these persons, but a bad and excessive superstition,' accompanied, it seems, with an oath of mutual federation, to allow themselves in no crime or immoral conduct whatever.' The truth is, the ancient heathens considered religion entirely as an affair of State, as much under the tuition of the magistrate as any other part of the police. The religion of that age was not merely allied to the State; it was incorporated into it. Many of its offices were administered by the magistrate. Its titles of pontiffs, augurs, and flamens, were borne by senators, consuls, and generals. Without discussing therefore the truth of the theology, they resented every affront put upon the established worship as a direct opposition to the authority of government.

Add to which, that the religious systems of those times, however il supported by evidence, had been long established. The ancient religion of a country has always many votaries, and sometimes not the fewer because its origin is hidden in remoteness and obscurity. Men have a natural veneration for antiquity, especially in matters of religion. What Tacitus says of the Jewish, was more applicable to the heathen establishment, "Hi ritus, quoquo modo inducti, antiquitate defenduntur.' It was also a splendid and sumptuous worship. It had its priesthood, its endowments, its temples. Statuary, painting, architecture, and music, contributed their effect to its ornament and magnificence. It abounded in festival shows and solemnities, to which the common people are greatly addicted; and which were of a nature to engage them much more than anything of that sort among us. These things would retain great numbers on its side by the fascination of spectacle and pomp, as well as interest many in its preservation by the advantage which they drew from it. 'It was moreover interwoven,' as Mr. Gibbon rightly represents it, with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public or private life, with all the offices and amusements of society.' Upon the due celebration also of its rites, the people were taught to believe, and did believe, that the prosperity of their country in a great measure depended. I am willing to accept the account of the matter which is given by Mr. Gibbon : The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful:' and I would ask, from which of

these three classes of men were the christian missionaries to look for protection or impunity? Could they expect it from the people, whose acknowledged confidence in the public religion' they subverted from its foundation? from the philosopher who, considering all religions as equally false,' would of course rank theirs among the number, with the addition of regarding them as busy and troublesome zealots? or from the magistrate who, satisfied with the utility' of the subsisting religion, would not be likely to countenance a spirit of proselytism and innovation; a system which declared war against every other, and which, if it prevailed, must end in a total rupture of public opinion; an upstart religion, in a word, which was not content with its own authority, but must disgrace all the settled religions of the world ? It was not to be imagined that he would endure with patience, that the religion of the Emperor and of the State should be calumniated and borne down by a company of superstitious and despicable Jews.

Lastly; the nature of the case affords a strong proof, that the original teachers of Christianity, in consequence of their new profession, entered upon a new and singular course of life. We may be allowed to presume, that the institution which they preached to others, they conformed to in their own persons; because this is no more than what every teacher of a new religion both does, and must do, in order to obtain either proselytes or hearers. The change which this would produce was very considerable. It is a change which we do not easily estimate, because, ourselves and all about us being habituated to the institution from our infancy, it is what we neither experience nor observe. After men became Christians, much of their time was spent in prayer and devotion, in religious meetings, in celebrating the eucharist, in conferences, in exhortations, in preaching, in an affectionate intercourse with one another, and correspondence with other societies. Perhaps their mode of life, in its form and habit, was not very unlike the Unitas Fratrum, or of modern Methodists. Think then what it was to become such at Corinth, at Ephesus, at Antioch, or even at Jerusalem. How new! how alien from all their former habits and ideas, and from those of everybody about them! What a revolution there must have been of opinions and prejudices to bring the matter to this!

We know what the precepts of the religion are; how pure, how benevolent, how disinterested a conduct they enjoin; and that this purity and benevolence is extended to the very thoughts and affections. We are not perhaps at liberty to take for granted that the lives of the preachers of Christianity were as perfect as their lessons: but we are entitled to contend, that the observable part of their behaviour must have agreed in a great measure with the duties which they taught. There was therefore, which is all that we assert, a course of life pursued by them, different from that which they before led. And this is of great importance. Men are brought to anything almost sooner than to change their habit of life, especially when the change is either inconvenient, or made against the force of natural inclination, or with the loss of accustomed indulgences. 'It is the most difficult of all things to convert men from vicious habits to virtuous ones, as every one may judge from what he feels in himself, as well as from what he sees in others." It is almost like making men over again.

Left then to myself, and without any more information than a knowledge of the existence of the religion, of the general story upon which it is founded, and that no act of power, force, or authority, was concerned in its first success, I should conclude, from the very nature and exigency of the case, that the author of the religion during his life, and his immediate disciples after his death, exerted themselves in spreading and publishing the institution throughout the country in which it began, and into which it was first carried; that, in the prosecution of this purpose, they underwent the labours and troubles which we observe the propagators of new sects to undergo; that the attempt must necessarily have also been in a high degree dangerous; that from the subject of the mission, compared with the fixed opinions and prejudices of those to whom the missionaries were to address themselves, they could hardly fail of encountering strong and frequent opposition; that, by the hand of government, as well as from the sudden fury and unbridled licence of the people, they would oftentimes experience injurious and cruel treatment; that, at any rate, they must have always had so much to fear for their personal

safety, as to have passed their lives in a state of constant peril and anxiety; and lastly, that their mode of life and conduct, visibly at least, corresponded with the institution which they delivered, and, so far, was both new, and required continual self-denial.

ANNOTATIONS.

The ruling party at Jerusalem had just before crucified the Founder of the religion.'

If the idea of Christ's Resurrection occurred to the disciples at all, it must have occurred to them as a thing to be proved. 'SOMETHING' may have made it congenial to their own minds; but nothing could have bewitched them to believe it would turn out congenial to the minds of priests and people reeking with the blood of a murdered Messiah. And they must, therefore, have plainly perceived that, in spreading such a story, their personal safety was at stake. We read, accordingly, of their being straitly threatened by the Jewish rulers, as intending to bring on them this man's blood.'

'A system which swept away the very foundation of the existing establishment.'

The ancient Romans and other Pagans seldom objected to the addition of a new god to their list; and it is said that some of them actually did propose to enrol Jesus among the number. This was quite consonant to the genius of their mythological system. But the overthrow of the whole system itself, and the substitution of a fundamentally different religion, was a thing they at first regarded with alarm and horror; all their feelings were enlisted against such a radical change. So also in the unreformed Churches. The enrolment from time to time of a new saint in the calendar, or the promulgation of a new dogma, are acceptable novelties. But those who would abolish all saintworship, and restore Christianity to its primitive purity, are denounced as heretical innovators. Any one, therefore, who should imagine that the Gospel may have been originally re

ceived with some degree of favour on account of its being new, because, forsooth, men like novelties, and that, therefore, something short of the most overpowering miraculous proofs might have sufficed for its introduction and spread,-such a person must have entirely overlooked the distinction between the kinds of things in which men do or do not favour what is new.

'That the religion of the Emperor and the State should be calumniated and borne down by a company of superstitious and despicable Jews?'

Dean Milman has given' a vivid and just description of the kind of reception likely to await the promulgators of the Gospel in heathen cities.

Conceive then the Apostles of Jesus Christ, the tentmaker or the fisherman, entering, as strangers, into one of the splendid cities of Syria, Asia Minor, or Greece. Conceive them, I mean, as unendowed with miraculous powers, having adopted their itinerant system of teaching from human motives, and for human purposes alone. As they pass along to the remote and obscure quarter, where they expect to meet with precarious hospitality among their countrymen, they survey the strength of the established religion, which it is their avowed purpose to overthrow. Everywhere they behold temples on which the utmost extravagance of expenditure has been lavished by succeeding generations; idols of the most exquisite workmanship, to which, even if the religious feeling of adoration is enfeebled, the people are strongly attached by national or local vanity. They meet processions, in which the idle find perpetual occupation, the young excitement, the voluptuous a continual stimulant to their passions. They behold a priesthood, numerous, sometimes wealthy; nor are these alone wedded by interest to the established faith; many of the trades, like those of the makers of silver shrines in Ephesus, are pledged to the support of that to which they owe their maintenance. They pass a magnificent theatre, on the splendour and success of which the popularity of the existing authorities mainly depends; and in which the serious exhibitions are essentially religious, the lighter as inti

1 Bampton Lectures, L. vi. p. 269.