refuses attention to claims which God himself may have authorised, but argues a credulity also in that general maxim which is not to be exceeded even by the lowest fanaticism.

So far as to the silence of the Jews on this subject. With regard to heathens-of them also it is, I believe, certain, that for the first hundred and forty years after Christ's death, we can trace no denial of the actual facts recorded in the Scripture as our Saviour's miracles. The accounts transmitted to us by the Younger Pliny, and by Tacitus, are a sufficient proof that the number of Christians was in their time very considerable, and that their progress was the object of much and jealous suspicion. The severe persecutions of them which had already taken place, are another proof of the same indubitable fact. And if it could be supposed that this progress of the religion, and this jealousy of its influence or its pretensions, must have excited among heathens the same critical attention to the claim of miracles set up by its professors, which it has been proved that the Jews, who had always been taught to regard miracles as among the signs of the coming of the Messiah, must have exerted, and did exert on the occasion, we

should be entitled to infer from this silence of the heathen writers the same conclusion as from that of the Jews, namely that they did not, because they could not deny them. The heathens charge also both Jews and Christians with magic. Thus they also, it would seem, admit the truth of the facts. And where Pliny reports of the Christians in Bithynia that it was their custom to sing hymns to Christ as a god", we can hardly question but that in the then state of opinions, he must have supposed them to attribute to him the same miraculous powers which were commonly attributed to the gods of heathenism.On the whole, however, and after considering all circumstances, it appears to me that this silence of the heathen writers, this absence in them of all denial of the Christian miracles, proves only that they were received generally without denial; but is insufficient to prove, what is proved by the Jewish silence, that there was no ground for denying them. If those heathen writers, indeed, could reasonably be supposed to have felt any jealousy of the claim of miracles in Christianity, their not denying might

a

Lardner, Vol. VII. 250. 257.

b Ibid. 293.

prove that they could not deny them. If they felt that jealousy, they would have denied them if they could. It is hardly possible, also, that if they had actually been denied by any authority entitled to serious attention, that denial should not have been recorded by heathen writers. The denial of a history which they did not believe, the belief of which is called by Tacitus a pernicious superstition, and which was brought before Pliny in his judicial capacity, no love of the marvellous could have induced them to suppress.

But prodigies were, in truth, in the heathen world, so little regarded by all persons not immediately concerned in them; even though a divine power had been exerted in Palestine, the belief or the denial of it must have seemed to import so little to the worshipper of the gods of Greece, or of Italy, that probably, in that age, false claims of miracles might have easily passed current among the heathens. I infer nothing, therefore, as to the reality of Christ's miracles from their not being denied by the early heathen writers.

The first denial which I can find in any heathen writer of the facts which constitute our

Saviour's miracles are in the writings of Celsus, as preserved to us by Origen, which are referred by Lardner to the year CLXXVI. Celsus on some occasions denies the performance of the miracles. He appears on other occasions to allow that they were performed, but attributes the performance to the use of magical arts. It is exceedingly doubtful whether he believed in magic himself; but he was manifestly desirous to throw out all imputations, which, though he could not but know them to be inconsistent with one another, he might yet think would tell against Christianity.

All such imputations, however, are nothing like evidence, except that the hesitation of so able and determined an adversary to venture on a denial of our Saviour's miracles universally, is, in truth, both a real, and a very considerable proof that those miracles were really performed. As for proper evidence in opposition to the miracles, as for any counter authority, these very objections prove that there was none to produce:

a

Lardner, Vol. VII. 357. VIII. 22. 24, 25. 33.

b Ibid. VIII. 25, and compare Cyril's quotation from Julian, ibid. Note x. p.

399.

they prove that Celsus, even within a century and half after the death of our Saviour, could only set to work as a modern sceptic would do; that, though personating a Jew, he could produce no Jewish testimonies against the miracles, that, like modern sceptics, "he had only the Gospel to search, as Origen more than once observes, for evidence against the Gospel."Hence it follows clearly that the miracles of our Saviour were not contested in the first ages of Christianity, and that when unbelievers became anxious to contest them they could not produce any contrary evidence.

This is complete it rebuts entirely the objection that there may have been evidence now lost against the miracles of Christianity. It shows the falsehood of the very facts which must be assumed as the very principle of that objection. It shows that at the period, when, if there had been any contrary evidence, it undoubtedly must, and would have been alleged, none was alleged in the least deserving attention and hence it plainly follows that there was none to allege.

a Sherlock as quoted by Lardner, Vol. VIII. p. 68.