pontúm to Taurominium; because Christ had [ in solitude and spend their days in penances and walked on the sea, Pythagoras rode through the prayers; ambitious innovators have been carried skies; because Christ had been forty days fast- to the highest pitch of human greatness by ing in the wilderness, Pythagoras was to be becoming founders of a new religion; but Christ forty days without food in the Temple of the taught his disciples neither to shun society, nor Muses at Metapontum ; because Christ descend- to disturb authorities; he told them indeed that ed into Hades, and rose again from the dead, they should die for the faith they professed, but and appeared upon earth, Pythagoras descended it was not the death of soldiers, but of martyrs, to the shades below, remained there a complete they should suffer, and these precepts he conyear, saw Homer, Hesiod, and other departed firmed by his own example, being "led like a spirits, returned upon earth wan and emaciated, lamb to the slaughter." If they who profess and reported what he had seen in full assembly his religion were to practise it, Universal Love of his disciples, whilst his mother, by his special and Benevolence would obtain upon earth. direction before his descent, registered upon tablets all that passed, and noted the times of his temporary death and resurrection: to carry on the competition, he was made to allay winds, tempests, and earthquakes, to cure diseases whether of mind or body, and to foretell to certain fishermen, whom he found at work, how many fish they should enclose in their net. The reader who has consulted Porphyry and Iambli-imitation of them, warrant a fair presumption, chus will call to mind other coincidences. With what superior, what incontestable strength of evidence does the disciple of Christ meet the disciple of Pythagoras in his comparison between their masters! The heathen teacher was almost a miracle of erudition; he traversed the East in pursuit of science, and collected knowledge, wherever it was to be found, with unremitting industry: Christ lived in privacy and obscurity, educated only in the humble trade and occupation of his parents, to whom he was obedient and devoted, till he set out upon the functions of his mission. The person of the first was captivating and comely, not to be approached but with awe and adoration, with preparatory penances and rigid initiations, with every artifice to set him off that human wit could devise; the other was "despised and rejected of men,' the simplest and the meekest being that ever walked the earth; conversing freely with all men, presenting himself to the poor and lowly, to women and to little children; in him was "no form of comeliness" that men should desire; no artifice or trick to catch applause or to excite surprise: if he exercised bis miraculous power in healing the infirm, or reviving the dead, he did it in silence, and under injunction of secrecy, directing men to pay their thanks to God alone, and forbidding them to call him good. No magic numbers, nor mystic symbols obscured his doctrines, but he delivered the simple system of his pure morality in little easy anecdotes, levelled to the capacity and fitted to the memory of the poorest and most illiterate. From such he chose his disciples, that the “wisdom of this world" might have no share in his ministry, and he rested upon the weakest agents the task of preaching and propagating the sublimest religion. Gloomy enthusiasts have buried themselves in deserts and caverns of the earth to brood But of the internal evidences of Christ's religion I am not now to speak; so long as the distinctions between good and evil exist, these can need no defence; if men agree in the one, they cannot differ or dispute about the other. With regard to the gospel account of Christ's miracles, I may be allowed, in general, to observe, that these forgeries of Porphyry and Iamblichus, in that if these writers could have disproved the authority of the Evangelists, and controverted the matter of fact, they would not have resorted to so indecisive and circuitous a mode of opposing them as this which we are now examining: men of such learning as these writers would not have risked extravagant fictions, merely to keep way with a history which they had more immediate means of refuting: on the other hand, if their absurdity should lead any man to suppose that they forged these accounts by way of parody and in ridicule of the gospels, the accounts themselves give the strongest evidence to the contrary, and it is clear beyond a doubt that both Porphyry and Iamblichus mean to be credited in their histories of Pythagoras, as seriously as Philostratus does in his of Apollonius Tyaneus. This will more fully appear by referring to the circumstances that occasioned these histories to be written. Christ having performed his miracles openly and before so many witnesses, it is not found that the matter of fact was ever questioned by any who lived in that age: on the contrary, we see it was acknowledged by his most vigilant enemies, the Pharisees: they did not deny the miracle, but they ascribed it to the aid of the prince of the devils; so weak a subterfuge against the evidence of their own senses probably satisfied neither themselves nor others; if it had, this accusation of sorcery (being capital by their law, and also by that of the Romans) would have been heard of, when they were so much to seek for crimes, wherewith to charge him on his trial: if any man shall object that this is arguing out of the gospels in favour of the gospels, I contend that this matter of fact does not rest solely on the gospel evidence, but also upon collateral historic proof: for this very argument of the Pharisees, and this only, is made use of by those Jews, whom Celsus brings in arguing against the Christian religion; and those Jews, on this very account, rank Christ with Pythagoras; and I challenge the cavillers against Christ's miracles either to controvert what is thus asserted, or to produce any other argument of Jewish origin, except this ascribed to the Pharisees by the gospel, either from Celsus, as above mentioned, or any other writer. the contrary way to what he wished, and that the reason why contemporary writers were silent was not because they were ignorant of the facts, but because they could not confute them? Here then we will leave the case for the present; the heathen writers, contemporary with Christ, make no mention of his miracles; they are interested to disprove them, and they do not disprove them; modern unbelievers think this a reason that these miracles were never performed; Celsus writes fifty years after the time, never urges this silence as an argument for their nonexistence, but virtually, nay, expressly admits Christ's miracles, by setting up Pythagoras's in competition with them. Neither is it Pythagoras alone he compares to Christ, he states the performances of Aristeas Proconnesius and Abaris also. Of Aristeas, the gives it only upon hearsay: he relates that it was reported of him, that he died at Proconnesus, and appeared there seven years after, and having written some verses disappeared; but that two or three hundred years after, he had appeared again at Metapontum, where, by special direction of Apollo, he was worshipped as a god. Of Abaris, Celsus relates that he rode through the air on an arrow, passing over mountains and seas in his passage out of Scythia into Greece, and back again into Scythia. Celsus, it is well known, was a very learned man, and wrote in the time of Adrian, or something later; this was not above fifty years after the date of Christ's miracles. Celsus did not controvert the accounts of them who were witnesses of the miracles, or attempt to show any inconsistence or chicanery in the facts themselves; he takes up at a second hand, the old Pharisaical argument of ascribing them to the power of the devil: in short, they were perform-first account we have is in Herodotus, and he ed, he cannot deny it; there was no trick or artifice in the performance, he cannot discover any; the accounts of them are no forgeries, he cannot confute them; they are recent histories, and their authenticity too notorious to be called into question: he knows not how the miracles were performed, and therefore they were done by the invocation of the devil; he cannot patiently look on and see that learning so long the glory of all civilized nations, and which he himself was to an eminent degree possessed of, now brought into disgrace by a new religion, professing to be a divine revelation, and originating from amongst the meanest and most odious of all the provincial nations, and propagated by disciples who were as much despised and hated by the Jews in general as the Jews were by all other people. Unable to disprove the account, and at a loss how to parry it from hearsay, or from what he finds in former writers, he has no other resource but to bring forward again those cavilling Pharisees, and roundly to assert in general terms (which he does more than once) that these miracles are all "the tricks of a sorcerer," and for this he expects the world should take his authority. I have said that Celsus adduces neither oral nor written authority against Christ's miracles; but I am well aware it may be said (and modern cavillers will affect to say it with triumph) that authorities are silent on the subject; "there are none which make mention of these miracles, at least none have come down to our times."-If this silence implies a want of collateral evidence, which, in the opinion of our modern disbelievers, vitiates the authenticity of the gospel, how much stronger would the argument have been in Celsus's time than in ours! Why does he not avail himself of it? And why does he take such pains to controvert accounts of which no man had ever spoken either in proof or disproof? May it not be fairly presumed, that he forbears to urge it from plain conviction that it would operate Hence it came to pass that other heathen writers, after the example of Celsus, published their accounts of Pythagoras and Apollonius Tyaneus; not so much for the purpose of giving the histories of those persons as to set them up in opposition to Christ and his disciples. Porphyry composed the history of Pythagoras, after he had written fifteen books professedly against the Christian religion; these were suppressed by the Christian emperors who succeeded Galienus, in whose time Porphyry wrote his history of Pythagoras in the island of Sicily, whither he retired in disgust with the emperor for his favour to the Christians, and would have put himself to death with his own hand, if Plotinus had not prevented him. Galienus soon died, and the succeeding emperors being disposed to persecute the Christians, Porphyry published his history. Iamblichus published his account of Pythagoras in the reign of the Emperor Julian, with whom he was in high favour, as the letters of that Emperor sufficiently testify. Hierocles also, in the time of Dioclesian, published two books against the Christian religion, under the title of Philalethes, and for these was promoted by Galerius from being chief judge at Nicomedia to the government of Alexandria. These books are now lost, but we are informed by Eusebius they were mostly copied from Celsus, and set up Aristeas, Pythagoras, and Apollonius Tyaneus against Christ, whom, he says, the Christians, on account of his doing a few teratyai, call a God, and concludes with these words, viz. "That it is worth considering that those things of Jesus are boasted of Peter and Paul, and some others of the like sort, liars, and illiterate, and impostors; but for these things of Apollonius we have Maximus and Damis, a philosopher, who lived with him, and Philostratus, men eminent for their learning and lovers of truth." As for these witnesses to Philostratus's legend of Apollonius, Maximus's minutes go no farther than to two or three years of Apollonius's life passed at Ægæ, when he was about twenty years old; and what he had from Damis was a tablebook of minutes, which a nameless man, pretending to be a relation of Damis, brought to Julia, the mother and wife of Caracalla, and were by her given to the Sophist Philostratus to dress up in handsomer language. Such are the authorities for the legend of Philostratus, written above a hundred years after the death of Apollonius, who died a few weeks after the Emperor Domitian, in the year of Christ 96. This Apollonius was of the sect of Pythagoras, and the patroness of Philostratus's history was the monster Julia, mother and wife to the detestable Caracalla. NUMBER XI. Ir seems natural to suppose that any great and signal revelation of the Divine Will should be authenticated to mankind by evidences proportioned to the importance of the communication, Christians contend that in the purity and perfection of their religion, as it was taught by Christ, and in the miracles which he performed on earth whilst he was teaching, full and sufficient evidences are found of a Divine Revela. tion. As for the religion of Christ, it speaks for itself, the book is open which contains it, and, however it may have degenerated in practice through the corruption of them who profess it, there seems no difference of opinion in the world as to the purity and perfection of its principles: of these evidences, therefore, which are generally called internal, I have no need to speak. Is it not possible to make the same direct appeal to the miracles as to the religion of Christ? Many centuries have revolved since they have ceased; nature has long since resumed her course, and retains no traces of them; their evidences, therefore, are not, like those of Christ's religion, internal, but historical; it must, however, be acknowledged that they are historical evidences of the strongest sort, for the historians were eyewitnesses of what they relate, and their relations agree. It is easy, therefore, to see that, if the system of Christianity is to be attacked, it is in this part only the attack is to be expected. This has accordingly taken place in three different periods, and in three different modes. The unbelieving Jews, contemporary with Christ, before whose eyes the miracles were performed, could not dispute their being done, but they attempted to criminate the doer by accusing him of a guilty communication with evil spirits, ascribing his supernatural deeds to the power of the devil. The heathens, who had not ocular demonstration, but could not contest facts so well established, made their attack upon his miracles by instancing others who had done things altogether as wonderful, viz. Pythagoras, Abaris, Apollonius, and others. Thus the matter rested for many ages, till modern cavillers within the pale of the Christian church struck upon a new argument for an attack upon Christ's miracles; and this argument having been woven into a late publication, whose historical merit puts it into general circulation, many retailers of infidelity (and Dr. Mac-Infidel amongst the rest) have caught at it as a discovery of importance, and, as they have contrived to connect it with topics of more erudition than the generality of people are furnished with on whom they practise, it has been propagated with some success where it has had the advantage of not being understood. The strength of this argument lies in the discovery that contemporary authorities are silent on the subject of Christ's miracles: naturalists and the authors, who record all curious and extraordinary events of their own or of preceding times, make no mention of the wonderful things which Christ is said to have done in the land of Judæa; in short, the Evangelists are left alone in the account, and yet some things are related by them too general in their extent, and too wonderful in their nature, to have been passed over in silence by these authors, or, in other words, not to have had a place in their collections: the elder Pliny and Seneca, they tell us, were living at the time of Christ's passion; the Evangelists relate that there was darkness over the face of the earth when Christ gave up the ghost, and this darkness was miraculous, being out of the course of nature, and incidental to the divinity of the person who was then offering up his life for the redemption of mankind. Against the veracity of the gospel account relative to this particular prodigy the attack is pointed; and they argue that, if it extended over the whole earth, elder Pliny and Seneca, with all others who were then living, must have noticed it; it was local to the province of Judæa, men of their information must have heard of it: each of if these philosophers has recorded all the great phenomena of nature which his curiosity and care could get together, and Pliny, in particular, has devoted an entire chapter to eclipses of an extraordinary nature, yet does not mention this at the Passion: the defection of light which followed Cæsar's murder was not to be compared with what the gospel relates of the preternatural darkness at the Passion, and yet most of the writers of that age have recorded the former event, whilst all are silent as to the latter "Therefore it did not happen." This, I believe, is a fair state of the argument, and if there be any merit in the discovery, it certainly rests with the moderns; for neither Celsus, Porphyry, nor his disciple Iamblichus, has struck upon it, though the first-mentioned wrote against Christianity in the time of Adrian, who succeeded to the empire eighty years after Christ's 's passion; as for Seneca, he died about thirty years, and elder Pliny three and forty years after Christ. The fathers of the church, it seems, are divided in opinion as to the darkness at Christ's passion being general to the whole earth, or local only to Judæa. As the decision of this point does not affect the general question, the abettors of the argument are willing to admit with Origen, Beza, and others, that the prodigy should be understood as local to that part of the world, to which his other miracles were confined, and to whose conviction, if it really happened, it is natural to suppose it should be specially addressed. Allowing this, these reasoners contend that it must of necessity have been reported to Rome, and that report must have been known, to Seneca and elder Pliny, and, being known, must have been recorded by one or both. These positions merit examination. The first point to be taken for granted is, that the miracle of the three hours' darkness upon the passion of Christ must necessarily have been reported to Rome: this report was either to come in the state despatches of the Procurator Pilate to the court of Tiberius, or from private communications: of the probability of the first case the reader must judge for himself from circumstances; it is merely matter of speculation: it involves a doubt, at least, whether the Procurator would not see reasons personal, as well as political, against reporting to the court an event which, at best, tended to his own crimination, and which, if he had delivered it for truth, might have alarmed the jealousy or roused the resentment of his sovereign. The idea entertained by the Jews of deliverance from the Roman yoke by their expected Messias was too general to have escaped the knowledge of their watchful tyrants, and it does not seem likely any Roman governor of that province would be forward to report any miracle or miracles that had reference to a person who, having set up a new religion, declared himself that very Messias, which the Jewish prophecies foretold should appear to extirpate the Gentile idolatry; if this be a reason for the Roman Procurator in Judæa to be silent on the subject, it is no less so for the people of Rome to reject the reports of the Christians themselves, if they ventured any; and as for the unbelieving Jews, it is not to be expected they would contribute to spread the evidences of Christ's divinity. The next point to be taken for granted in the argument under examination is, that this report, if actually made, must have been known to the philosopher Seneca and the naturalist Pliny; and I think it may fairly be allowed that an event of this sort could not well fail of coming to the knowledge of Seneca, and even of Pliny (though he died forty-three years after the time,) if the government in Tiberius's reign had been made acquainted with it by authority, and had taken no measures for suppressing it, or any accounts published at the time respecting it; for, after all, it must be observed that this event not being found in Pliny's Natural History, nor in Seneca's Inquiries, does not by any means decide the question against any accounts being published, but leaves it still open to conjecture (and with some reason) that such accounts might have been suppressed by the heathen emperors. But, waving any further discussion of this point, we will pass to the third and last position: in which it is presumed that, if this preternatural eclipse at Christ's passion was known to Seneca and Pliny, one or both must have recorded it in their works. This, I think, is begging a question very hardly to be granted; for these writers must have stated the event, either as a thing credible, or doubtful, or incredible; they must either have grounded it upon authority or reported it upon hearsay; they must have admitted it, with its date and circumstances, at the very crisis when it happened; and, in that case, what would have been the consequence of such a publication? The Christians would naturally have made the application to the passion of Christ, and how dangerous was it for a heathen to admit a fact open to such an interpretation? A Roman philosopher, giving a serious history of extaordinary and prodigious events, would make his court but ill to a heathen persecuting emperor, ' by admitting this into the account, unless it was to confute it: now this does not appear to have been in contemplation with Seneca or Pliny in any part of their writings; each of these authors tells us what he credits and wishes to be credited, not what he disbelieves and wishes to confute : the defection of light at the time of Cæsar's death was the creed of the court; the historians, nas turalists, and even the poets celebrated that phenomenon, and it did not lose in their relations; but in the case of the darkness at Christ's death, a believer in him and his miracles draws a stronger argument for his belief from the silence of Seneca and Pliny than any caviller can urge against it from the same circumstance: if we admit they knew it, and yet did not record it, are we not better founded in supposing they were silent because they could not controvert the fact, than our opponents are in saying it did not pass, because they do not mention it? It is too much to require of witnesses that they should depose to a fact which is to convict themselves: I must therefore appeal to the candid reader, whether a philosopher writing in the court of Nero, who had charged the Christians with the burning of Rome, and was devising terrible and unheard of modes of torturing them upon this charge, who had beheaded Paul and crucified Peter for preaching Christ and the redemption of mankind earned by his Passion; whether a heathen philosopher, I say, writing at this very time an account of extraordinary, but what he delivers as true events in nature, would venture upon putting into his account a miracle, tending to confirm the divine nature and mission of that person, whose immediate followers were then suffering under the most determined persecution? No heathen writer in his senses would have ventured to give such an account. Peter and Paul declared for the miracle, and were martyred for their doctrine; the gospel account declared for the miracle, and no one Roman writer controverted the assertion; this was the time for Seneca, for Pliny, and other heathen writers to cry out against the glaring fiction, "Do the Christians say there was a general darkness when their master expired? We appeal to the fact against them; it reached not us at Rome; the light of that day was like the light of other days. Do they say it was partial to Judæa only? Be it so. We meet them on their own ground; we appeal to the Procurator Pilate, to the noble Romans resident in Judæa, to the soldiers, to the very centurion who attended his execution, to witness against this impudent attack upon men's senses. Let them pretend that he healed the sick, cured the lame, turned water into wine, or performed a thousand other juggling tricks, but darkness over a whole province can be confuted by the testimony of a whole province, and to this we appeal." Was this said? Was this appeal made? Strange perversion of reason, to turn that into an argument against a thing which seems conclusive for it! at least, no negative can come nearer to conclusion than contemporary silence in a case so open to confutation, had it not been true. "But Seneca and elder Pliny did not see the gospel"-Let it pass; let us grant all that the argument supposes; why are we told of no confutation of this miracle by any heathen writer contemporary with or posterior to the gospel account of the Passion? The assertion of a pre ternatural event, so generally notorious, must have been open to proof. Would Celsus have overlooked it? Would not Lucian have taken it up? Should not we hear of its having been urged by Porphyry, who was so voluminous a controversialist? Should not we meet it in Julian or Philostratus? Should we hear nothing that could lead us to believe it was controverted by Iamblichus, or Hierocles in his books entitled Philalethes? If the silence of the heathen writers is to be appealed to for the purpose of impeaching Christ's miracles, let the appeal be made; while we confine ourselves to the defence of those miracles only which are recorded in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, neither the silence of ancient, nor the eloquence of modern opponents can shake the records on which we ground our faith. NUMBER XII. Ar the same time that it is fair to suppose there must be more than ordinary merit in men who rise to great opulence and condition in life from low beginnings, all the world must be sensible of the danger attending sudden elevation, and how very apt a man's head is to turn who climbs an eminence to which his habits have not familiarized him. A mountaineer can tread firm upon a precipice, and walk erect without tottering along the path that winds itself about the craggy cliff, on which he has his dwelling; whilst the inhabitant of the valley travels with affright and danger over the giddy pass, and oftentimes is precipitated from the height to perish in the gulph beneath his feet. Such is the fate of many who, by the revolutions of fortune, are raised to lofty situations: it is generally the lot of such people to make few friends; in their danger there are none to give them warning, in their fall there are none to afford pity. This is not the case with them who are born to the dignities they enjoy: the sovereign, whose throne is his inheritance, meets with pity and indulgence-pity for the cares inseparable from his condition, indulgence for the failings and excesses incidental to hereditary greatness: but the man who is the maker of his own fortune acts on a stage where every step he takes will be observed with jealousy; amongst the many thousands who are set to watch him, let him reflect how many hearts there are, rankling with disappointed pride, and envying him the lot which, in their own conceit at least, their merit had a better title to: when such a man appears, it is the common cry--" I cannot bear that up |