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 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 ftate should be calumniated and borne down by a company of superstitious and despicable Jews. Laftly; the nature of the cafe affords a trong proof, that the original teachers of Chriftianity, in confequence of their new profeffion, entered upon a new and fingular 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 confiderable. It is a change which we do not easily eftimate, because, ourselves and all about us being D3 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 eucharift, 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 fuch at Corinth, at Ephefus, 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 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 Chriftianity were as perfect as their leffons: 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 any thing almost sooner 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 most 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 sfees in others *." It is almost like making men over again. 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 cafe, 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 profecution 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 fubject of the miffion, compared with the fixed opinions and prejudices of those to whom the miffionaries 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 and cruel treatment; that, at any rate, they must have always had fo much to fear for their personal safety, as to have passed their lives in a state of conftant peril and anxiety; and lastly, that their mode of life and conduct, visibly at least, correfponded with the institution which they delivered, and, fo far, was both new, and required continual self-denial, CHAP. |