by the same zeal
and the same interests, yet endued with less learning, less judgment,
and more credulity.

Such Christian reader, were the fathers, the leaders, and the great men
of the church, and the apologists for your religion. And it is upon the
credibility of these convicted knaves that ultimately, and
substantially depends your belief. For it is upon their testimony and
tradition that you receive and believe in the authenticity of the N.T.,
its doctrines and miracles.

I hope that if you choose to build your faith upon the testimony of
such witnesses, that you will not think it unreasonable in me to
presume to doubt the truth of opinions and miracles supported by the
testimony of men like the fathers. I am willing, because I think it
reasonable, to let every man follow his own judgment, and do I ask too
much to be permitted without offence to enjoy the same liberty with
regard to these things; which I conceive no fair man will now say, (if
what has been brought forward be true) are positively provable as true,
and worthy of unhesitating assent.

For the case is thus. The gospels are accused of being written by
credulous and superstitious authors whose names are not certainly
known; as containing too inconsistent and contradictory accounts of
prodigies and miracles; and also palpable marks of forgery. Now to
convince a thinking man, that histories of such suspected character,
containing relations of miracles, are divine or even really written, by
the persons to whom they are ascribed, and not either some of the many
spurious productions, with which it is notorious and acknowledged, the
age in which they appeared abounded, calculated to astonish the
credulous and superstitious! or else writings of authors who were
themselves infected with the grossest superstitious credulity, what is
the testimony?

For the first hundred years after the lives of the supposed authors,
none at all. And the earliest fathers who speak of them are all
convicted of gross credulity, and incapacity to distinguish genuine
from, fictitious writings, (for they admitted as genuine scripture many
books confessedly nonsensical forgeries,) but what is worse, are
manifestly guilty by the evidence of their own words of having been
palpable liars, cheats, and forgers. But, "it is an obvious rule in the
admission of evidence in any cause whatsoever, that the more important
the matter to be determined by it is, the more unsullied, and
unexcept