facts which they declared they had seen and heard, which they said they were commanded to publish, and which no threatening or punishment could make them either deny or conceal.

The history of mankind has not preserved a testimony so complete and satisfying as that which I have now stated. If, in conformity to the exhibitions which the writings of these men give of their character, you suppose their testimony to be true, then you can give the most natural account of every part of their conduct, of their conversion, their stedfastness, and their heroism. But if, notwithstanding every appearance of truth, you suppose their testimony to be false, inexplicable circumstances and glaring absurdities crowd upon you. You must suppose that twelve men of mean birth, of no education, living in that humble station which placed ambitious views out of their reach and far from their thoughts, without any aid from the state, formed the noblest scheme that ever entered into the mind of man, adopted the most daring means of executing that scheme, and conducted it with such address as to conceal the imposture under the semblance of simplicity and virtue. You must suppose that men guilty of blasphemy and falsehood united in an attempt the best contrived, and which has in fact proved the most successful, for making the world virtuous; that they formed this singular enterprise without seeking any advantage to themselves, with an avowed contempt of honour and profit, and with the certain expectation of scorn and persecution; that although conscious of one another's villany, none of them ever thought of providing for his own security by disclosing the fraud; but that, amidst sufferings the most grievous to flesh and blood, they persevered in their conspiracy to cheat the world into piety, honesty, and benevolence.

They who can swallow such suppositions have no title to object to miracles. They should remember that there is a moral as well as a physical order; that there are certain general principles by which human actions are regulated, and upon which we are accustomed to proceed in our judgments of the conduct of men; and that it is much more difficult to conceive that, in opposition to those prin

ciples which analogy and experience have established, such a testimony as the apostles uttered should be false, than that the laws of nature in some particular instances should have been suspended. Of the suspension of the laws of nature we can give a rational account: the purpose for which it is said to have been made renders it not incredible. But the falsehood of testimony in such circumstances would be a phenomenon in the history of the human mind so strange and inexplicable, that we need not be afraid to apply to this case the words of Mr. Hume, although he certainly did not mean them to be so applied: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." The falsehood of the testimony of the apostles would be more miraculous, i. e. it is more improbable than any fact which they attest.

3. But although the testimony of the apostles appears, upon all the principles according to which we judge of such matters, to have been credible at the time when it was given, it remains to be inquired, whether the distance at which we live from that time does, in any matérial degree, impair to us its original credibility.

It is allowed that the testimony of the apostles received the strongest confirmation from its having been emitted immediately after the ascension of Jesus, in the very place where they said he had performed many of his mighty works, under the eye of that government which had persecuted him, and in presence of multitudes to whom they appealed as witnesses of what they declared. This must be allowed by all who are qualified to judge of evidence. Now let it be remembered that the benefit of this confirmation is not lost to us, because, although their testimony was at first oral, given in their preaching to those whom they converted, it was soon recorded in books which we receive upon satisfying evidence as authentic and genuine. There is therefore no room to allege in disparagement of this testimony, the inaccuracy of verbal reports, or the natural disposition to exaggerate in the repetition of every extraordinary event. We are put in possession of the facts as they were published in the lifetime of the apostles,

without the embellishments of succeeding ages; and every circumstance which moved those who heard their testimony is preserved in their books to establish our faith.

The early publication of the Gospels and Acts is to us an unquestionable voucher of the following most important facts, that the miracles of our Lord and his apostles were not done in a corner before a few select friends, and by them artfully spread through the world, but were performed openly, in the fields, in the city, in the temple, before enemies who had every opportunity of examining them, who did not regard them with indifference, who were alarmed with the effect which they produced upon the minds of the people, and were zealous in bringing forward every objection. Had any one of these circumstances been false, the early publication of books asserting them would have overturned the scheme. Further, there is much particularity in the narration of many of the miracles : reference is made to time and place; many local circumstances are introduced; persons are marked out, not only by their distress, but by their rank and their names; the emotions of the spectators, the joy of those who received deliverance, the consultations held by rulers, and the public orders in consequence of certain miracles, all enter into the record of these books. While every

intelligent reader discerns in this particular detail the most accurate acquaintance with the prejudices and the manners of the times, and is from thence satisfied that the books are authentic, he must also be satisfied that a detail which, by its particularity, called so much attention, and admitted, at the time it was published, of so easy investigation, is itself a voucher of its own truth. Again, the history of the miracles is so closely interwoven with the rest of the narration, that any man who reads it may be satisfied that it could not have been inserted after the books were published. There are numberless allusions to the miracles even in those passages where none of them are recorded; the faith of the first disciples is said to have been founded upon them, and the change upon their sentiments is truly inexplicable, unless we suppose the miracles to have been done in their presence. All, therefore, who received the Gospels and the Acts in early times, when they could easily examine the truth of the

facts, may be considered as setting their seal to the miracles of Jesus and his apostles; and the number of the first converts out of Judea and Jerusalem forms, in this way, a cloud of witnesses.

That confirmation of the testimony of the apostles, which appears to be implied in the faith of all the first Christians, is rendered much more striking, by the peculiar nature of a large part of the New Testament. I mean the epistles to the different churches. Paul, in several of the epistles which he sent by particular messengers to those whose names they bear, and which were authenticated to the whole Christian world by his superscription, mentions the miracles which he had performed, the effect which his miracles had produced, and the extraordinary powers which he had imparted. A large portion of the first Epistle to the Corinthians is occupied with a discourse concerning spiritual gifts, in which he speaks of them as common in that church, as abused by many who possessed them, and as inferior in excellence to moral virtue. In his first Epistle to the Thessalonians, which is known to have been the earliest of the apostolical writings, Paul says, "Our Gospel came to you not in word only, but in power and in the Holy Ghost; and they, i. e. your own citizens, in their progress through different parts of the world, show of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned from idols to serve the living God."* Here is a letter written not twenty years after the ascension of Jesus, sent as soon as it was written to the church of Thessalonica to be read there, and in the neighbouring churches, copied and circulated by those to whom it was addressed, uniformly quoted since that time by the succession of Christian writers, and come down to us with every evidence that can be desired, indeed without any dispute, of its being a genuine letter. In this letter the apostle tells the Thessalonians that they had been converted to the Gospel by the miracles of those who preached it, and that the effect which this conversion had produced upon their conduct was talked of everywhere. If these facts had not been known to the Thessalonians, the letter would have been instantly rejected, and the

1 Thess. i. 5, 9.

character of him who wrote it would have sunk into contempt. Its being publicly read, held in veneration, and transmitted by them, is a proof that every thing said in it concerning themselves is true, and therefore it is a proof that those who could not be mistaken, believed in the miracles of the apostles of our Lord. This argument is handled by Butler, and all the ablest defenders of our religion; and I have been led to state it particularly, because it has always appeared to me an unanswerable argument, arising out of the books themselves, a confirmation of the testimony of the apostles that is independent of their personal character, and yet is demonstrative of the estimation in which they were held by their contemporaries, and of the credit which we may safely give to their report.

4. It only remains to be added upon this question, that a testimony thus strongly confirmed is not contradicted by any opposite testimony. The books of the New Testament are full of concessions made by the adversaries of Christianity; concessions, the force of which must be admitted by all who believe the books to be authentic: and it is very remarkable, that concessions of exactly the same kind with those made by the Jews in our Saviour's days, were made by the zealous and learned adversaries of our faith in the first four centuries. Celsus, Porphyry, Hierocles, and Julian did not deny the facts; they only attempted to disparage them, or to ascribe them to magic. Julian was emperor of Rome in the fourth century. He had renounced Christianity, and his zeal to revive the ancient heathen worship made him the bitterest enemy of a system which condemned all the forms of idolatry. Yet this man, with every wish to overturn the establishment which Christianity had received from Constantine, does not pretend to say in his work against the Christians, that no miracles were performed by Jesus. In one place he says, "Jesus, who rebuked the winds, and walked on the seas, and cast out dæmons, and as you will have it, made the heavens and the earth." In another place," Jesus has been celebrated about three hundred years, having done nothing in his lifetime worthy of remembrance, unless any one thinks it a mighty matter to heal lame and blind people, and exorcise dæmoniacs in the villages of Bethsaida