t have revered, of the Divine Unity,
was defaced by the wild enthusiasm, and annihilated by the airy
speculations, of the new sectaries. The author of a celebrated dialogue,
which has been attributed to Lucian, whilst he affects to treat the
mysterious subject of the Trinity in a style of ridicule and contempt,
betrays his own ignorance of the weakness of human reason, and of the
inscrutable nature of the divine perfections. [11]

[Footnote 9: Cur nullas aras habent? templa nulla? nulla nota
simulacra!--Unde autem, vel quis ille, aut ubi, Deus unicus, solitarius,
desti tutus? Minucius Felix, c. 10. The Pagan interlocutor goes on to
make a distinction in favor of the Jews, who had once a temple, altars,
victims, &c.]

[Footnote 10: It is difficult (says Plato) to attain, and dangerous
to publish, the knowledge of the true God. See the Theologie des
Philosophes, in the Abbe d'Olivet's French translation of Tully de
Natura Deorum, tom. i. p. 275.]

[Footnote 11: The author of the Philopatris perpetually treats the
Christians as a company of dreaming enthusiasts, &c.; and in one place
he manifestly alludes to the vision in which St. Paul was transported
to the third heaven. In another place, Triephon, who personates a
Christian, after deriding the gods of Paganism, proposes a mysterious
oath.]

It might appear less surprising, that the founder of Christianity should
not only be revered by his disciples as a sage and a prophet, but that
he should be adored as a God. The Polytheists were disposed to adopt
every article of faith, which seemed to offer any resemblance, however
distant or imperfect, with the popular mythology; and the legends of
Bacchus, of Hercules, and of Aesculapius, had, in some measure, prepared
their imagination for the appearance of the Son of God under a human
form. [12] But they were astonished that the Christians should abandon
the temples of those ancient heroes, who, in the infancy of the world,
had invented arts, instituted laws, and vanquished the tyrants or
monsters who infested the earth, in order to choose for the exclusive
object of their religious worship an obscure teacher, who, in a recent
age, and among a barbarous people, had fallen a sacrifice either to
the malice of his own countrymen, or to the jealousy of the Roman
government. The Pagan multitude, reserving their gratitude for
temporal benefits alone, rejected the inestimable present of life and
immortality, which was offered to m