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AND

HIS IMPOSTURES:

OR, THE

PROGRESS OF FANATICISM.

ILLUSTRATED IN THE EXTRAORDINARY CASE

OF

ROBERT MATTHEWS,

AND SOME OF HIS FORERUNNERS AND DISCIPLES.

"It ill comports with the majesty of truth, or the character of God, to believe that he
has built the noblest superstructure on the weakest foundation; or reduced mankind to the
miserable alternative either of remaining destitute of the knowledge of himself, or of de-
riving it from the source of impious imposture."-Robert Hall.

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AND SOLD BY THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS THROUGHOUT THE
UNITED STATES.

NOV 1000

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Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1835, By HARPER & BROTHERS,

In the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York.

PREFACE.

Ir was not until the last week in the recent month of April, that the idea of the present work was suggested. In conversation with a distinguished clerical friend, upon the subject of Matthias and his impostures, particularly in regard to the respectability of the people whom he had succeeded in leading so widely astray, the writer mentioned the fact, that, after all, the pretended prophet was but a circumstance, as it were, in a series of delusions originating in fanaticism twelve or thirteen years since, which, in their progress, had been marked at different periods, by transactions and absurdities scarcely less censurable, or extraordinary, than the gross impieties of the arch-impostor himself. With a great number of facts in relation to the matters referred to, the writer had become acquainted as they transpired; and in the belief that he could possess himself of all others essential to a continuous history of one of

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