o your ' signs and wonders,' I have been
warned in my father's letter to pay no regard to any such things in
this case. Besides, you ought to be sensible, that your identity with
the person I am taught by my father's letter to expect, can be only
determined by comparing you with the description of him given
therein. Whether your 'wonderful works' are real miracles or not, I
neither know, nor care. At any rate, they cannot, in the nature of
things, be any thing to the purpose in; this case. For you to pretend,
that they prove what you offer them to prove, is quite absurd; you
might as well, and as reasonably, pretend, that they could prove
Aristotle to have been Alexander; or the Methodist George
Whitfield to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte!"

To conclude, if any person should feel inclined to attempt to refute
this book, let him do it like a man; without evading the question, or
equivocating, or caviling about little things. Let him consider the
principal question, and the main arguments on which he perceives
that the author relies, and not pass over these silently, and hold up
a few petty mistakes and subsidiary arguments as specimens of the
whole book. Such a mode of defence would be very disengenuous,
and with a discerning reader, perfectly futile and insufficient. It
would be as if a man prostrate, and bleeding under a lion whose
teeth and claws were infixed in his throat, should tear a handful of
hairs out of the animal's mane, and hold them up as proofs of
victory.

In fine, let him, before his undertaking, carefully consider these
pungent words of Bishop Beveridge, "Opposite answers, and
downright arguments advantage a cause; but when a disputant
leaves many things untouched, as if they were too hot for his
fingers; and declines the weight of other things, and alters the true
state of the question: it is a shrewd sign, either that he has not
weighed things maturely, or else (which is more probable,) that he
maintains a desperate cause."

FINIS.

APPENDIX A.#

As reasons for this assertion, (that "the account of the resurrection
given by the evangelists is no better, nay, worse, than conjecture,
as it is a mere forgery of the second century.--Vide page 86) take
the following facts, which are now ascertained, and can be
proved:--1. Several sects of Christians in the first century, in the
apostolic era, denied that Jesus was crucified, as the Basildeans,
&c. The author of the epistle ascribed to Barnab