favour; the proud and obftinate, together with the giddy and the thoughtless, almoft univerfally against him.

This state of opinion discovers to us also the reason of what fome choose to wonder at, why the Jews fhould reject miracles when they faw them, yet rely fo much upon the tradition of them in their own history. It does not appear, that it had ever (entered into the minds of those who lived in the time of Mofes and the Prophets, to afcribe their miracles to the fupernatural agency of evil Beings. The folution was not then invented. And the authority of Mofes and the Prophets being established, and become the foundation of the national polity and religion, it was not probable that the later Jews, brought up in a reverence for that religion, and the subjects of that polity, fhould apply to their hiftory a reasoning which tended to overthrow the foundation of both.

II. The infidelity of the gentile world,

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and

and that more efpecially of men of rank and learning in it, is refolvable into a principle which, in my judgement, will account for the inefficacy of any argument or any evidence whatever, viz. contempt prior to examination. The state of religion amongst the Greeks and Romans had a natural tendency to induce this difpofition. Dionyfius Halicarnaffenfis remarks, that there were fix hundred different kinds of religions, or facred rites exercised at Rome*. The fuperior claffes of the community treated them all as fables. Can we wonder then, that Christianity was included in the number, without enquiry into its feparate merits, or the particular grounds of its pretenfions? It might be either true or falfe for any thing they knew about it. The religion had nothing in its character which immediately engaged their notice. It mixed with no politics. It produced no fine writers. It contained no curious fpeculations. When it did reach their knowledge, I doubt not but that

* Jortin's Remarks on Eccl. Hift. vol. i. p. 371.

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it appeared to them a very strange systemfo unphilofophical-dealing fo little in argument and difcuffion, in fuch arguments however and difcuffions as they were accustomed to entertain. What is faid of Jefus Chrift, of his nature, office, and miniftry, would be, in the highest degree, aliene from the conceptions of their theology. The redeemer, and the deftined judge, of the human race, a poor young man executed at Jerufalem with two thieves upon a cross! Still more would the language, in which the Chriftian doctrine was delivered, be dissonant and barbarous to their ears. What knew they of grace, of redemption, of juftification, of the blood of Chrift fhed for the fons of men, of reconcilement, of mediation? Chriftianity was made up of points they had never thought of; of terms which they had never heard.

It was prefented alfo to the imagination. of the learned heathen, under additional difadvantage, by reafon of its real, and still more of its nominal, connection with Ju daifm.

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daifm. It fhared 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; fo that whatever reports of a miraculous nature came out of that country, were looked upon by the heathen world as falfe and frivolous. When they heard of Christianity, they heard of it as a quarrel amongst this people, about fome articles of their own fuperftition. Defpifing therefore, as they did, the whole system, it was not probable that they would enter, with any degree of feri

oufness or attention, into the detail of its difputes, or the merits of either fide. How little they knew, and with what careleffness they judged, of these matters, appears, I think, pretty plainly from an example of no less weight than that of Tacitus, who in a grave and profeffed difcourfe upon the

hiftory

hiftory of the Jews, ftates, that they worfhipped the effigy of an afs*. The paffage is a proof, how prone the learned men of these times were, and upon how little evidence, to heap together ftories which might increase the contempt and odium in which that people was held. The fame foolish charge is alfo confidently repeated by Plutarch +.

It is obfervable, that all thefe confiderations are of a nature to operate with the greatest force upon the highest ranks; upon men of education, and that order of the public from which writers are principally taken: I may add alfo, upon the philofophical as well as the libertine character: upon the Antonines or Julian, not lefs than upon Nero or Domitian; and more particularly, upon that large and polifhed clafs of men, who acquiefced in the general persuasion, that all they had to do was to practise the duties of morality, and to worship the deity

*Tac. Hift. lib. v. c. 2.

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+ Sympof. lib. iv. quef. 5.

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