d barbarous to their ears. What knew they of grace, of redemption, of
justification, of the blood of Christ shed for the sins of men, of
reconcilement, of mediation? Christianity was made up of points they had
never thought of; of terms which they had never heard.

It was presented also to the imagination of the learned Heathen under
additional disadvantage, by reason of its real, and still more of its
nominal, connexion with Judaism. It shared 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; so that whatever
reports of a miraculous nature came out of that country were looked upon
by the Heathen world as false and frivolous. When they heard of
Christianity, they heard of it as a quarrel amongst this people about
some articles of their own superstition. Despising, therefore, as they
did, the whole system, it was not probable that they would enter, with
any degree of seriousness or attention, into the detail of its disputes
or the merits of either side. How little they knew, and with what
carelessness 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 professed discourse upon the history of the Jews, states
that they worshipped the effigy of an ass. (Tacit. Hist. lib. v. c. 2.)
The passage is a proof how prone the learned men of those times were,
and upon how little evidence, to heap together stories which might
increase the contempt and odium in which that people was holden. The
same foolish charge is also confidently repeated by Plutarch. (Sympos.
lib. iv. quaest. 5.)

It is observable that all these considerations 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 also upon the philosophical as well as the
libertine character; upon the Antonines or Julian, not less than upon
Nero or Domitian; and, more particularly, upon that large and polished
class of men who acquiesced in the general persuasion, that all they had
to do was to practise the duties of morality, and to worship the Deity
more patrio;