a habit of thinking, liberal as it may appear, which shuts
the door against every argument for a new religion. The considerations
above mentioned would acquire also strength from the prejudices which
men of rank and learning universally entertain against anything that
originates with the vulgar and illiterate; which prejudice is known to
be as obstinate as any prejudice whatever.

Yet Christianity was still making its way: and, amidst so many
impediments to its progress, so much difficulty in procuring audience
and attention, its actual success is more to be wondered at, than that
it should not have universally conquered scorn and indifference, fixed
the levity of a voluptuous age, or, through a cloud of adverse
prejudications, opened for itself a passage to the hearts and
understandings of the scholars of the age.

And the cause which is here assigned for the rejection of Christianity
by men of rank and learning among the Heathens, namely, a strong
antecedent contempt, accounts also for their silence concerning it. If
they had rejected it upon examination, they would have written about it;
they would have given their reasons. Whereas, what men repudiate upon
the strength of some prefixed persuasion, or from a settled contempt of
the subject, of the persons who propose it, or of the manner in which it
is proposed, they do not naturally write books about, or notice much in
what they write upon other subjects.

The letters of the younger Pliny furnish an example of this silence, and
let us, in some measure, into the cause of it. From his celebrated
correspondence with Trajan, we know that the Christian religion
prevailed in a very considerable degree in the province over which he
presided; that it had excited his attention; that he had inquired into
the matter just so much as a Roman magistrate might be expected to
inquire, viz., whether the religion contained any opinions dangerous to
government; but that of its doctrines, its evidences, or its books, he
had not taken the trouble to inform himself with any degree of care or
correctness. But although Pliny had viewed Christianity in a nearer
position than most of his learned countrymen saw it in, yet he had
regarded the whole with such negligence and disdain (further than as it
seemed to concern his administration), that, in more than two hundred
and forty letters of his which have come down to us, the subject is
never once again mentioned. If, out of this number, the t