such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed, are utterly unworthy of being answered, and would fly in the face of all historical evidence, the fact of the case is, that the being of no other individual mentioned in history ever laboured under such a deficiency of evidence as to its reality, or was ever overset by a thousandth part of the weight of proof positive, that it was a creation of imagination only.

To the question, then, On what grounds do you deny that such a person as Jesus Christ existed as a man? the proper answer is,

Because his existence as a man has, from the earliest day on which it can be shown to have been asserted, been as earnestly and strenuously denied, and that, not by enemies of the Christian name, or unbelievers of the Christian faith, but by the most intelligent, most learned, most sincere of the Christian name, who ever left the world proofs of their intelligence and learning in their writings, and of their sincerity in their sufferings;

And because the existence of no individual of the human race, that was real and positive, was ever, by a like conflict of jarring evidence, rendered equivocal and uncertain.

CHARGE 4.

It was distinctly charged against the early preachers of Christianity, that they had adopted and transferred to their own use the materials they found prepared to their hands, in the writings of the ancient poets and philosophers; and by giving a very slight turn to the matter, and a mere change of names, had vamped up a patchwork of mythology and ethics, a mixture of the Oriental Gnosticism and the Greek Philosophy, into a system which they were for foisting upon the world as a matter of a divine revelation that had been especially revealed to themselves. "All these figments of crack-brained opiniatry and silly solaces played off in the sweetness of song by deceitful poets, by you too credulous creatures, have been shamefully reformed and made over to your own God."* Such is the objection of Cæcilius, in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, written in dialogue, about the

* Omnia ista figmenta malesanæ opinionis, et inepta solatia, a poetis fallacibus, in dulcedine carminis lusa, a vobis nimium credulis in Deum vestrum, turpiter reformata sunt.-Minucius Felix in Apol.

year 211. A charge answered by admission, rather than denial, and corroborated by the never-to-be-forgotten fact, that the Egyptian Therapeuts in their university of Alexandria, where first Christianity gained an establishment, were professedly followers and maintainers of the Eclectic philosophy, which consisted in nothing else but this very overt and avowed practice of bringing together whatever they held to be useful and good in all other systems; and thus, as they pretended, concentrating all the rays of truth that were scattered through the world into the common centre of their own system. This is fully admitted by Lactantius, Arnobius, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Origen; and denied by none who have ventured fearlessly to investigate the real origin of Christianity.

CHARGE 5.

PORPHYRY,* whose very name is aconite to Christian intolerance, objects against Origen, that, being really a Pagan, and brought up in the schools of the Gentiles, he had, to serve his own ambitious purposes, contrived to turn the whole Pagan system, which he had first egregiously corrupted, into the new-fangled theology of Christians.

CHARGE 6.

CELSUS, in so much of his work concerning the "TRUE LOGOS" as Origen has thought proper to suffer posterity to become acquainted with, charges the Christians with a recoinage of the misunderstood doctrine of the ancient Logos.† Charges thus affecting the character of Origen, the great pillar of the Christian church, cannot fall innocent of wound on Christianity itself. Origen is the very first of all the fathers who has presented us with a catalogue of the books contained in the New Testament. He was the most laborious of all writers; and his authoritative pen was alone competent to produce every iota of variation which existed between the old Pagan legends of the Egyptian Therapeuts and that new version of them

* Porphyry.Theodoret calls him Ασπονδος ήμω νπολεμιος, and Ο παντων ημιν XOTVS. Augustin calls him "Christianorum acerrimus inimicus."

+ Quasi refingerent Τα του παλαιου λογου παράκουσματα. Lib. 3.

which first received from him the designation of the New Testament.*

ADMISSIONS OF BISHOP HERBERT MARSH.

Bishop Marsh, in his Michaelis, the highest authority we could possibly appeal to on this subject, admits, that "it is a certain fact, that several readings in our common printed text are nothing more than alterations made by Origen, whose authority was so great in the Christian church, that emendations which he proposed, though, as he himself acknowledged, they were supported by the evidence of no manuscript, were very generally received."‡ The reader will do himself the justice to recollect, that Origen lived and wrote in the third century, and that "no manuscript of the New Testament now extant is prior to the sixth century; and, what is to be lamented, various readings which, as appears from the quotations of the Fathers, were in the text of the Greek Testament, are to be found in none of the manuscripts which are at present remaining."§

ADMISSIONS, TO THE SAME EFFECT, OF THE EARLY FATHERS.

To charges of such pregnant inference, we find our Christian Fathers, in like manner, making answers that only serve to authenticate those charges; to demonstrate that they were founded in truth and not in malice; and that, answered as they were, and as any thing may be, they were utterly irrefragible.

"You observe the philosophers," says Minucius Felix, "to have maintained precisely the same things as we Christians, but not so is it on account of our having copied from them, but because they, from the divine preachings of the prophets, have imitated the shadow of truth interpolated: thus the more illustrious of their wise men, Pythagoras first, and especially Plato, with a corrupted and half-faith

* See the chapter on Origen.

+ "The Introduction to the New Testameat by Michaelis, late professor at Gottingen, as translated by Marsh, is the standard work, comprehending all that is important on the subject."- -The learned Bishop of Llandaff, quoted in Elsley's Annotations on the Gospels, vol. 1. (the introd.), p. xxvi.

+ Michaelis's Introduction to New Test., by Bishop Marsh, vol. 2, p. 368. § Ibid. vol. 2, p. 160.

have handed down the doctrine of regeneration."* And Lactantius, after admitting the truth of the story, that man had been made by Prometheus out of clay,-adds, that the poets had not touched so much as a letter of divine truth; but those things which had been handed down in the vaticination of the prophets, they collected from fables and obscure opinion, and having taken sufficient care purposely to deprave and corrupt them, in that wilfully depraved and corrupted state they made them the subjects of their poems.†

Tertullian calls the philosophers of the Gentiles the thieves, the interpolators, and the adulterators of divine truth; alleges, that "from a design of curiosity they put our doctrines into their works, not sufficiently believing them to be divine to be restrained from interpolating them, and that they mixed that which was uncertain with what they found certain."

Eusebius pleads, that the Devil, being a very notorious thief, stole the Christian doctrines, and carried them over for his friends, the Pagan philosophers and poets, to make fun of.§

Theodoret accuses Plato especially, with having purposely mixed muddy and earthy filth with the pure fountain from which he drew the arguments of his theology.||

Thus, if we may believe Eusebius, the beautiful fable of Ovid's Metamorphosis, describing Phaeton falling from the chariot of his father, the Sun, was nothing more than a wicked corruption of the unquestionable truth of the prophet Elijah having been caught up to heaven, as described (2 Kings ii.), "Behold there appeared a chariot of fire, and HORSES of fire, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven;" the heathens being so ignorant as to confound the name Helias with Helios, the Greek word for the Sun.

The almost droll Justin Martyr gives us a most satisfactory explanation of the whole matter; that "it having reached the Devil's ears that the prophets had foretold that Christ would come for the purpose of tormenting the * Quoted in Paganus Obtrectator, p. 34.

+ Lactantii Instit. lib. 3, cap. 10. Sic etiam conditionem renascendi, sapientium clariores, Pythagoras primus, et præcipuus Plato, corrupta et dimidiata fide tradiderunt.-Min. Felix.

Tertul. Apolog. cap. 46, 47.

§ Κλεπτης γαρ ο Διάβολος και τα ημετερα εκφερομύθων προς τους εαυτού υπο ontas-Euseb. procudubio sed perdidi locum.

|| Εξ ης ουτος λαβων της θεολογίας τας αφορμας το ιλνώδες και γεώδες ανεμιξεν. ―Theodoritus Therapeut. libro 2, de Platone loquens.

wicked in fire, he set the heathen poets to bring forward a great many who should be called (and were called) sons of Jove. The Devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that the true history of Christ was of the same character as those prodigious fables and poetic stories."*

I render from the beautiful Greek of Theodoret, a passage of considerable elegance, in which the reader will trace the rising dignity of style, superior manner, and cultivated taste with which an historian of the fourth century could improve and varnish the awkward sophistry of the honester Christian Father of the second:—

"But if the adversaries of truth (our Pagan opponents) so very much admired the truth, as to adorn their own writings even with the smallest portions they could pillage from it, and these, though mixed with much falsehood, yet dimmed not their proper beauty, but shone like pearls resplendent through the squalors in which they lay, so that, according to the evangelical doctrine, the light shone in the darkness, and by the darkness itself was not concealed; we may easily understand how lovely and admirable the divine doctrines must be, secerned from falsehood, for so differs the gem in its rough matrix, from what it is when seen resplendent in a diadem."+

CHARGE 7.

The Emperor Julian-who, with all his imperfections on his head, was an ornament to human nature, and can by no means be conceived to have wanted any possible means of information on the subject-objects against the claims of Christianity, what a thousand testimonies confirm, that it was a mixture of the Jewish superstition and Greek philosophy, so as to incorporate the Atheism of the one with the loose and dissolute manner of living of the other. "If any one," says he, "should wish to know the

* Ακουσαντες γαρ παραγενησομενον τον χριστον, και κολαθησομενους δια πυρος τους ατέβεις, προεβάλλοντο πολλους λεχθηναι λεγομενους υιούς τω διι, νομίζοντες δυνμσεσθαι ενεργισαι τερατολογίαν ηγήσασθαι τους ανθρώπους τα του χριστου, και ομοίως τοις υπο των ποιητων λεχθεισι.-Justini. Apolog. 2.

† Ει δε και οι της αληθειας αντιπαλοι ουτω κομιδη θαυμαζουσι την αλήθειαν, ως και βραχεσι μορίοις εκείθεν σεσυλημενοις διακαλλύνειν τα οικεια ξυγχραμματα, και πολλω ψεύδει ταυτα μιγνυμενα μη αμβλύειν το σφετερον καλλος, αλλα καν κοπρια και φορύτω κειμενους τους μαργαριτας αστραπτειν λιαν, και κατα την ευαγγελικήν διδασκαλίαν, το φως, εν τη σκοτία φαίνειν, και υπο της σκοτίας, μη κρυπτεσθαι ξυνιδείν ευπετες, όπως εστιν αξιέραστα και αξιαγαστα τα θεια μαθήματα του ψευ δους κεχωρισμενα πολλήν γαρ δηπου διαφοραν έχει μαργαρίτης εν βαρβαρω κείμενος nai ev diadηuati λαμлшTheodoret. Therapeut. libro 2.