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every where discovers itself in the New Testament, have, for many ages, been the most effectual method of animating true believers with a zeal for the honour of the Gospel, and a desire of framing their conversation as becomes the Gospel of Christ.

Where then there are such genuine marks of an excellent character, not only in their discourses, but in their epistolary writings, and those sometimes addressed to particular and intimate friends, to whom the mind naturally opens itself with the greatest freedom, surely no candid and equitable judge would lightly believe them to be all counterfeit; or would imagine, without very substantial proof, that persons who breathe such exalted sentiments of God and religion, should be guilty of any kind of wickedness; and in proportion to the degree of enormity and aggravation attending such a supposed crime, it may justly be expected that the evidence of their having really committed it should be unanswerably strong and convincing.

Now it is very certain, on the principles laid down above, that if the testimony of the apostles was false, they must have acted as detestable and villainous a part as one can easily conceive. To be found, as the apostle with his usual energy expresses it, false witnesses of God, in any single instance, and solemnly declare to have done miraculously, what we, in our own consciences, know was never done at all, would be an audacious degree of impiety,

to which none but the most aban-. doned of mankind could arrive. Yet if the testimony of the apostles was false, as we have proved they could not be themselves mistaken in it, this must have been their case; and that not in one single instance only, but in a thousand. Their lives must, in effect, be one continued and perpetual scene of perjury; and all the most solemn actions of it (in which they were speaking to God, or speaking of him as God the father of Christ, from whom they received their commission and powers) must be a most prophane and daring insult on all the acknowledged perfections of his nature.

And the inhumanity of such a conduct would, on the whole, have been equal to its impiety. For it would have been deceiving men in their most important interests, and persuading them to venture their own future happiness on the power and fidelity of one whom, on this supposition, they knew to have been an impostor, and justly to have suffered a capital punishment for his crimes. It cannot be supposed that God, who regards the interest of his children, would long suffer such an imposition to prevail, without preventing it by the interposition of his wisdom and power.

It would have been great guilt to have given the hearts and devotions of men so wrong a turn, even though they had found magistrates ready to espouse and establish, yea and to enforce the religion they taught. But, on the contrary, to labour to propa

can in our hearts believe them to have been these abandoned wretches, at once the reproach and astonishment of mankind? Would they have sealed a known falsity with their blood, or bartered their lives for the confirmation of vague notions or uncertain conjectures? We cannot surely believe such things of any, and much less of them, unless it shall appear they were in some particular circumstances of strong temptation; and what those circumstances could be, it is difficult even for imagination to conceive.

gate it in the midst of the most vigo-writings, and then say, whether we rous and severe opposition from them, must equally enhance the guilt and folly of the undertaking. For by this means they would have made themselves accessary to the ruin of thousands; and all the calamities which fell on such proselytes, or even on their remotest descendants, for the sake of Christianity, would be in a great measure chargeable on these first preachers of it. The blood of honest, yea of pious, worthy, and heroic persons, who might otherwise have been the greatest blessings to the public, would, in effect, be crying for vengeance against them. And the distresses of the widows and orphans, which those martyrs might leave behind them, would join to swell the account.

So that, on the whole, the guilt of those malefactors, who are from time to time the victims of public justice, even for robbery, murder, or treason, is small when compared with that which we have now been stating. And corrupt as human nature is, it appears to be utterly improbable that twelve men should be found, we will not say in one little nation, but even on the whole face of the earth, who could be capable of entering into so black a confederacy, on any terms whatsoever.

And now in this view of the case, let us make a serious pause, and compare with it what we have just been saying of the character of the apostles of Jesus, so far as an indifferent person could conjecture it from their

But history is so far from suggesting any unthought-of fact, to help our imagination on this head, that it bears strongly the contrary way. shall now proceed to shew,

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That they were under no temptation to forge a story of this kind, or to publish it to the world, knowing it to be false.

They could reasonably expect no gain, no reputation by it. But on the contrary, supposing it an imposture, they must, with the most ordinary share of prudence, have foreseen infamy and ruin, as the certain consequences of attempting it. For the grand foundation of their doctrines was that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified at Jerusalem by the Jewish rulers, was the Son of God, and the Lord of all things. We appeal to men's consciences, whether this looks at all like the contrivances of artful and designing men?

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It was evidently charging upon the princes of their country the most criminal and aggravated murder; indeed, all things considered, the most enormous act of wickedness which the sun had ever seen. They might therefore depend upon it, that these rulers would immediately employ all their art and power to confute the testimony, and to destroy their persons. Accordingly, one of them was presently stoned, another quickly beheaded; and most of the rest scattered abroad into strange cities (as we learn from the Acts of the Apostles) where they were sure to be received with great prejudices, raised against them among the Jews, by reports from Jerusalem, and highly strengthened by their expectations of a temporal Messiah: expectations which, as the apostles knew by their own experience, it was exceeding difficult to root out of men's minds; expectations which would render the doctrine of Christ crucified an insuperable stumbling-block to the Jews.

Nor could they expect a much better reception among the Gentiles, with whom their business was to persuade them to renounce the gods of their ancestors, and to depend upon a person who had died the death of a malefactor; and to persuade them to forego the pompous idolatries in idolatries in which they had been educated, and all the sensual indulgences with which their religion (if it may be called a religion) was attended, to worship one invisible God through one Mediator, in a most plain and simple manner ;

and to receive a set of precepts, most directly calculated to controul and restrain not only the enormities of men's actions, but the irregularities of their hearts.

A most difficult undertaking! And to engage them to this, they had no other arguments to bring but such as were taken from the views, of an eternal state of happiness or misery, of which they asserted their crucified Jesus to be supreme disposer, who should another day dispense his blessings or his vengeance, as the Gospel. had been embraced or rejected. Now, could it be imagined, that men would easily be persuaded, merely on the credit of their affirmation, or in compliance with their importunity, to believe things which to their prejudiced minds would appear so improbable, and to submit to impositions to their corrupt inclinations so insupportable? And if they could not persuade them to it, what could the apostles then expect? What but to be insulted as fools or madmen by one sort of people; and by another to be persecuted with the most savage and outrageous cruelty, as blasphemers of their gods, as seducers of the people, and disturbers of the public peace? All which we know happened accordingly. Nay, they assure us, that their Lord had often warned them of it; and they themselves expected it; and thought it necessary to admonish their followers to expect it too. And it appears, that, far from drawing back, upon that account, as they would surely have done, if they had been governed by secular

motives, they became so much the more zealuos and arduous; and animated each other to resist, even at the price of their blood.

Now, as this is a great evidence of the integrity and piety of their characters, and thus illustrates the former head, so it serves to the purpose now immediately in view; that is, it proves how improbable it is that any person of common sense should engage in an imposture, from which, as many have justly observed, they could, on their own principles, have nothing to expect but ruin in this world and damnation in the next. When we therefore consider and compare their character and circumstances, it appears utterly improbable, on various accounts, that they would have attempted in this article to impose upon the world. But suppose that in consequence of some unaccountable, as well as some undiscoverable frenzy, they had ventured on the attempt, it is easy to shew,

That, humanly speaking, they must quickly have perished in it; and their foolish cause must have died with them, without ever gaining any credit in the world. Common sense must have suggested to them, that a report of a circumstance most extraordinary in its nature, if not attested by the most convincing evidence, must have exposed their cause as base, absurd and contemptible.

One may venture to say this in general, on the principles which I

have before laid down. But it appears still more evident, when we consider the nature of the fact they asserted, in conjunction with the methods they took to engage men to believe it; methods, which, had the apostles been impostors, must have had the most direct tendency to ruin both their scheme and them-selves..

Let us a little more particularly re-flect on the nature of that grand fact, namely, the death, resurrection, and exaltation of Christ; which as I observed, was the great foundation of the Christian scheme, as first exhibited by the apostles. The resurrection of a dead man, and his ascension into, and abode in the upper world, was so strange a thing, that a thousand objections would immediately be raised against it and some extraordinary proof would justly be required as a balance to them. Now I wish that the rejectors of the gospel would set themselves to invent some hypothesis, which should have any appearance of probability, to shew how such an amazing story should ever gain credit in the world, if it had not some very convincing proof. Where and when could it first begin to be received? Was it in the same, or a suc-ceeding age? Was it at Jerusalem, the spot of ground on which it is said to have happened? or in Greece, Italy, Asia, or Africa? The scene and time may be changed, as one pleases; but the difficulty cannot.

Take it in a parallel instance: suppose twelve men in London were now.

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to affirm, that a person executed there as a malefactor in a public manner, a month, or six weeks ago, or, if you please, a year, or five or ten years, since, for it is much the same, was a prophet sent from God with extraordinary powers: that he was raised from the dead: that they conversed with him after his revival; and at last saw him taken up into heaven. Would their united testimony make them to be believed there? Or suppose them to disperse, and that one or two of them should retire to Northampton, and go on still more distant, suppose Leicester, Nottingham, or York, and tell their story there and that others were to carry it over to Paris, or Amsterdam, or to Vienna, or Madrid; could they expect any more credit with us, or with them, or hope for any thing better than to be looked upon as lunatics, and treated as such? And if they should go into other places, and attempt to mend their scheme, by saying their Master was put to death an hundred or two hundred years ago, when there could be no historical evidence of it discovered, and no proof given but their own confident assertion; would they remove, or would they not rather increase the difficulty? Or would they in any of these cases gain credit by the most dexterous tricks of legerdemain, of which you can suppose them masters? Especially if they should undertake, in consequence of such supposed facts, to engage men to renounce their religion, in which they had been educated; to deny to deny themselves in their dearest passions and most important worldly inter

ests; and even probably to hazard their liberties and their lives, in dependance on a future reward, to be received into a place and state which no man living on the earth had ever seen or known? You would readily allow this to be an insupportable case : and why should you suppose it to have happened sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago? You may assure yourselves that the reason and the passions of mankind were then as strong as they are now. But let us a little more particularly consider,

The manner in which the apostles undertook to prove the truth of their testimony to this fact and it will evidently appear, that instead of confirming their scheme, it must have been sufficient utterly to have overthrown it, had it been itself the most probable imposture that the wit of man could ever have contrived. It is evident, they did not merely assert that they had seen miracles wrought by this Jesus, but that he had endowed themselves with a variety of miraculous powers. And these they undertook to display, not in such idle and useless tricks as slight of hand might perform; but in such solid and important works, as appeared worthy of a divine interposition, and entirely superior to human power restoring sight to the blind, soundness to lepers, activity to the lame, and, in some instances, life to the dead. Nor were these things undertaken in a corner, in a circle of friends or dependants : nor were they said to be wrought on such as might be suspected of being confederate in the fraud: but they

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