ledge the authority of those prophecies, and both are
obliged, with devout reverence, to search for their sense and their
accomplishment. But this mode of persuasion loses much of its weight
and influence, when it is addressed to those who neither understand
nor respect the Mosaic dispensation and the prophetic style. In the
unskilful hands of Justin and of the succeeding apologists, the sublime
meaning of the Hebrew oracles evaporates in distant types, affected
conceits, and cold allegories; and even their authenticity was rendered
suspicious to an unenlightened Gentile, by the mixture of pious
forgeries, which, under the names of Orpheus, Hermes, and the Sibyls,
were obtruded on him as of equal value with the genuine inspirations of
Heaven. The adoption of fraud and sophistry in the defence of revelation
too often reminds us of the injudicious conduct of those poets who
load their invulnerable heroes with a useless weight of cumbersome and
brittle armor.

But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and
philosophic world, to those evidences which were represented by the hand
of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age
of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine
which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame
walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised,
daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended
for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned
aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations
of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral
or physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius, the
whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire,
was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this
miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity,
and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science
and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder
Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the
earliest intelligence, of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in
a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature,
earthquakes, meteors comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable
curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other have omitted to
mention the greatest pheno