bserve. After
men became Christians, much of their time was spent in prayer and
devotion, in religious meetings, in celebrating the Eucharist, in
conferences, in exhortations, in preaching, in an affectionate
intercourse with one another, and correspondence with other societies.
Perhaps their mode of life, in its form and habit, was not very unlike
the Unitas Fratrum, or the modern methodists. Think then what it was to
become such at Corinth, at Ephesus, at Antioch, or even at Jerusalem.
How new! How alien from all their former habits and ideas, and from
those of everybody about them! What a revolution there must have been of
opinions and prejudices to bring the matter to this!

We know what the precepts of the religion are; how pure, how benevolent,
how disinterested a conduct they enjoin; and that this purity and
benevolence are extended to the very thoughts and affections. We are
not, perhaps, at liberty to take for granted that the lives of the
preachers of Christianity were as perfect as their lessons; but we are
entitled to contend, that the observable part of their behaviour must
have agreed in a great measure with the duties which they taught. There
was, therefore, (which is all that we assert,) a course of life pursued
by them, different from that which they before led. And this is of great
importance. Men are brought to anything almost sooner than to change
their habit of life, especially when the change is either inconvenient,
or made against the force of natural inclination, or with the loss of
accustomed indulgences. It is the most difficult of all things to
convert men from vicious habits to virtuous ones, as every one may judge
from what he feels in himself, as well as from what he sees in others.*
It is almost like making men over again.

_________

* Hartley's Essays on Man, p. 190.
_________

Left then to myself, and without any more information than a knowledge
of the existence of the religion, of the general story upon which it is
founded, and that no act of power, force, and authority was concerned in
its first success, I should conclude, from the very nature and exigency
of the case, that the Author of the religion, during his life, and his
immediate disciples after his death, exerted themselves in spreading and
publishing the institution throughout the country in which it began, and
into which it was first carried; that, in the prosecution of this
purpose, they underwent the labours and tro