ignorant fishermen; and subjecting its converts to continual insult, self-denial, and injury.However ready the multitude, in England for example, may be to swallow whatever partakes of the marvellous, would any tale lead any large proportion of its inhabitants to such a renunciation,-not transiently, but for the rest of their lives; especially if the tale appealed for its truth, not to mere pretensions of prophecy, but to actual and unquestionable miracles performed, and continually performing, in the presence of, and often upon, the converts themselves, or on those in their company? And would impostors rest their hopes of success, their pretensions to credibility, on ground so open to instant detection, as so barefaced an appeal to the senses of their auditors? Before you and I resolved on a life of habitual self-denial to some of the most powerful of our instincts, habits, and opinions; before we were content to be cast out of our families, to sacrifice our property and lives; we should be very sure, I think, that the Divine call was unequivocal. Should we not?

Thirdly; If Christianity were an imposition,

it would exhibit a case foreign to all our ex-. perience of the capacities and tendencies of mankind. For it would follow, that a dozen of the most illiterate and vulgar inhabitants of a country remarkable for its blind attachment to its own very peculiar religion, and for its abhorrence of all others, framed a system of religion, not only remarkable for its comprehensive liberality, but superior (as it is, I think, on all hands confessed) in pure morality to, yet differing (advantageously for human happiness, differing) from, the beautiful theories of Plato, Socrates, and the most re nowned philosophers of the world. That to give currency to this system of purity, they invented a blasphemous tissue of falsehoods, the truth of which falsehoods they uniformly united in maintaining, throughout lives of active holiness, and which most of them finally sealed with their blood. And to complete the incon sistency, that, with all this unaccountable sagacity and zeal, they had the folly to appeal, for the truth of their mission, to miracles of a nature the most open to detection, and to their immediate converts, as the actual witnesses of

what they never saw. And yet that they succeeded? Is this complication of improbabilities credible? Or if it could be possible, would it have succeeded in convincing (in contradiction to their very senses, as well as in opposition to their dearest interests) the bigoted Jews on the one hand, or the enlightened Greeks and Romans of the Augustan age on the other, to renounce their repsective religions (the latter personally and pompously administered by the highest political characters in the empire) in favour of that of an obscure peasant of a subjected and despised province, who had also perished in the attempt? Could any thing short of almost irresistible conviction produce such effects?—If, then, the Apostles were neither deceived nor deceivers, they were, of course, what they professed to be, the messengers of a revelation actually from GOD.

The evidences for Christianity are very far from being exhausted in this single argument: The undesigned coincidences in the Gospel narratives, the originality and purity of the character of CHRIST; the unity of design of the Apostles; the destruction of Jerusalem; its

continued desolate state, notwithstanding attempts to rebuild it, on purpose to falsify the prophecy of CHRIST regarding it; the dispersion, yet marked distinction as a people, of the Jews; the proof arising from the prophecies of Isaiah, Daniel, &c. accomplished in CHRIST, and in HIM only; the peculiarity, the purity, and exact adaptation of Christianity to the wants and circumstances of human nature, all afford a powerful combination of evidence, convincing in the aggregate, though separately imperfect.

LETTER III.

NEXT to the miraculous nature of the Gospel narrative, your notice will probably be attracted by the peculiarity of its style. You might, perhaps, expect that Christianity would be propounded with the method, regularity, and precision of language, with which a system of

ethicks or of science would, in modern days, be exhibited; but you will find, on perusal, that not only no such order is attempted, but that the language used is often highly figurative, and remarkably general. It is very material to a just conception of Christianity, that this circumstance be fully attended to: and the following reasons may be assigned for the fact.

First; Compositions, even of the most scientific nature, in those times, and particularly in those Eastern countries, possessed not that methodical arrangement of parts, that correctness of language and of argument, which advan tageously prevail in modern Europe; and it was neither within the capacity, nor indeed the intention, of the Apostles, to compose an argumentative system, but in their narratives simply to record the most remarkable passages in the life and doctrines of CHRIST; and in most of their epistles to their disciples, to exhort them to avoid certain temporary errors of opinion or practice, and to lead lives conformable to Christianity: in general, mentioning its specific duties only incidentally, as what their " converts had before been instructed in, and as