SECTION IV.

OF THE OBJECTION THAT OUR EVIDENCE IS MERE PARTY EVIDENCE, AND THAT THIS IS FAR FROM BEING TRULY

THE CASE.

It will be here objected that all this evidence is party evidence. We produce our own books: we tell our own story. It has been the fortune, it will perhaps be said, of Christianity, to become the predominant religion of Europe. The history of the opposition to it has been suppressed or neglected. This is said to be the reason why we have now no means of alleging any formal or detailed refutation of those miracles on which the evidence of it rests. There are other reported facts, it may be said, in ancient history of the same kind. It is shrewdly suspected that in the long contests which took place between the states of Greece and the Persian empire, the spirit and colouring of the romantic history which has been transmitted to us is wholly fallacious. It is the same with regard to the wars of Carthage and Rome. All our authorities display the virtue of one side,

and tell of the cruelty and characteristic perfidy of the other. Yet we scarcely doubt but that if the event had preserved to us the Punic instead of the Roman story, we might have had presented a directly contrary picture.

And

thus it is said, that as the miracles of our Saviour gained no doubt in his own sect an easy reception, so the triumph of the sect overbore opposition, and the original objections to them sank gradually into disrepute :-but that we may still presume that those objections, though now lost, might, if preserved, have appeared to us insurmountable. If not, why did not "the rulers or the Pharisees also believe on him"?" Why else was it that "not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called"? Can we really suppose that if those miracles which in the Gospels are af firmed so positively to have been performed by our Saviour, can we really suppose that if they were actually performed, any of the spectators would have failed to believe in him?

To this I answer, first, that the spirit or colouring of many relations of historical facts, though of more value in some respects than the

facts themselves, yet cannot be compared with them in any question of evidence. Whether Greece or Persia demand our sympathy, we still cannot refuse credit to the Grecian historians' as to the fact of there having been a battle of Marathon. Whether Scipio or Hannibal be our favourite hero, we cannot doubt but that there was a battle at Zama. Louisbourgh was taken, whether the assailants or the defenders be supposed to have gained the most renown in the siege. We have also to observe, that the Scripture miracles are facts of such a species that they could not possibly have grown up out of the rest of the history by any stretch of exaggeration or partiality. They are the very facts on which the history turns, as essential a part of it as the battle of Salamis was of the expedition of Xerxes into Greece. If they be not true, the whole is more than a misrepresentation, the whole is a fable, a fable either invented by the Apostles, or at least imposed by them, and imposed successfully on mankind. To a case like this, a case of party colouring, a case of mere misrepresentation, cannot possibly be a case in point.

a See Johnson's Idler, No. 20.

Secondly, I answer that the objection supposes that we have lost the evidence which we may presume to have been in the possession of the party which opposed the first teachers of Christianity. And so far, no doubt, is true, that there exists no evidence against the miracles of Christianity, which deserves for a moment the slightest attention. But then it is not true that we have lost the evidence of the reception which was given to Christianity by its earliest adversaries. We have proof that the party opposed to it at its origin had really no evidence against its miracles to produce. In Rome and Greece, no doubt, the predominant parties, forming always a tyranny of the very worst description, proscribed entirely all fair discussion on the merits or the demerits of Carthage or Persia. But the party of the Christians, for several ages after Christ, predominated no where. For several ages power was always against them. And though we have lost the writings of most of their earliest adversaries, yet we have still incontrovertible historical evidence that those adversaries did not contest the truth of the miracles :—and we may be assured that they did not, because they could not, contest it..

In proof of this point, namely that the truth of Christ's miracles was not contested by the earliest adversaries of our religion, I have to observe, in the first place, that, if the writers of the New Testament were sincere writers, that is, if they believed the story they told, their entire silence as to any denial of the miracles, except of the miracle of our Saviour's resurrection, is a sufficient proof to us that they were not seriously denied. If denied, sincere writers must have defended them. Probably an impostor would have defended them also. If he did not, it would be because he might calculate that it would be most prudent to avoid exciting the suspicion that any serious denial of them had ever been made. Finessing of this kind is, no doubt, sometimes practised. But still it is incredible that where the writers are so numerous as those whose writings compose the volume of the New Testament, and to these we may add also all the early Fathers, this finesse should have been adopted by them all. It is utterly incredible also, that, if adopted as a finesse, their silence on the subject should not obviously have exposed them either to a refutation the most cogent and pointed, or to reproaches which would render silence impossible. Finesse is noto