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tolerably complete account of Christ's life might be collected out of his works. In the following quotation, he asserts the performance of miracles by Christ, in words as strong and positive as the language possesses: "Christ healed those who from their birth were blind, and deaf, and lame; causing, by his word, one to leap, another to hear, and a third to see: and having raised the dead, and caused them to live, he, by his works, excited attention, and induced the men of that age to know him. Who, however, seeing these things done, said that it was a magical appearance, and dared to call him a magician, and a deceiver of the people

In his first apology, Justin expressly assigns the reason for his having recourse to the argument from prophecy, rather than alleging the miracles of the Christian history: which reason was, that the persons with whom he contended would ascribe these miracles to magic; "lest any of our

* Just. Dial. p. 258, ed. Thirlby.
+ Apolog. prim. p. 48, ib.

opponents should say, What hinders, but that he who is called Christ by us, being a man sprung from men, performed the miracles which we attributed to him, by magical art?" The suggestion of this reason meets, as I apprehend, the very point of the present objection; more especially when we find Justin followed in it, by other writers of that age. Irenæus, who came about forty years after him, notices the same evasion in the adversaries of Christianity, and replies to it by the same argument: "But, if they shall say, that the Lord performed these things by an illusory appearance (avariadas), leading these objectors to the prophecies, we will show from them, that all things were thus predicted concerning him, and strictly came to pass." Lactantius, who lived a century lower, delivers the same sentiment, upon the same occasion: "He performed miracles; we might have supposed him to have been a magician, as ye say, and as the Jews then supposed, if all the prophets had not with one spirit foretold that Christ should perform these very things."

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*Iren. I. ii. c. 57.

† Lactant. v. 3.

But to return to the Christian apologists in their order. Tertullian:-"That person whom the Jews had vainly imagined, from the meanness of his appearance, to be a mere man, they afterwards, in consequence of the power he exerted, considered as a magician, when he, with one word, ejected devils out of the bodies of men, gave sight to the blind, cleansed the leprous, strengthened the nerves of those that had the palsy, and, lastly, with one command, restored the dead to life; when he, I say, made the elements obey him, assuaged the storms, walked upon the seas, demonstrating himself to be the Word of God*."

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Next in the catalogue of professed apologists we may place Origen, who, it is well known, published a formal defence of Christianity, in answer to Celsus, a heathen, who had written a discourse against it. I know no expressions, by which a plainer or more positive appeal to the Christian miracles can be made, than the expressions used by Origen; "Undoubtedly we do think him to be the Christ, and the Son of

*Tertull. Apolog. p. 20; ed. Priorii, Par. 1675.

God, because he healed the lame and the blind; and we are the more confirmed in ` this persuasion, by what is written in the prophecies: "Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear, and the lame man shall leap as an hart." But that he also raised the dead, and that it is not a fiction of those who wrote the Gospels, is evident from hence, that, if it had been a fiction, there would have been many recorded to be raised up, and such as had been a long time in their graves. But, it not being a fiction, few have been recorded: for instance, the daughter of the ruler of a synagogue, of whom I do not know why he said, She is not dead but sleepeth, expressing something peculiar to her, not common to all dead persons; and the only son of a widow, on whom he had compassion, and raised him to life, after he had bid the bearers of the corpse to stop; and the third, Lazarus, who had been buried four days." This is positively to assert the miracles of Christ, and it is also to comment upon them, and that with a considerable degree of accuracy and candour.

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In another passage of the same author we meet with the old solution of magic ap

plied to the miracles of Christ by the adversaries of the religion. "Celsus," saith Origen, "well knowing what great works may be alleged to have been done by Jesus, pretends to grant that the things related of him are true; such as healing diseases, raising the dead, feeding multitudes · with a few loaves, of which large fragments were left*." And then Celsus gives, it seems, an answer to these proofs of our Lord's mission, which, as Origen understood it, resolved the phenomena into magic; for, Origen begins his reply, by observing, "You see that Celsus in a manner allows that there is such a thing as magic."

It appears also from the testimony of Saint Jerome, that Porphyry, the most learned and able of the Heathen writers against Christianity, resorted to the same. solution: "Unless," says he, speaking to Vigilantius," according to the manner of the gentiles and the profane, of Porphyry

* Orig. cont. Cels. lib. ii. sect. 48.

+ Lardner's Jewish and Heath. Test. vol. ii. p. 294. ed. 4to.

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