generally choose, that of pleading the apostles were enthusiasts; and leaves them silent, unless they will say that they were impostors. For you evidently see, that could we suppose these facts to be false, they could by no means pretend an involuntary mistake; but must, in the most criminal and aggravated sense, as St. Paul himself expresses it, 1 Cor. xv. 15. "Be found false witnesses of God." But how unreasonable it would be to charge them with so notorious a crime will in part appear if we consider,

That the character of these writers, so far as we can judge by their works, seems to render them worthy of regard; and leaves no room to imagine that they intended to deceive us.

It would be unnecessary to shew at large, that they appear to have been persons of natural sense, and at the time of their writing, of a composed mind; for certainly, no man that ever read the New Testament with attention, could imagine they were idiots or madmen. Let the discourses of Christ in the Evangelists, of Peter and Paul in the Acts, as well as many passages in the Epistles, be perused, and we will venture to say, that he who is not even charmed with them, must be a stranger to all the justest rules of polite criticism. But he who suspects that the writers wanted common sense, must himself be most evidently destitute of it; and he who can suspect they might possibly be distracted, must himself, in this instance at least, be just as mad as he imagines them to have been. It was necessary, however, just to touch upon this; because unless we are satisfied that a person be himself in what he writes, we cannot pretend to determine his character from his writings.

Having premised this, let us, on perusing the New Testament, observe what evident marks it bears of simplicity and integrity, of piety and benevolence; upon which we shall find them pleading the cause of its authors, with a nervous, though gentle eloquence;. and powerfully persuading the mind, that men who were capable of writing so excellently well, must evidently appear to have strictly adhered to the rectitude of truth.

The manner in which they relate this narration is most happily adapted to gain our belief. For as they tell it with a great deal of circumstance, which by no means could be prudent in legendary writers, because it leaves so much the more room for confutation; so they also do it in the most easy and natural manner. There is no air of declamation and harangue; nothing that looks like artifice and design; no apologies, no encomiums, no character, no reflections, no digressions: but the facts are recounted with great simplicity, just as they appear to have happened; and those facts are left to speak for themselves in their great author. It is plain that the rest of these writers, as well as the apostle Paul, did not affect excel

lency of speech, or flights of eloquence, as the phrase signifies; but determined to know nothing, though amongst the most learned and polite, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. A conduct which is the more to be admired, when we consider how extraordinary a theme theirs was, and with what abundant variety of most pathetic declamation, it would easily have furnished any common writer: so that one would really wonder how they could forbear it. But they rightly judged that a vain affectation of ornament, when recording such facts of their own knowledge, might perhaps have brought their sincerity into question; and so have rendered the cross of Christ of no effect.

Their integrity likewise evidently appears in the freedom with which they mention those circumstances, which might have exposed their Master and themselves to the greatest contempt among prejudiced and inconsiderate men; such as they knew they must generally expect to meet with. As to their Master, they scruple not to own, that his country was despised, his birth and education mean, and his life indigent; that he was most disdainfully rejected by the rulers, and accused of sabbathbreaking, blasphemy, and sedition: that he was reviled by the populace as a debauchee, lunatic, and a demoniac; and at last, by the united rage of both rulers and people, was publicly executed as the vilest of malefactors, with all imaginable circumstances of ignominy, scorn and abhorrence.

Nor do they scruple to own that terror and distress of spirit into which he was thrown by his sufferings, though this was a circumstance at which some of the heathens took the greatest offence, as utterly unworthy so excellent and divine a person. As to themselves, the apostles readily confess not only the meanness of their original employment, and the scandal of their former life, but their prejudices, their follies, and their faults, after Christ had honored them with so holy a calling. They acknowledge their lowness of apprehension under so excellent a teacher; their unbelief, their cowardice, their ambition, their rash zeal, and their foolish contentions. So that, on the whole, they seemed every where to forget they were writing of themselves, and appear not at all solicitous about their own reputation; but only that they might represent the matter just as it was, whether they went through honor or dishonor, through evil report or good report. Nor is this all; for,

It is certain, that in their writings there are the most genuine traces, not only of a plain and honest, but of a most pious and devout, a most benevolent and generous disposition. These appear especially in the epistolary parts of the New Testament, where indeed we should most reasonably expect to find them: and of these it may be confidently affirmed, that the greater progress any one has made in love to God, in zeal for his glory, in a

compassionate and generous concern for the present and future happiness of mankind; the more humble, and candid, and temperate, and pure he is; the more ardently he loves truth, and the more steadily he is determined to suffer the greatest extremity in its defence; in a word, the more his heart is weaned from the present world, and the more it is fired with the prospect of a glorious immortality, the more pleasure he will take in reading those writings: the more will he relish the spirit which discovers itself in them, and find that as face answers to face in water, so do the traces of divine grace which appear there, answer to those which a good man feels in his own soul. Nay it may be added that the warm and genuine workings of that excellent and holy temper, which 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 honor 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 abandoned 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 profane 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 labor to propagate it in the midst of the most vigorous 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 wid ows 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 ap pears 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 writings, and then say, whether we 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 peculiar circumstances of strong temptation; and what those circumstances could be, it is difficult even for imagination to conceive.

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. I shall now proceed to shew,

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?

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 amongst the Jews, by reports from Jerusalem, and highly strengthened by their expectation of a temporal Messiah: expectations, which, as the apostles knew by their own experience, it was exceedingly 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; to persuade them to forego the pompous 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 control 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