tensions, had, at the hazard of their lives, and the certain expense
of their ease and tranquillity, gone about Greece, after his death, to
publish and propagate his doctrines: and if these things had come to our
knowledge, in the same way as that in which the life of Socrates is now
transmitted to us through the hands of his companions and disciples,
that is, by writings received without doubt as theirs, from the age in
which they were published to the present, I should have believed this
likewise. And my belief would, in each case, be much strengthened, if
the subject of the mission were of importance to the conduct and
happiness of human life; if it testified anything which it behoved
mankind to know from such authority; if the nature of what it delivered
required the sort of proof which it alleged; if the occasion was adequate
to the interposition, the end worthy of the means. In the last ease, my
faith would be much confirmed if the effects of the transaction
remained; more especially if a change had been wrought, at the time, in
the opinion and conduct of such numbers as to lay the foundation of an
institution, and of a system of doctrines, which had since overspread
the greatest part of the civilized world. I should have believed, I say,
the testimony in these cases; yet none of them do more than come up to
the apostolic history.

If any one choose to call assent to its evidence credulity, it is at
least incumbent upon him to produce examples in which the same evidence
hath turned out to be fallacious. And this contains the precise question
which we are now to agitate.

In stating the comparison between our evidence, and what our adversaries
may bring into competition with ours, we will divide the distinctions
which we wish to propose into two kinds,--those which relate to the
proof, and those which relate to the miracles. Under the former head we
may lay out of the case:--

I. Such accounts of supernatural events as are found only in histories
by some ages posterior to the transaction; and of which it is evident
that the historian could know little more than his reader. Ours is
contemporary history. This difference alone removes out of our way the
miraculous history of Pythagoras, who lived five hundred years before
the Christian era, written by Porphyry and Jamblicus, who lived three
hundred years after that era; the prodigies of Livy's history; the
fables of the heroic ages; the whole of the Greek and Roman,