that the fame mistake prevailed in his time;

ye having heard that we are waiting for a kingdom, suppose, without diftinguishing, that we mean a human kingdom, when in truth we speak of that which is with God*." And it was undoubtedly a natural fource of calumny and misconstruction.

The preachers therefore of Chriftianity had to contend with prejudice backed by power. They had to come forward to a difappointed people, to a priesthood poffeffing a confiderable share of municipal authority, and actuated by strong motives of oppofition and resentment; and they had to do this under a foreign government, to whose favour they made no pretenfions, and which was constantly furrounded by their enemies. The well known, because the experienced, fate of reformers, whenever the reformation fubverts some reigning opinion, and does not proceed upon a change already taken place in the fentiments of a country, will not allow, much less lead us, to suppose, that the first propagators of Christianity at Jerufalem and in Judea, with the difficulties and the enemies which they had to contend with, and entirely destitute, as they were, of force, authority or protection, could execute their mission with personal ease and fafety.

Let us next enquire what might reasonably be expected by the preachers of Chriftianity when they turned themselves to the heathen public. Now the first thing that strikes us is, that the religion they carried with them was exclusive. It denied without referve the truth of every article of heathen mythology, the existence of every object of their worship. It accepted no compromife: it admitted no comprehenfion. It must prevail, if it prevailed at all, by the overthrow of every statue, altar and temple, in the world. It will not easily be credited that a design, so bold as this was, could in any age be attempted to be carried into execution with impunity.

For

For it ought to be confidered, that this was not fetting forth, or magnifying the character and worship of some new competitor for a place in the Pantheon, whose pretenfions might be difcuffed or afferted without questioning the reality of any others. It was pronouncing all other gods to be false, and all other worship vain. From the facility with which the Polytheison of ancient nations admitted new objects of worship into the number of their acknowledged divinities, or the patience with which they might entertain proposals of this kind, we can argue nothing as to their toleration of a system, or of the publishers and active propagators of a system, which swept away the very foundation of the existing establishment. The one was nothing more than what it would be, in Popish countries, to add a faint to the calendar; the other was to abolish and tread under foot the calendar itself.

Secondly, it ought also to be confidered, that this was not the case of philosophers propounding in their books, or in their schools, doubts concerning the truth of the popular creed, or even avowing their difbelief of it. These philosophers did not go about from place to place to collect profelytes from amongst the common people; to form in the heart of the country societies profeffing their tenets; to provide for the order, instruction and permanency of these focieties; nor did they enjoin their followers to withdraw themselves from the public worship of the temples, or refuse a compliance with rites instituted by the laws*. These things are what the Christians did, and what the philofophers did not: and in these confifted the activity and danger of the enterprife.

Thirdly, it ought also to be confidered, that this danger proceeded not merely from soleinn acts and public resolutions of the state, but from fudden bursts of violence at particular places, from the licence of the populace, the rafhness of fome magiftrates and the negligence of others; from the influence and instigation of interested adversaries, and, in general, from the variety and warmth of opinion which an errand so novel and extraordinary could not fail of exciting. I can conceive that the teachers of Chriftianity might both fear and fuffer much from thefe causes, without any general perfecution being denounced against them by imperial authority. Some length of time, I should fuppose, might pass, before the vast machine of the Roman empire would be put in motion, or its attention be obtained to religious controversy: but, during that time, a great deal of ill usage might be endured, by a fet of friendless, unprotected travellers, telling men, wherever they came, that the religion of their ancestors, the religion in which they had been brought up, the religion of

the