the established church, in or out of holy orders. I will ask it from any man. My aim, and only aim, is to remove my ignorance; and, as I remove my own, to remove that of others. About reputation, and the best of a controversy, I do not care; my grand aim is not so much victory, as a disputant, as mutual instruction. This instruction can only be obtained by the free and unmolested exhibition of every kind of argument; and my print of the God of the Jews and Christians, by no means a caricature or false representation, as you and the Jew have styled it; is an argument, and a powerful argument, to shew, that there is no such a God in existence, as that depicted in the books of the Old and New Testament. There is nothing narrated in, those books, in reference to physics, that has the least analogy with the properties of matter which we now see about us, and which we know, by analogy, always to have been in a similar state. Instead of being books to guide us through life, they are books of darkness, and of the most gross ignorance.

All these personifications of deity, or of the properties of matter, are with learned men, confessedly figurative, and being figurative, they are false; because they cheat the ignorant, who look upon them as the pictures of real beings. All idolatry has sprung from these personifications, and all religion has been alike idolatrous. A personification or identity can no where exist but on the surface of a planet, and it cannot move from planet to planet. It lives but to die, and no one identity can by possibility hold an immortality. These are truths, which I am prepared to

discuss with any mán. And I proclaim all contrary representations to be false and injurious to the public morals.

Intelligence, or the power to design, is the criterion of the falseness of all theology. Theologians say it is a property or spirit that pervades all matter, or all nature, as they call a subterfuge for confused ideas. The materialists, of whom I am one, say, and prove negatively, that intelligence, or the power to design, is an artificial principle confined to animals, and no where existing but with a living animal body, cannot exist distinct from the life of that body. This point is decisive against the theologians. This point justifies every public act of mine, and proclaims my persecution and imprisonment to be one uniform piece of wickedness and tyrannical power, and a constant violation of law which exists not beyond person, property and public morals.

Independant of this decisive point, which is my last retreat, I overthrow the religion of the Christians and the Jews by history. I prove, beyond a question, that the Christian Religion was not known in the first of the eighteen centuries which it now counts, and that no such a person as Jesus Christ lived in Judea or elsewhere, other than as an allegorical character. I prove, that the Christian Religion took its rise in the Grecian Provinces, and not in Judea.

And. with reference to the Jews, I call upon Mr. Moses Elias Levi, to shew me, from what part of Asia or Africa his ancestors came to be captives at Babylon; for the Jerusalem of Palestine was only a colonization by the Persian Princes, and not the metropolis of a nation of Jews or Israelites, before that captivity and colonization. Indeed, there is no proof of a captivity, if we come to precise history.

These points, I have asserted successfully for two years, and am daily surrounding them with new proofs. I have appealed, not to the ignorant, but to the learned, to the heads of the Christian Church of this country, and to the High Priest of the Jews. I now appeal to Mr. Moses Elias Levi and to you, the learned Editor of the New Times

newspaper.

Notwithstanding the fuss which you make about my shilling God, I find, by the reports of our missionary pence gatherers, that Gods are sold in India much cheaper, being there modelled of clay or carved in wood and hawked about by children at a penny a piece: and these Gods have all the same origin, all have arisen from ignorance of the properties of matter, and in giving the human or other figure to powers, for the existence of which that ignorance could not otherwise account.

In this same paper of yours, I read, that the central Africans, lately visited by Captain Clapperton," laugh exceedingly at our explanations of the Trinity." Well night they have laughed. I laugh. Every well educated, sensible, thinking and honest man laughs at it. There was never any thing taught or explained one half so ridiculous. in the Pagan Mythology. There is no authority for it in your holy books. The doctrine grew up by peacemeal from the fierce bloody and ignorant disputes among the early Christians.

See, also, in this same article, that these central Africans use the cross as an ensign or order. This corroborates what I have lately shewn, in exposing Freemasonry, that the cross is only a borrowed emblem among the christians, a simplified or abbreviated figure of the Triple Tau or Crux Ansata, common to the Egyptians and many other ancient nations. All that learning or research has yet done towards an explanation of its symbolical, meaning is, that it represents the animal organs of generation, or the general prolific properties of animal and vegetable matter.

I will conclude this desultory letter, by proceeding to negative the assertions of your comment on the print of the God and the conduct of Moses Elias Levi.

First, you call the exhibition a piece of audacity, a nuisance disgraceful to the metropolis, and a print professedly in ridicule of THE ALMIGHTY. Almighty is a vague meaningless word and refers to nothing in existence or that ever did exist. That which does in reality exist is studied

and venerated by no man more than by myself. This print ridicules nothing. It it a plain, undistorted description of the God of the Bible, the God of Jews and Christians; and neither that God, nor any thing supernatural mentioned in the Bible, has any reality, or paralel, or reference, in the things that do exist. It is as "false as hell," as the Jew is made to say after Lord Ellenborough: which, with them, was a false figure, if they held the doctrine of hell to be true. I holding it to be a falsehood, can compare a falsehood with it.

If the print ridicules the almighty, the Bible ridicules the almighty. If the print be a nuisance, the Bible is a nuisance. If the print be audacious, the Bible is audacious. The exhibition did not originate with me, but with those who originated the Bible, and Mr. Editor, I am quite ready to join you in all the epithets which you, in your holy zeal, for the profits of religion, at least, have bestowed upon it. Call it ineffable wickedness, say that it harrows up the feelings of the good man, that it teaches blasphemy to our sons and daughters in the street, that it paralyses authority and merits, punishment, and I will agree with you. I am suffering a seventh year of imprisonment for the endeavour to put a stop to this state of things. And how much longer is the labouring man to be taxed, to support that system of religion, which I prove to be wholly founded on historical and physical fable? How much longer am I to be imprisoned for publishing the proofs ?

Supposing, that my shopman, Christopher, had broken your windows and torn out your paper, for exhibiting him as a "miscreant." How then would you have reasoned? Had Moses Elias Levi been an intelligent man, he would have seen that such a squib, as this print of the Bible God, was not meant to outrage any man's feelings; but to remove the folly of such men, as those who hold to such degrading notions. It was and is meant to instruct them. It bears no analogy to a caricature of a real person, and no wise man would feel offended at such an exhibition, whilst millions are