person whom a universal fame pronounced would arise from the east.

It was an age the furthest removed from that credulity which distinguishes ignorant nations. It was an age of scepticism, when dislike of all religion prevailed to a great extent among the learned. The Epicurean doctrine had swallowed up all other sects; which maintained the indifference of human actions, made pleasure the chief good, and held the cessation of existence at death. The disciples of this philosophy denied a deity, or asserted such an ideal one as remains in a state of torpor and inactivity, heedless of the concerns of this lower world. No period could be conceived so little adapted to the exhibition of a false, and so well calculated to put to the test the merits of a true religion. They had wits sharpened by curiosity, so that they would eagerly inquire after whatever was new; but at the same time they were disposed to treat with contempt that which pretended to be supernatural. They had long been accustomed to laugh at their own gods; and though they might imagine there was some safety attached to the ancient superstitions, yet in their private life and expectations, it is evident, they did not in the least connect any serious anticipation of happiness with the worship, or punishment with the neglect, of their deities. The infinite wisdom saw fit to select this time to silence, for ever, as my text speaks, the babblings of philosophy, and to destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. It cannot be said that Christianity stole upon the world like a thief in the night; it cannot be said that it owed its success to the credulity of mankind; and that if the generations among whom it first appeared, lived now, they would have reasoned to more purpose. For the productions of that age, are the admiration of this. In works of taste and imagination, it has never been surpassed; and it is sometimes considered as the highest praise of writers of the present day, that they exhibit a near approach to the inimitable beauties of the authors who then flourished.

It was a time, however, of infinite luxury, effeminacy, and corruption of manners, as we observed in a former lec

ture, when the most dissolute and relaxed standard of opinions, and the most debauched and disgusting state of public and private morals, prevailed. That is, the period was exactly that in which men would examine a new religion with a strict and even feverish suspicion, and would resist the yoke of a holy law with the greatest contempt and pertinacity.

The place also whence the doctrine arose, was just the very spot which witnessed the facts on which it rested. It was not in some distant and obscure region that the apostles first asserted the resurrection of Christ; but at Jerusalem, and at the festival which collected the most numerous assemblage of the nation. The first Christian churches were formed in Judea and Galilee, which had been the scenes of our Lord's ministry and miracles. The success of the apostles on the spot where the chief parts of the history had been transacted, could only arise from the truth of their appeals to the hearts of the witnesses, and to the accompanying power of Almighty God.

These considerations are of surprising force. A religion is established in the place where its facts occurred, and is believed by immense numbers who were capable of ascertaining the truth of them; and it then goes forth into the hearts of a polished and learned world at the very height of all its secular pride and indulgence, and imposes its holy laws on the corrupt and licentious age. It triumphs by its meek and peaceful doctrine over the influence of education, the force of habit, the weight of authority, the craft of a corrupt priesthood, the policy of legislators, the skill and genius of poets and philosophers, the fascination of oracles and prodigies, the shafts of scorn and ridicule, and the impositions of an idolatry supported by remote antiquity, universal diffusion, and inseparable conjunction with the laws and usages and fancied prosperity of each state. Surely no man can witness the Christian faith marching forth unarmed amidst such foes, and yet victorious over them allwithout being constrained to believe that a heavenly, though an invisible guard, watched over its progress, and without

(j) Lect. ii.

exclaiming, after the manner of the Roman soldier who witnessed the mysterious sufferings of its divine Author, "Truly, this religion is from God!"

3. But not only had the Christian religion to meet with these obstacles, but to meet them strengthened and supported by the fiercest persecutions. I now refer again to the statements of Tacitus and Pliny adduced above. Weigh every word of those passages, and tell me the amount of fierce and unprincipled persecution which raged against Christianity. But these are only specimens of the dreadful scenes which lasted for three hundred years; during which the blood of the Christian martyrs flowed in torrents in almost every part of the Roman empire. The Jew and the Gentile vied in their hatred and cruelty. He who professed this despised religion was exposed to the loss of property and country and liberty and life. The emperors armed the magistrates with authority, the fury of the populace supplied additional means of destruction, and the poison of the most odious calumnies (as we see also in the extracts to which I have just referred) aggravated all-the Christians were tortured with every species of cruelty, and accounted the enemies of the human race. Neither age nor sex was spared; and for centuries a succession of sanguinary persecutions, with short intervals of repose, marked the progress of the church.

Now the doctrine of Christ never could have overcome such obstacles in the first instance, if it had depended on merely human means. That which is already established may have within it causes of further extension; education, habit, temporal interests, spirit of party, obstinacy, pride, love of fame may then operate. But how to propagate at first, how to press on against education and habit and the other tenacious principles of mankind; how to resist and turn all the accustomed inclinations and predilections of the heart of man, this is the difficulty. The first Christians. did not suffer in the defence of opinions long entertained, conveyed down by hereditary usage, and at a time when the evidences of them had become, as they are now, those of testimony, and not of personal knowledge and ocular obser

vation. The matter was quite different. They suffered in attestation of facts which they had witnessed with their own eyes, and in support of a doctrine at war with all their natural feelings, prejudices, and mental associations. This is the point. And what we assert is that the first Christians could never have been brought over to a new and strict doctrine; and at the risk of every possible suffering, and when no one human motive of pride or vain-glory or ambition or covetousness was interested on the side of the new opinions; they never could have embraced the religion of a crucified Jew, with the whole world against them, but on the fullest. conviction of the divine authority of Christianity, attested in its miraculous operations, and sealed upon the heart by the gifts and graces of the Spirit. The case speaks for itself. We know what men are. It is morally impossible for such a doctrine as the Christian, to have been propagated by such feeble instruments, with such rapidity, to such a vast extent, in spite of every imaginable obstacle, and unsupported by a single human resource, if it had not been of God.

But consider,

III. THE MORAL AND SPIRITUAL CHANGE WROUGHT IN THE CHRISTIAN CONVERTS. It was no idle assent which they had to give to a philosophical speculation or an abstract theory. The reception of the doctrine, besides all the outward disruption of their previous habits, and all the personal hazards which it brought with it, disposed them to take up a new course of life, entirely in opposition to the corrupt propensities of our nature. Compare the apostle's description of the previous characters of the Roman or Corinthian or Ephesian converts; as far from God, alienated from the divine life, resigned over to all uncleanness, the understanding blinded to truth, the heart hardened against spiritual perceptions with his description of the same men renewed, sanctified, elevated, united to God, having the eyes of their understanding enlightened, beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, walking in love, mortifying every corrupt affection, living a pure and self-denying and benevolent life; and then tell me what but the power of God could have pro

duced the change. What could have led the mass of the heathen world to sacrifice all their prejudices and all their lusts, in order to embrace the suffering and holy religion of a despised malefactor, unless a divine and undoubted power had attended it? What more demonstrative token of such a power, than to turn thousands of men "from the practice of every vice to the practice of every virtue; to reform them. in understanding, inclination, affection; to recover, what philosophy only pretended to, the dominion of reason over passion; to make them unfeignedly subject to their Maker, rejoicing in his favor in the midst of the severest sufferings, and serenely waiting for their dismission into a state of blissful immortality?" The patience, especially, with which they endured the torments inflicted on them, had something in it more than human. This did not appear in a few cases merely, but was so general, and at the same time so astonishing, as to attract the notice of their persecutors, and frequently to produce submission to the doctrine which they taught.

The general meekness also and benevolence of their lives, (of which the letter of Pliny is no unimportant proof,) their unresisting obedience to the civil governors, who so often ill-treated them, and their charity towards each other, prove both the sincerity of their faith, and the truth of the religion which they had embraced.

The astonishing revolution in the human mind and manners, which the new religion thus produced-a change from the darkness, and corruption, and abominations of Gentile idolatries, and Jewish traditions, to the pure and benevolent graces of Christianity-a change in itself most difficult, and effected in the face of all these additional obstacles already noticed-forms an invincible argument for the truth of the Revelation. The conversion was, even by the admission of heathens themselves, from bad to good, from vice and dissoluteness of morals, to purity and love. The history of the world affords no parallel to this illustrious fact.

Nor should it be forgotten, that amongst the numerous converts to the Christian faith, were persons of all ranks, as