religion. What Tacitus fays of the Jew ifh, was more applicable to the heathen establishment," Hi ritus, quoquo modo inducti, antiquitate defenduntur." It was alfo a fplendid and fumptuous 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 fhows and folemnities, to which the common people are greatly addicted; and which were of a nature to engage them much more than any thing of that fort among us. These things would retain great numbers on its fide 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 bufinefs or pleasure, of public or private life, with all the offices and amusements of fociety." 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 dépended.

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 confidered by the people as equally true, by the philofophers as equally falfe, and by the magistrate as equally useful:" and I would afk, from which of thefe three claffes of men were the Chriftian miffionaries to look for protection or impunity? Could they expect it from the people, "whofe acknowledged confidence in the public religion" they fubverted from its foundation? from the philofopher, who, "confidering all religions as equally falfe," would of courfe rank theirs among the number, with the addition of regarding them as bufy and troublesome zealots? or from the magistrate, who, fatisfied with the "utility" of the fubfifting religion, would not be likely to countenance a spirit of profelytism and innovation; a fyftem, which declared war against

every other, and which, if it prevailed, muft end in a total rupture of public opinion; an upstart religion, in a word, which was not content with its own authority, but muft disgrace all the fettled 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 flate fhould be calumniated and borne down by a company of fuperftitious and defpicable Jews.

Laftly; the nature of the cafe affords a frong proof, that the original teachers of Christianity, in confequence of their new profeffion, entered upon a new and fingular course of life. We may be allowed to prefume, that the inftitution which they preached to others, they conformed to in their own perfons; because this is no more than what every teacher of a new religion both does, and muft do, in order to obtain either profelytes or hearers. The change which this would produce was very confiderable. It is a change which we do not easily eftimate, because, ourselves and all about us

being habituated to the inftitution from our infancy, it is what we neither experience nor obferve. After men became Chriftians, much of their time was spent in prayer and devotion, in religious meetings, in celebrating the eucharift, in conferences, in exhortations, in preaching, in an affectionate intercourse with one another, and correspondence with other focieties. 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 fuch at Corinth, at Ephesus, at Antioch, or even at Jerufalem. How new! how aliene from all their former habits and ideas, and from those of every body 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 difinterested 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 Chrif tianity were as perfect as their leffons: but we are entitled to contend, that the obfervable 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 affert, a course of life pursued by them, different from that which they before led. And this is of great importance. Men are brought to any thing almoft fooner than to change their habit of life, efpecially, when the change is either inconvenient, or made against the force of natural inclination, or with the lofs of accuftomed indulgences. "It is the moft difficult of all things to convert men from vicious habits to virtuous ones, as every one máy judge from what he feels in himself, as well as from what he fees in others." It is almost like making men over again.

Left then to myself, and without any

* Hartley's Effays on Man, p. 190.

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