sionary from the Therapeutan college; schismatised from the church, and set up in trade for himself. He opposed the ascetic discipline in which he had been trained, and thus drew to his party that large majority of ignoramuses which in all ages and countries are eager to embrace every part of superstition but its mortifications and restraints. There were innumerable other charges brought against the early Christians, which, as they impinge on their moral character only, and might be either true or false without materially affecting the evidences of the religion they professed, lie beyond the scope of this DIEGESIS. Their amount in evidence is, that they sustain the fact, that whatever the principles and conduct of Christians may be supposed to have been, they were never such as to conquer the prejudices or to conciliate the affections of their fellow men. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny have spoken of them in the most disparaging terms; and though it might be that those really wise and good men were unfairly prejudiced, yet it must cost any man who is not prejudiced himself, an effort to think so.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES ADDUCED FROM CHRISTIAN
WRITINGS.

THE New Testament is in every one's hands: the claims
of the four gospels therein contained we have already
considered.

The thirteen epistles, purporting to have been written by an early convert to Christianity, who was before a blas phemer, a persecutor, and injurious; the anonymous epistle to the Hebrews; the one of James; one of Jude; two of Peter; three of John: and the Apocalypse, or Revelation of St. John the Divine; though all of them, except the Apocalypse, are admitted to have been written before any one of the four gospels; are entirely without date, and will read as well to an understanding or supposition of their having been written five or six hundred, or even a thousand years, either earlier or later than the period to which they are usually assigned. Certain it

1 Tim. i. 13.

is, that they contain not a single phrase of a nature or significancy to fix with any satisfactory probability the time when they were written; but from beginning to end they proceed on the recognition of an existing church government and an established ecclesiastical polity which, on the supposition of its origination in events that happened later than the time of Augustus, must outrage all our knowledge of history, and all common sense, to be reconciled with the supposition of their having been written by the persons to whom they are ascribed as 'tis certain that no such state of church government, that could be properly called Christian, existed or could have existed among the followers of a religion which had originated in the age of Augustus, or among any persons who had been his contemporaries.

The Acts of the Apostles is evidently a broken narrative, and gives us no account whatever of what became of the immediate disciples of Christ, or how or with what success they executed the important commission they had received from their divine master; save, that Judas the traitor is said to have come to a violent death, as a judgment of God upon his perfidy; and that Peter and John were imprisoned as impostors, after having received the Holy Ghost, and been endued with the gift of speaking all the languages of the earth (a miracle which no rational being on earth believes); and that James was put to death by Herod.

The last account we have of Peter in the sacred history, requires us to believe, that after having been delivered from prison by the intervention of an angel, his chains falling off, and the ponderous iron gate opening of his own accord, "he went down from Judea to Cæsarea, and there abode."*

The last we learn of Paul is, that "Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came into him; preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him."

The evident air and aim of this account, as far as it goes, is palpably incompatible with any notion of the apostles having suffered martyrdom; it rather seems to make an ostentation of their prodigious success, and their perfect prosperity and security, and that too in Rome, in

Acts, xii. 19.

the immediate neighbourhood, and under the government of the tyrant Nero: while the insinuation at least with respect to the melancholy end of Judas, is, that the apostles themselves would have considered martyrdom as dishonourable to their religion, and their being put to violent and cruel deaths, an indication of the divine displeasure, as it is evidently represented to have been, upon Judas.* The names and order of the twelve apostles, in the last list we have of them, are

In the Lives of the Apostles, written by the eunuch Dorotheus, bishop of Tyrus, who died A. D. 366, we have the following brief account of the apostles respectively:

1. SIMON PETER.

SIMON PETER is the chief of the apostles. He, as we are given to understand by his epistles, preached the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Bithynia, and in the end preached at Rome, where, afterwards, he was crucified, the third kalends of July, under Nero the emperor, with his head downwards (for that was his desire), and there also buried.

2. JAMES.

James, the son of Zebedee, a fisherman, preached the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ unto the twelve dispersed tribes. He was slain with the sword, by Herod the tetrarch, in Judea, where also he was buried.

3. JOHN.

John, the brother of James who was also an evangelist, whom the Lord loved, preached the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in Asia. The emperor Trajan exiled him into the Isle of Patmos for the word of God, where he wrote also his gospel, the which afterwards he published at Ephesus, by Gaius, his host and deacon. After the death of Trajan, he returned out of the Isle of Patmos, and remained at Ephesus, until he had lived a hundred and twenty years, at the end of which, he being yet in full health and strength (for the Lord would have it so),

* See this question settled in the chapter on Martyrdom.

digged his own grave, and buried himself alive. There are some which write that he was not banished into the Isle of Patmos under Trajan, but in the time of Domitian, the son of Vespasian.

The translator of this JOHN, St. Jerome, quotes the authority of Tertullian to prove, that in the time of Nero, he was thrown at Rome into a tun of hot boiling oil, and thereby he took no harm, but came forth after his trial purer than when he went in. St. Augustin relates, that after St. John had made his grave at Ephesus, in the presence of divers persons, he went into it alive, and being no sooner in, and as appeared to the by-standers, dead, they threw the earth in upon him, and covered him; but that kind of rest was rather to be termed a state of sleep than of death; for that the earth of the grave bubbleth and boileth up to this day after the manner of a well, by reason of John resting therein and breathinga sign that he only slumbereth there, but is not really dead! And till Christ shall come again, thus he remains, plainly showing that he is alive by the heaving up of the earth, which is caused by his breathing; for the dust is believed to ascend from the bottom of the tomb to the top, impelled by the state of him resting beneath it. Those who know the place," adds this conscientiously veracious Father, must have seen the earth thus heave up and down; and that it is certainly truth, we are assured, as having heard it from no light-minded witnesses."*

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4. ANDREW,

The brother of Simon Peter, as our elders have delivered unto us, preached the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ unto the Scythians, Sogdians, Sacians, and in the middle Sebastopolis inhabited of wild Ethiopians. He was crucified by Egeas, king of the Edessæans, and buried at Patris, a city of Achaia.

"Idem Augustinus asserat Apostolum Johannem vivere atque in illo sepulchro ejus, quod est apud Ephesum, dormire eum potius quam mortuum jacere contendat. Assumat in argumentum quod illic terra sensim scatere et quasi ebullire perhibeatur, atque hoc ejus anhelitu fieri. Et cum mortuus putaretur, sepultum fuisse dormientem, et donec Christus veniat, sic manere, suamque vitam scaturigine pulveris indicare: qui pulvis creditur ut ab imo ad superficiem tunuli ascendat statu quescentis impelli.... Viderint qui locum sciuntquia et revera, non a levibus hominibus id audivimus. Ad hanc rem satis superque satis testificandam utor.-Fabrici Codice Apocrypho, tom. 2, p. 590, in

notis.

5. PHILIP.

Philip, of the city of Bethsaida, preached the Gospel in Phrygia; he was honourably buried at Hierapolis, with his daughters. In Acts viii. 39, Philip is described as possessing the power of rendering himself invisible.

6. THOMAS,

As it hath been delivered unto us,* preached the Gospel of our Saviour Jesus Christ unto the Parthians, Medes, and Persians; he preached also unto the Caramans, Hircans, Bactrians, and Magicians! He rested at Calamina, a city in India, being slain with a dart, where he was also honourably buried.

7. BARTHOLOMEW

Preached the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ unto the Indians, and delivered unto them the gospel of Matthew. He rested, and was buried in Albania, a city of Armenia the Great.

The translator, Peter de Natalibus, informs us, that this St. Bartholomew was nephew to the king of Syria. Antonius, in his Chronicle, writeth, that some have delivered that he was beaten to death with cudgels; some, that he was crucified with his head downwards; others, that he was flayed alive; and others, that he was beheaded, at the commandment of Ptolemæus, king of India; but Peter de Natal, together with Abdias, bishop of Babylon, reconcile the whole in this manner: how that the first day the apostle was beaten with cudgels, the second day crucified and flayed alive, and afterwards, while yet he continued to breathe, beheaded.

With all due respect to such profoundly learned authorities, I could suggest another way of reconciling the whole matter. This royal apostle was especially distinguished for his miraculous power of rendering himself invisible, and slipping through the key-hole into bed-chambers, for the greater convenience of giving lectures to young ladies, on the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. This faculty he possessed in common with St. Philip.

Surely this is a very suspicious sort of wording for the first and earliest testimony that can be pretended to the existence of so extraordinary a Thomas. + Et cæpit quærere Apostolum, sed non invenit eum amplius. Factum est autem ut apparuit Apostolus ostio clauso in cubiculo ipsius dicens nihil carnale desidero sed scire te volo quia filius Dei in virginis vulva conceptus, inter ipsa secreta virginis. Ohe! jam satis est! terque quaterque plus quam satis!