te, together with the giddy and
the thoughtless, almost universally against him.

This state of opinion discovers to us also the reason of what some
choose to wonder at, why the Jews should reject miracles when they saw
them, yet rely so 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 Moses and the prophets to ascribe their miracles to
the supernatural agency of evil being. The solution was not then
invented. The authority of Moses 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, should apply to their history
a reasoning which tended to overthrow the foundation of both.

II. The infidelity of the Gentile world, and that more especially of men
of rank and learning in it, is resolvable into a principle which, in my
judgment, 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 disposition. Dionysius Halicarnassensis remarks, that there were
six hundred different kinds of religions or sacred rites exercised at
Rome. (Jortin's Remarks on Eccl. Hist. Vol. i. p. 371.) The superior
classes of the community treated them all as fables. Can we wonder,
then, that Christianity was included in the number, without inquiry into
its separate merits, or the particular grounds of its pretensions? It
might be either true or false for anything 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 speculations. When it did reach their knowledge, I
doubt not but that it appeared to them a very strange system,--so
unphilosophical,--dealing so little in argument and discussion, in such
arguments however and discussions as they were accustomed to entertain.
What is said of Jesus Christ, of his nature, office, and ministry, would
be in the highest degree alien from the conceptions of their theology.
The Redeemer and the destined Judge of the human race a poor young man,
executed at Jerusalem with two thieves upon a cross! Still more would
the language in which the Christian doctrine was delivered be dissonant
an