e sentiment upon the same occasion: "He performed
miracles;--we might have supposed him to have been a magician, as ye
say, and as the Jews then supposed, if all the prophets had not with one
spirit foretold that Christ should perform these very things." (Lactant.
v. 3.)

But to return to the Christian apologists in their order.
Tertullian:--"That person whom the Jews had vainly imagined, from the
meanness of his appearance, to be a mere man, they afterwards, in
consequence of the power he exerted, considered as a magician, when he,
with one word, ejected devils out of the bodies of men, gave sight to
the blind, cleansed the leprous, strengthened the nerves of those that
had the palsy, and lastly, with one command, restored the dead to life;
when he, I say, made the very elements obey him, assuaged the storms,
walked upon the seas, demonstrating himself to be the Word of God."
(Tertul. Apolos. p. 20; ed. Priorii, Par. 1675.)

Next in the catalogue of professed apologists we may place Origen, who,
it is well known, published a formal defence of Christianity, in answer
to Celsus, a heathen, who had written a discourse against it. I know no
expressions by which a plainer or more positive appeal to the Christian
miracles can be made, than the expressions used by Origen; "Undoubtedly
we do think him to be the Christ, and the Son of God, because he healed
the lame and the blind; and we are the more confirmed in this persuasion
by what is written in the prophecies: 'Then shall the eyes of the blind
be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear, and the lame man shall
leap as a hart.' But that he also raised the dead, and that it is not a
fiction of those who wrote the Gospels, is evident from hence, that if
it had been a fiction, there would have been many recorded to be raised
up, and such as had been a long time in their graves. But, it not being
a fiction, few have been recorded: for instance, the daughter of the
ruler of a synagogue, of whom I do not know why he said, She is not
dead, but sleepeth, expressing something peculiar to her, not common to
all dead persons: and the only son of a widow, on whom he had
compassion, and raised him to life, after he had bid the bearers of the
corpse to stop; and the third, Lazarus, who had been buried four days."
This is positively to assert the miracles of Christ, and it is also to
comment upon them, and that with a considerable degree of accuracy and
candour.

In another passage