What knew they of grace, of redemption, of
justification, of the blood of Christ shed for the sins of men, of
reconcilement, of mediation? Christianity was made up of points they had
never thought of; of terms which they had never heard.
It was presented also to the imagination of the learned Heathen under
additional disadvantage, by reason of its real, and still more of its
nominal, connexion with Judaism. It shared in the obloquy and ridicule
with which that people and their religion were treated by the Greeks and
Romans. They regarded Jehovah himself only as the idol of the Jewish
nation, and what was related of him as of a piece with what was told of
the tutelar deities of other countries; nay, the Jews were in a
particular manner ridiculed for being a credulous race; so that whatever
reports of a miraculous nature came out of that country were looked upon
by the Heathen world as false and frivolous. When they heard of
Christianity, they heard of it as a quarrel amongst this people about
some articles of their own superstition. Despising, therefore, as they
did, the whole system, it was not probable that they would enter, with
any degree of seriousness or attention, into the detail of its disputes
or the merits of either side.
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