At any rate, having grown tired of pelting the Church with the dirtballs of Voltaire and Paine, they begin to acknowledge that it is, after all, an institution; and that the Bible is an influential book, both popular and useful in its way.

Mankind, it seems, will have a Church and a Bible of some sort; why not go to work and make a Church and a Bible of their own?
Accordingly they have gone to work, and in a very short time have prepared a variety of ungodly religions, so various that the worldly-minded man who can not be suited with one to his taste must be very hard to please.

Discordant and contradictory in their positive statements, they are agreed only in negatives; denying the God of the Bible, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment to come.

Nevertheless each discoverer or constructor presents his system to the world with great confidence, large claims to superior benevolence, vast pretensions to learning and science, and no little cant about duty and piety.
Wonderful to tell, some of them are very fond of clothing their ungodliness in the language of Scripture.
No pains are spared to secure the wide spread of these notions.
Prominent Infidels are invited to deliver courses of scientific lectures, in which the science is made the medium of conveying the Infidelity.

Scientific books, novels, magazines, daily newspapers, and common school books, are all enlisted in the work.