imilar opinion with regard to most of the books
which go to compose it. Lastly. The reason why the New
Testament canon has been so long respected, seems to have been
purely owing to the credulity of the ignorant, and the laziness,
indifference, or fears of the learned.

Douglas, in his famous "Criterion," gives us, as infallible tests, by
which we may distinguish when written accounts of miracles are
fabulous, the following marks:--

1. "We have reason to suspect (he says) the accounts to be false,
when they are not published to the world till after the time when
they are said to have been performed."

2. "We have reason to suspect them to be false, when they are not
published in the place where it is pretended the facts were
wrought, but are propagated only at a great distance from the
supposed scene of action."

3. "Supposing the accounts to have the two fore-mentioned
qualifications, we still have reason to suspect them to be false, if in
the time when, and at the place where, they took their rise, they
might be suffered to pass without examination."

These are the marks he gives us as infallible tests by which we
may distinguish the accounts of miracles in the New Testament to
be true; and accounts of miracles in other books (though supported
by more testimony than the former,) to be false; with how much
justice, may be evident from the following observations:--

1. If "we have reason to suspect the accounts to be false, when
they are not published to the world till long after the time when
they are said to have been performed," then we have reasons to
suspect the accounts given in the four gospels; for we have no
proof in the world, that any of them were written till nearly one
hundred years after the supposed writers of them were all dead.

2. If "we have reason to suspect them to be false, when they are
not published in the place where it is pretended the facts were
wrought, but are propagated only at a great distance from the
supposed scene of action," then it is still further evident that the
accounts in question are not true. For they were apparently none of
them published in Judea, the scene of the events recorded in them.
But it is pretty clear that they were written in countries at a
distance from Palestine. And the facts recorded in them were-no
where so little believed as in Judea, among the people in whose
sight they are said to have been wrought, where they ought, if true,
to have met with mos