A View of the Evidences of Christianity in Three Parts

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General Books, 2013 - History - 150 pages
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1860 edition. Excerpt: ... at all. And he has always reason to snspect that his neighhors may be secret unbelievers; since he knows, that, if they are so, they dare not avow it. It is pretty well known accordingly that in those European States where the utmost intolerance prevails, utter disbelief of Christianity among the educated classes, is rather the rule than the exception. And the like takes place, though in a minor degree, wherever the intolerant principle is less fully carried out: that is, where Christians, or those of a particular Church, claim, as such, a monopoly of political power, and exclude others, merely on the ground of religious error, from civil rights and privileges. Considering how utterly foreign from the whole character of the Gospel is all intolerance, and how much the Gospel itself was for a long time the subject of persecution, there is no need for any attempt to palliate it by an advocate of Christianity. But it is important to observe that a strong evidence of the truth of our Religion is afforded by the deplorable spectacle of persecution practised by its votaries. For when wo see how strong is the proneness to persecution, in Man in his unregenerate state, --so strong, that it is practised, and even vindicated, by the professors of a Religion most emphatically opposed to it, this affords a very strong presumption that such a religion could not have proceeded from Man.1 A religion of human devising, would, we may be sure, have been as intolerant in its principles as the Mahometan. Persecution, therefore, as well as other corruptions which have crept into Christianity in manifest opposition to the spirit of it, while they prove a stumbling-block to the perverse and the thoughtless, furnish to the candid and diligent a confirmation of..

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