It
is nothing else than the Gospel history woven into verse; perhaps was at
first rather a fiction than a forgery; an exercise of ingenuity, more
than an attempt to deceive.
CHAPTER X.
RECAPITULATION.
The reader will now be pleased to recollect, that the two points which
form the subject of our present discussion are, first, that the Founder
of Christianity, his associates, and immediate followers, passed their
lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings; secondly, that they did so in
attestation of the miraculous history recorded in our Scriptures, and
solely in consequence of their belief of the truth of that history.
The argument, by which these two propositions have been maintained by
us, stands thus:
No historical fact, I apprehend, is more certain, than that the original
propagators of Christianity voluntarily subjected themselves to lives of
fatigue, danger, and suffering, in the prosecution of their undertaking.
The nature of the undertaking; the character of the persons employed in
it; the opposition of their tenets to the fixed opinions and
expectations of the country in which they first advanced them; their
undissembled condemnation of the religion of all other countries; their
total want of power, authority, or force--render it in the highest
degree probable that this must have been the case.
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