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 behavior 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, 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.

1

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 labors 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 license 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

1 Hartley's Essays on Man, p. 190.

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 favor 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 favor 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 splendor 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.

mately connected with the indulgence of the baser passions. They behold another public building, where even worse feelings, the cruel and the sanguinary, are pampered by the animating contests of wild beasts and of gladiators, in which they themselves may shortly play a dreadful part,

'Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday!'

Show and spectacle are the characteristic enjoyments of the whole people, and every show and spectacle is either sacred to the religious feelings, or incentive to the lusts of the flesh; those feelings which must be entirely eradicated, those lusts which must be brought into total subjection to the law of Christ. They encounter likewise itinerant jugglers, diviners, magicians, who impose upon the credulous, and excite the contempt of the enlightened in the first case, dangerous rivals to those who should attempt to propagate a new faith by imposture and deception; in the latter, naturally tending to prejudice the mind against all miraculous pretensions whatever: here, like Elymas, endeavoring to outdo the signs and wonders of the Apostles; there, throwing suspicion on all asserted supernatural agency, by the frequency and clumsiness of their delusions. They meet philosophers, frequently itinerant like themselves; or teachers of new religions, priests of Isis and Serapis, who have brought into equal discredit what might otherwise have appeared a proof of philanthropy, the performing laborious journeys at the sacrifice of personal ease and comfort, for the moral and religious improvement of mankind; or at least have so accustomed the public mind to similar pretensions, as to take away every attraction from their boldness or novelty. There are also the teachers of the different mysteries, which would engross all the anxiety of the inquisitive, perhaps excite, even if they did not satisfy, the hopes of the more pure and lofty-minded. Such must have been among the obstacles which would force themselves on the calmer moments of the most ardent; such the overpowering difficulties, of which it would be impossible to overlook the importance, or elude the force; which required no sober calculation to estimate, no laborious inquiry to discover; which met and confronted them wherever they went, and which, either in desperate presumption, or deliberate reliance on their own preternatural powers, they must have contemned and defied.

The commencement of their labors was usually disheartening, and ill-calculated to keep alive the flame of ungrounded enthusiasm. They begin their operations in the narrow and secluded synagogue of their own countrymen. The novelty of their doctrine, and curiosity, secure them at first a patient attention; but as the more offensive tenets are developed, the most fierce and violent passions are awakened. Scorn and hatred are seen working in the clouded brows and agitated countenances of the leaders: if here and there one is pricked to the heart, it requires considerable moral courage to acknowledge his conviction; and the new teachers are either cast forth from the indignant assembly of their own people, liable to all the punishments which they are permitted to inflict, scourged and beaten; or, if they succeed in forming a party, they give rise to a furious schism; and thus appear before the heathen with the dangerous notoriety of having caused a violent tumult, and broken the public peace by their turbulent and contentious harangues: at all events, disclaimed by that very people on whose traditions they profess to build their doctrines, and to whose Scriptures they appeal in justification of their pretensions. They endure, they persevere, they continue to sustain the contest against Judaism and paganism. It is still their deliberate, ostensible, and avowed object to overthrow all this vast system of idolatry; to tear up by the roots all ancient prejudices; to silence shrines, sanctified by the veneration of ages as oracular; to consign all those gorgeous temples to decay, and all those images to contempt; to wean the people from every barbarous and dissolute amusement.

But in one respect it is impossible now to conceive the extent to which the Apostles of the crucified Jesus shocked all the feelings of mankind. The public establishment of Christianity, the adoration of ages, the reverence of nations, has thrown around the cross of Christ an indelible and inalienable sanctity. No effort of the imagination can dissipate the illusion of dignity which has gathered round it; it has been so long dissevered from all its coarse and humiliating associations, that it cannot be cast back and desecrated into its state of opprobrium and contempt. To the most daring unbeliever among ourselves, it is the symbol-the absurd, and irrational, he may conceive, but still the ancient and venerable symbol