ry of Jesus Christ! Every Christian had this power.
Tertullian, in one of his _Apologies_,(100) challenges the Pagans to make
the experiment, and consents that a Christian should be put to death, if
he did not oblige these givers of oracles to confess themselves devils.
Lactantius informs us, that every Christian could silence them by only the
sign of the cross.(101) And all the world knows, that when Julian the
Apostate was at Daphne, a suburb of Antioch, to consult Apollo, the god,
notwithstanding all the sacrifices offered to him, continued mute, and
only recovered his speech to answer those who inquired the cause of his
silence, that they must ascribe it to the interment of certain bodies in
the neighbourhood. Those were the bodies of Christian martyrs, amongst
which was that of St. Babylas.

This triumph of the Christian religion ought to give us a due sense of our
obligations to Jesus Christ, and, at the same time, of the darkness to
which all mankind were abandoned before his coming. We have seen amongst
the Carthaginians, fathers and mothers, more cruel than wild beasts,
inhumanly giving up their children, and annually depopulating their
cities, by destroying the most vigorous of their youth, in obedience to
the bloody dictates of their oracles and false gods.(102) The victims were
chosen without any regard to rank, sex, age, or condition. Such bloody
executions were honoured with the name of sacrifices, and designed to make
the gods propitious. "What greater evil," cries Lactantius, "could they
inflict in their most violent displeasure, than thus to deprive their
adorers of all sense of humanity, to make them cut the throats of their
own children, and pollute their sacrilegious hands with such execrable
parricides?"

A thousand frauds and impostures, openly detected at Delphi, and every
where else, had not opened men's eyes, nor in the least diminished the
credit of the oracles; which subsisted upwards of two thousand years, and
was carried to an inconceivable height, even in the minds of the greatest
men, the most profound philosophers, the most powerful princes, and
generally among the most civilized nations, and such as valued themselves
most upon their wisdom and policy. The estimation they were in, may be
judged from the magnificence of the temple of Delphi, and the immense
riches amassed in it through the superstitious credulity of nations and
monarchs.

The temple of Delphi having been burnt about the