Christian writers and fathers down to the time of the Emperor Constantine, after which period there could be no doubt of the full tide of testimony in favour of this religion. I pressed upon them the rank, the talents, and the integrity of many of these writers, whose abilities and testimony could be deemed inferior to the negative testimony of the most celebrated infidel writers, only by those who rejected or undervalued them. I marshalled the conflicting testimonies together, and shewed that if the question was to be decided by authority alone, that it must be in favour of the Christians, as every circumstance which could constitute evidence, or give weight to it, was unequivocally in their favour.

The Christians were men who gave a proof of the sincerity of their principles by exposing themselves to persecution, to the loss of their estates and effects, and even to death itself. Their lives were unblemished and innocent, and they were occupied in acts of forgiveness and benevolence. Their abilities were of an order as high, or even higher, than their pagan opponents, though the latter are better known to scholars, as writing on

subjects connected with philosophy, history, or poetry, than those of the Christians, whose works were all on the subject of religion.

If a strict review, indeed, is made of the talents of each party, no honest mind could long be at a loss to give a preference to the great erudition, the sound judgment, and manly eloquence of some of these writers. The amount of the whole is, that Tacitus, though acknowledged as an able historian and fine writer, did not know whether the Jews came from Mount Ida, and derived from it their name,-whether they were of Ethiopic descent, and driven out from Egypt for a contagious disease, or whether Jerusalem is not mentioned by Homer under the name of Solymar. He states, apparently without doubt, that Moses, an exile, brought them from Egypt; that the people thirsting in the wilderness, and being likely to rebel, Moses had the cunning to follow some asses, who would, he knew, search out the first grass and water; and that in this way he pretended to get water by heavenly aid; that in order to retain his power and confirm his authority, he gave out that the laws which he imposed on them were given by heaven, that they sacrificed the effigy of the ass, the animal to which they had been indebted

for their lives when thirsting in the desert,-in the most sacred places of the Temple. And with respect to the Christians-" that they were haters of mankind, and their religion a detestable superstition."

Pliny only learned something of the sect when they were accused as criminals before the tribunals, and, not finding them guilty of any moral crime, he yet thought it right to punish them for their obstinacy in refusing to worship the gods, and in persisting to call themselves Christians.

Except Porphyry, and Celsus, and Julian, who wrote against them, and who do not deny the accuracy of many of the accounts of the facts and miracles recorded in the Scriptures, most of the other writers either allude to them by the way of illustration, of ridicule, or contempt; and all the philosophers of the latter Platonic school appear to have considered Christianity as a philosophical system deserving of some attention, and accordingly, many of them blended its doctrines with the reveries of Plato and of the old Greek philosophers. In opposition to this, the Christian writers, by their numerous quotations from Scripture, by their arguments and explications of its doctrines, shew that they had deeply studied them, and un

derstood them exactly in the same sense as the Christians of every age, down to the present day, have invariably done.

After having thus given an historical view of the writers who either opposed or alluded to Christianity, and those who embraced, accepted, and defended it, or died for it, I read to them that chapter of Paley in which he shews the character of Christ as a moral preacher, and those points in which, simply considered in this light, he was not only original, but differed from, and excelled all other teachers whatever. Part of this was heard with attention; but some observations and criticisms having been occasionally made, a good deal of time was lost in discussing points which had no immediate connexion with the subject.

In order to come, therefore, to what was really useful, I proposed to them that we should meet every Wednesday night, as well as Sunday, by which means our course of discussion would be the sooner ended. This was readily agreed to, and the meeting was appointed to be held in my house, The chapter in Horne's excellent work, entitled, "Testimonies from natural and civil History to the credibility of the Old Testament," was my text

book. I read passages and commented on them. My object was to shew, that among the various, strange, and contradictory mythologies of the ancient nations, there was a mixture of truth blended with them respecting the creation of the world, an universal deluge, and various other particulars of the early history of man,—such as the primeval chaos, the division of time into weeks, the fall of man and the introduction of sin and misery, the worship of the serpent, and the necessity of sacrifice as an expiation for sin. A good deal of conversation took place on the pretensions of various nations to antiquity, and the claim of such inventions and astronomical observations as implied a contradiction of Scripture chronology.

At our next assembling I read the testimonies of Manetho, Eupetinos, Artapanes, Tacitus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Justin, Juvenal, Porphyry, Julian, and Mahommed, to shew that Moses was a real character, and not a mythological person, as some have impudently asserted, and that he lived long before Sanconiathon, who, according to them, lived before the Trojan war.

The history of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is attested by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Solinus, Tacitus, Pliny, and Josephus. Barnes,