divine preachings of the prophets, have imitated the shadow of truth interpolated: thus the more illustrious of their wise men, Pythagoras first, and especially Plato, with a corrupted and half-faith have handed down the doctrine of regeneration.' And Lactantius, after admitting the truth of the story, that man had been made by Prometheus out of clay,-adds, that the poets had not touched so much as a letter of divine truth; but those things which had been handed down in the vaticination of the prophets, they collected from fables and obscure opinion, and having taken sufficient care purposely to deprave and corrupt them, in that wilfully depraved and corrupted state they made them the subjects of their poems.t

Tertullian calls the philosophers of the Gentiles the thieves, the interpolators and adulterators of divine truth; alleges, that "from a design of curiosity they put our doctrines into their works, not sufficiently believing them to be divine to be restrained from interpolating them, and that they mixed that which was uncertain with what they found certain."

Eusebius pleads, that the Devil, being a very notorious thief, stole the Christian doctrines, and carried them over for his friends, the Pagan philosophers and poets, to make fun of.§

Theodoret accuses Plato especially, with having purposely mixed muddy and earthy filth with the pure fountain from which he drew the arguments of his theology.||

Thus, if we may believe Eusebius, the beautiful fable of Ovid's Metamorphosis, describing Phæton falling from the chariot of his father, the Sun, was nothing more than a wicked corruption of the unquestionable truth of the prophet Elijah having been caught up to heaven, as described (2 Kings ii.), “Behold there appeared a chariot of fire, and HORSES of fire, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven," the heathens being so ignorant as to confound the name Helias with Helios, the Greek word for the Sun.

The almost droll Justin Martyr gives us a most satisfactory expla

* Quoted in Paganus Obtrectator, p. 34.

+ Lactantii Instit. lib. 3, cap. 13. Sic etiam conditionem renascendi, sapientium clariores, Pythagoras primus, et præcipuus Plato, corrupta et dimidiata fide tradiderunt.-Min. Felix.

Tertul. Apolog. cap. 46, 47.

ξ Κλεπτης γαρ ο Διάβολος και τα ημέτερα εκφερομυθων προς τους εαυτου υπο φητας. -Euseb. procudubio sed perdidi locum.

|| Εξ ης ουτος λαβων της θεολογιας τας αφορμας το ιλνωδες και γεωδες ανεμίξει Theodoritus Therapeut., libro 2. de Platone loquens.

nation of the whole matter; that "it having reached the devil's ears that the prophets had foretold that Christ would come for the purpose of tormenting the wicked in fire, he set the heathen poets to bring forward a great many who should be called (and were called) sons of Jove. The Devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that the true history of Christ was of the same character as those prodigious fables and poetic stories."

I render from the beautiful Greek of Theodoret, a passage of considerable elegance, in which the reader will trace the rising dignity of style, superior manner, and cultivated taste with which an historian of the fourth century could improve and varnish the awkward sophistry of the honester Christian Father of the second :

"But if the adversaries of truth (our Pagan opponents) so very much admired the truth, as to adorn their own writings even with the smallest portions they could pillage from it, and these, though mixed with much falsehood, yet dimmed not their proper beauty, but shone like pearls resplendent through the squalors in which they lay, so that, according to the evangelical doctrine, the light shone in the darkness, and by the darkness itself was not concealed: we may easily understand how lovely and admirable the divine doctrines must be, secerned from falsehood, for so differs the gem in its rough matrix, from what it is when seen resplendent in a diadem.”+

CHARGE 7

The Emperor Julian-who, with all his imperfections on his head, was an ornament to human nature, and can by no means be conceived to have wanted any possible means of information on the subject

* Ακουσαντες γαρ παραγενησόμενον τον χριστον, και κολαθησομένους δια πυρος τους ασεβείς, προεβάλλοντο πολλους λεχθηναι λεγομένους υιους τω δι, νομίζοντες δυνήσεσθαι ενεργισαι τερατολογίαν ηγησασθαι τους ανθρωπους τα του χριστου, και ομοίως τοις υπό των ποιήτων λεχθεισι.Justini Apolog. 2

+ Ει δε και οι της αληθειας αντιπαλοι ουτω κομιδη θαυμαζουσι την αλήθειαν, ωη και βραχεσι μορίοις εκείθεν σεσυλημενοις διακαλλύνειν τα οικεία ξυχχραμματα, και πολλώ ψευδεί ταυτα μιγνυμενα μη αμβλύειν το σφετερον κάλλος, αλλά και κοπρια και φορύτω κείμενους τους μαργαρίτας αστραπτειν λιαν, και κατα την ευαγγελικης διδασκαλίαν, το φως, εν τη σκοτία φαίνειν, και υπο της σκοτίας, μη κρυπτεσθαι ξυνιδείν ευπετες, όπως εστιν αξιέραστα και αξιαγαστα τα θεια μαθηματα του ψευδούς κεχωρισμενα πολλην γαρ δήπου διαφοραν έχει μαργαρίτης εν βαρβυρω κείμενος και εν διαδήματι λαμπων.-Theodoret. Therapeut. libro 2.

objects against the claims of Christianity, what a thousand testimonies confirm, that it was a mixture of the Jewish superstition and Greek philosophy, so as to incorporate the Atheism of the one with the loose and dissolute manner of living of the other. "If any one," says he, "should wish to know the truth with respect to you Christians, he will find your impiety to be made up partly of the Jewish audacity, and partly of the indifference and confusion of the Gentiles, and that ye have put together, not the best, but the worst characteristics of them both."*

The answer to which charge, on the parts of the advocates of Christianity, was, that they neither took them to be gods whom the Gentiles considered to be such, and so were not assimulated to the Gentiles; nor did they respect the deisidemony of the Jews, and so were not adherents to Judaism. Nor was it a small matter of triumph to their cause, to contrast the apparent contrariety of charges that were alleged against them, in that as Julian accused them of adopting the worst parts of Gentilism, Celsus had accused them of selecting the best parts.

THE CHARGES OF CELSUS.

It is never to be forgotten, that the charges of Celsus stand only in the language in which Origen has been pleased to invest them; nor is it any very monstrous phenomenon that such wholly different characters as Julian and Celsus were, should either of them, with equal conscientiousness, have esteemed those selfsame things the best, which the other considered the worst parts of Gentilism.

Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher, might very naturally think that an impostor acted with sound policy in giving to his new-fangled system all the advantages it could derive from the closest convenient conformity to the Epicurean carelessness of living, and indulgence in innocent, or even in perhaps not quite innocent pleasures; while Julian, all whose virtues were of the severest and most rigid self-restraint, looked with horror on the licence which the doctrines of the apostolic chief of sinners had seemed to countenance in the lives and manners of the

*

Είτις υπερ υμών εθνλοι οκοπειν ευρήσει την υμετεραν οσέβειαν εκτε της ιουδαικης τολμης και της παρα τοις εθνεσιν αδιαφοριαν και χυδαιοτητος συγκειμένην, εξ αμφοίν γαρ αυτό το καλλιστων αλλα τ χειρον ελκυσαντες παρυφήν κακων ειργασασθε. Julian apud Cyrill, lib. 2.

Christians. The charge of the emperor Julian is in striking coincidence of verisimilitude with the apparent fact of the case, that Paul of Tarsus, who, in his Epistle to the Colossians, calls himself a deacon of the Gospel,* and who could have stood in that humble grade, only as a servant and missionary from the Therapeutan college; schismatised from the church, and set up in trade for himself. He opposed the ascetic discipline in which he had been trained, and thus drew to his party that large majority of ignoramuses which in all ages and countries are eager to embrace every part of superstition but its mortifications and restraints. There were innumerable other charges brought against the early Christians, which, as they impinge on their moral character only, and might be either true or false without materially affecting the evidences of the religion they professed, lie beyond the scope of this DIEGESIS. Their amount in evidence is, that they sustain the fact, that whatever the principles and conduct of Christians may be supposed to have been, they were never such as to conquer the prejudices or to conciliate the affections of their fellow men. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny have spoken of them in the most disparaging terms; and though it might be that those really wise and good men were unfairly prejudiced, yet it must cost any man who is not prejudiced himself, an effort to think so.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES ADDUCED FROM CHRISTIAN WRITINGS.

The New Testament is in every one's hands: the claims of the four gospels therein contained we have already considered.

The thirteen epistles, purporting to have been written by an early convert to Christianity, who was before a blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious;t the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews; the one of James; one of Jude; two of Peter; three of John: and the Apocalypse, or Revelation of St. John the Divine, though all of them, except the Apocalypse, are admitted to have been written before any one of the four gospels; are entirely without date, and will read as well to an understanding or supposition of their having been written five or six

* That is the Greek text.

† 1 Tim. i. 13.

hundred, or even a thousand years either earlier or later than the period to which they are usually assigned. Certain it is, that they contain not a single phrase of a nature or significancy to fix, with any satisfactory probability, the time when they were written; but from beginning to end they proceed on the recognition of an existing church government and an established ecclesiastical polity which, on the supposition of its origination in events that happened later than the time of Augustus, must outrage all our knowledge of history, and all common sense, to be reconciled with the supposition of their having been written by the persons to whom they are ascribed as 'tis certain that no such state of church government, that could be properly called Christian, existed or could have existed among the followers of a religion which had originated in the age of Augustus, or among any persons who had been his contemporaries.

The Acts of the Apostles is evidently a broken narrative, and gives us no account whatever of what became of the immediate disciples of Christ, or how or with what success they executed the important commission they had received from their divine master; save that Judas the traitor is said to have come to a violent death, as a judgment of God upon his perfidy; and that Peter and John were imprisoned as impostors, after having received the Holy Ghost, and being endued with the gift of speaking all the languages of the earth (a miracle which no rational being on earth believes); and that James was put to death by Herod.

The last account we have of Peter in the sacred history, requires us to believe, that after having been delivered from prison by the intervention of an angel, his chains falling off, and the ponderous iron gate opening of its own accord," he went down from Judea to Cæsarea, and there abode."

The last we learn of Paul is, that "Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came unto him; preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him."

The evident aim and air of this account, as far as it goes, is palpably incompatible with any notion of the apostles having suffered martyrdom; it rather seems to make an ostentation of their prodigious success, and their perfect prosperity and security, and that too in Rome, in the immediate neighbourhood, and under the government of the tyrant Nero while the insinuation, at least, with respect to the melancholy end of Judas, is, that the apostles themselves would have considered Acts, xii. 19.

*