infinitely more rare, the character of a man, who has had courage and candor enough to acknowledge it.*

But what if there should be some incomprehensible doctrines in the Christian religion; some circumstances which in their causes, or their consequences, surpass the reach of human reason; are they to be rejected on that account? You are, or would be thought, men of reading, and knowledge, and enlarged understandings; weigh the matter fairly; and consider whether revealed religion be not, in this respect, just upon the same footing with every other object of your contemplation. Even in mathematics, the science of demonstration itself, though you get over its first principles, and learn to digest the idea of a point without parts, a line without breadth, and a surface without thickness; yet you will find yourself at a loss to comprehend the perpetual approximation of lines which can never meet; the doctrine of incommensurables, and of an infinity of infinites, each infinitely greater, or infinitely less, not only than any finite quantity, but than each other. In physics, you cannot comprehend the primary cause of any thing; not of the light, by which you see; nor of the elasticity of the air, by which you hear; nor of the fire by which you are warmed. In physiology, you cannot tell what first gave motion to the heart; nor what continues it; nor why its motion is less voluntary than that of the lungs; nor why you are able to move your arm to the right or left, by a simple volition: you cannot explain the cause of animal heat; nor comprehend the principle by which your body was at first formed, nor by which it is sustained, nor by which it will be reduced to earth. In natural religion you cannot comprehend the eternity or omnipresence of the Deity; nor easily understand how his prescience can be consistent with your freedom, or his immutability with his government of moral agents; nor why he did not make all his creatures equally perfect; nor why he did not create them sooner; in short, you cannot look into any branch of knowledge, but you, will meet with subjects above your comprehension. The fall and the redemption of human kind are not more incomprehensible than the creation and the conservation of the universe; the infinite Author of the works of providence, and of nature, is equally inscrutable; equally past our finding out in them both. And it is somewhat remarkable, that the deepest inquirers into nature have ever thought with most reverence, and spoken with most diffidence, concerning those things, which in revealed religion, may seem hard to be understood: they have ever avoided that self sufficiency of knowledge, which springs from ignorance, produces indifference, and ends in infidelity. Admirable to this purpose is the reflection of the greatest mathematician of the present age, when he is combating an opinion of Newton's by an hypothesis of his own, still less defensible than that which he opposes: "Tous les jours que je vois de ces esprits-forts, qui critique les vérités de notre religion, et s'en mocquent meme avec la plus impertinente suffisance, je pense, chetifs mortels! combien et combien des choses sur lesquelles vous raissonez si légérement, sont elles plus sublimes, et plus elévés, que celles sur lesquelles le grand Newton s'égare si grossiérement !!

* See a view of the Internal Evidence, &c. by Soame Jenyns. † Euler.

Plato mentions a set of men, who were very ignorant, and thought themselves supremely wise; and who rejected the arguments for the being of a God, derived from the harmony and order of the universe, as old and trite. There have been men it seems in all ages, who, in affecting singularity, have overlooked truth: an argument, however, is not the worse for being old; and surely it would have been a more just mode of reasoning if you had examined the external evidence for the truth of Christianity, weighed the old arguments from miracles, and from prophecies, before you had rejected the whole account from the difficulties you met with in it. You would laugh at an Indian, who in peeping into a history of England, and meeting with the mention of the Thames being frozen, or of a shower of hail, or of snow, should throw the book aside as unworthy of his farther notice, from his want of ability to comprehend these phenomena.

In considering the argument from miracles you will soon be convinced, that it is possible for God to work miracles; and you will be convinced, that it is as possible for human testimony to establish the truth of miraculous, as of physical or historical events: but before you can be convinced that the miracles in question are supported by such testimony as deserves to be credited, you must inquire at what period, and by what persons, the books of the Old and New Testament were composed. If you reject the account without making this examination, you reject it from prejudice, not from reason.

There is, however, a short method of examining this argument, which may, perhaps, make as great an impression on your minds as any other. Three men of distinguished abilities rose up at different times, and attacked Christianity, with every objection which their malice could suggest, or their learning could devise: but neither Celsus in the second century, nor Porphyry in the third, nor the emperor Julian himself in the fourth century, over questioned the reality of the miracles related in the Gospels. Do but you grant us what these men (who were more likely to know the truth of the matter than you can be) granted to their adversaries, and we will very readily let you make the most of the magic, to which, as the last wretched shift they were forced to attribute them. We can find you men, in our days, who from the mixture of two colorless liquors, will produce you a third as red as blood, or of any other color you desire; et dicto citius, by a drop resembling water, will restore the transparency; they will make two fluids coalesce into a solid body; and from the mixture of liquors colder than ice, will instantly raise you a horrid explosion and a tremendous flame: these, and twenty other tricks they will perform, without having been sent with our Saviour to Egypt to learn magic; nay, with a bottle or two of oil they will compose the undulations of a lake; and, by a little art, they will restore the functions of life to a man who has been an hour or two under water, or a day or two buried in the snow: but in vain will these men, or the greatest magician that Egypt ever saw, say to a boisterous sea, Peace, be still; in vain will they say to a carcass rotting in the grave, come forth the winds and the sea will not obey them, and the putrid carcass will not hear them. You need not suffer yourselves to be deprived of the weight of this argument, from its having been ob

* De Leg. lib. x.

served, that the fathers have acknowledged the supernatural part of Paganism, since the fathers were in no condition to detect a cheat, which was supported both by the disposition of the people, and the power of the civil magstrate ;* and they were from that inability forced to attribute to infernal agency what was too cunningly contrived to be detected, and contrived for too impious a purpose to be credited as the work of God.

With respect to prophecy, you may, perhaps, have accustomed yourselves to consider it as originating in Asiatic enthusiasm, in Chaldean mystery, or the subtle stratagem of interested priests, and have given yourselves no more trouble concerning the predictions of sacred, than concerning the oracles of Pagan history. Or if you have ever cast a glance upon this subject, the dissensions of learned men concerning the proper interpretation of the Revelation, and other difficult prophecies, may have made you rashly conclude, that all prophecies were equally unintelligible, and more indebted for their accomplishment to a fortunate concurrence of events, and the plain ingenuity of the expositor, than to the inspired foresight of the prophet. In all that the prophets of the Old Testament have delivered concerning the destruction of particular cities, and the desolation of particular kingdoms, you may see nothing but shrewd conjectures, which any one acquainted with the history of the rise and fall of empires might certainly have made and as you would not hold him for a prophet, who should now affirm that London or Paris would afford to future ages a spectacle just as melancholy as that which we now contemplate, with a sigh, in the ruins of Agrigentum or Palmyra; so you cannot persuade yourselves to believe, that the denunciations of the prophets against the haughty cities of Tyre or Babylon, for instance, proceeded from the inspiration of the Deity. There is no doubt, that by some such general kind of reasoning many are influenced to pay no attention to an argument, which, if properly considered carries with it the strongest conviction.

Spinoza said, that he would have broken his atheistic system to pieces, and embraced without repugnance the ordinary faith of Christians, if he could have persuaded himself of the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead; and I question not, that there are many disbelievers, who would relinquish their deistic tenets, and receive the Gopel, if they could persuade themselves, that God had ever so far interfered in the moral government of the world as to illumine the mind of any one man with the knowledge of future events. A miracle strikes the senses of the persons who see it; a prophecy addresses itself to the understandings of those who behold its completion; and it requires, in many cases, some learning, in all some attention, to judge of the correspondence of events with the predictions concerning them. No one can be convinced, that what Jeremiah and the other prophets foretold of the fate of Babylon, that it should be besieged by the Medes; that it should be taken, when her mighty men were drunken, when her springs were dried up; and that it should become a pool of water, and should remain desolate for ever; no one, I say, can be convinced, that all these, and other parts of the prophetic denunciation, have been minutely fulfilled, without spending sometime in reading the accounts which profane historians

* See Lord Lyttelton's Observations on St. Paul.

have delivered down to us concerning its being taken by Cyrus; and which modern travellers have given us of its present situation.

Porphyry was so persuaded of the coincidence between the prophecies of Daniel and the events, that he was forced to affirm, the prophecies were written after the things prophesied of had happened. Another Porphyry has, in our days, been so astonished at the correspondence between the prophecy concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, as related by St. Matthew, and the history of that event, as recorded by Josephus; that, rather than embrace Christianity, he has ventured, (contrary to the faith of all ecclesiastical history, the opinion of the learned of all ages, and all the rules of good criticism) to assert, that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel after Jerusalem had been taken and destroyed by the Romans. You may from these instances perceive the strength of the argument from prophecy; it has not been able indeed to vanquish the prejudices of either the ancient or the modern Porphyry; but it has been able to compel them both to be guilty of obvious falsehoods, which have nothing but impudent assertions to support them. Some over zealous interpreters of Scripture have found prophecies in simple narrations, extended real predictions beyond the times and circumstances to which they naturally were applied, and perplexed their readers with a thousand quaint allusions and allegorical conceits; this proceeding has made men of sense pay less regard to prophecy in general. There are some predictions, however, such as those concerning the present state of the Jewish people, and the corruptions of Christianity, which are now fulfilling in the world; and which, if you will take the trouble to examine them, you will find of such an extraordinary nature, that you will not perhaps hesitate to refer them to God as their author; and if you once become persuaded of the truth of any one miracle, or of the completion of any one prophecy, you will resolve all your difficulties (concerning the manner of God's interposition in the moral government of our species, and the nature of the doctrines contained in revelation) into your own inability fully to comprehend the whole scheme of divine Providence.

We are told however, that the strangeness of the narration, and the difficulty of the doctrines contained in the New Testament, are not the only circumstances which induce you to reject it; you have discovered, you think, so many contradictions in the accounts which the Evangelists have given of the life of Christ, that you are compelled to consider the whole as an ill-digested and improbable story. You would not reason thus upon any other occasion; you would not reject as fabulous the accounts given by Livy and Polibius of Hannibal and the Carthaginians, though you should discover a difference betwixt them in several points of little importance. You cannot compare the history of the same events, as delivered by any two historians, but you will meet with many circumstances, which, though mentioned by one, are either wholly omitted, or differently related by the other; and this observation is peculiarly applicable to biographical writings: but no one ever thought of disbelieving the leading circumstances of the lives of Vitellius or Vespasian, because Tacitus and Suetonius did not in every thing correspond in their accounts of these emperors. And if the memoirs of the life and doctrines of M. de Voltaire himself were some twenty or thirty years after his death, to be delivered to the world by four of his most intimate acquain

tance, I do not apprehend that we should discredit the whole account of such an extraordinary man, by reason of some slight inconsistencies and contradictions, which the avowed enemies of his name might chance to discover in the several narrations. Though we should grant you, then that the evangelists had fallen into some trivial contradictions, in what they have related concerning the life of Christ; yet you ought not to draw any other inference from our concession than that they had not plotted together, as cheats would have done, in order to give an unex ceptionable consistency to their fraud. We are not however disposed to make you any such concession; we will rather show you the futility of your general argument, by touching upon a few of the places which you think are most liable to your censure.

The

You observe, that neither Luke, nor Mark, nor John have mentioned the cruelty of Herod in murdering the infants of Bethlehem; and that no account is to be found of this matter in Josephus, who wrote the life of Herod; and therefore the fact recorded by Matthew is not true. concurrent testimony of many independent writers concerning a matter of fact unquestionably adds to its probability; but if nothing is to be received as true, upon the testimony of a single author, we must give up some of the best writers, and disbelieve some of the most interestng facts of ancient history.

According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there was only an interval of three months, you say, between the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus; from which time, taking away the forty days of the temptation, there will only remain about six weeks for the whole period of his public ministry; which lasted, however, according to St. John, at the least above three years. Your objection fairly stated, stands thus: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in writing the history of Jesus Christ, mention the several events of his life, as following one another in continued succession, without taking notice of the times in which they happened: but is it a just conclusion from their silence to infer, that there really were no intervals of time between the transactions which they seem to have connected? Many instances might be produced, from the most admired biographers of antiquity, in which events are related as immediately consequent to each other, which did not happen but at very distant periods: we have an obvious example of this manner of writing in St. Matthew; who connects the preaching of John the Baptist with the return of Joseph from from Egypt, though we are certain that the latter event preceded the former by a great many years.

John has said nothing of the institution of the Lord's supper; the other evangelists have said nothing of the washing of the disciples' feet. What then? are you not ashamed to produce these facts as instances of contradiction? If omissions are contradictions, look into the history of the age of Louis XIV., or into the general history of M. de Voltaire, and you will meet with a great abundance of contradictions.

John, in mentioning the discourses which Jesus had with his mother and his beloved disciple, at the time of his crucifixion, says, that she, with Mary Magdalene, stood near the cross. Matthew, on the other hand, says, that Mary Magdalene and the other women were there, beholding afar off. This you think a manifest contradiction; and scoffingly inquire, whether the women and the beloved disciple, which were near the cross, could be the same with those who stood far from the