uman nature. Again, he asks me to believe that
the immortality which Christianity promised Heathen--such an immortality
--was another of things which tended to give it success;--on the one
hand, a menace of retribution, not for flagrant crimes only, which
Heathenism itself punished, nor for the lax manners which the easy
spirit of Paganism had made venial but for spiritual vices, of which
it took account, some of which it had even consecrated virtues; and,
on the other hand, an other of a which promised nothing but delights
of a spiritual order; a paradise which, whatever material or
imaginative adjuncts it might have, certainly disclosed none; which
presented no one thing to gratify the prurient curiosity of man's fancy,
or the eager passions of his sensual nature; which must, in fact,
have been about as inviting to the soul of a Heathen as the promise
of an eternal Lent to an epicure! Surely these were resistless
seductions. Yet it is to such things as auxiliaries that Gibbon refers
me for the success of Christianity. Verily it is not without reason
that he is called a master of irony!

My friend fairly acknowledged the difficulties of the subject, but
said he could not believe in the truth of Christianity.

I repaired to another infidel acquaintance. "It is a perplexing, a
very perplexing controversy, no doubts," was his reply; "but every
thing tends to show that Christianity resembles in its principal
features all those other religions which you admit to be false.
All have their prodigies and miracles,--their revelations and
Inspirations,--their fragments of truth and their masses of
nonsense. They are all to be rejected together."

I again puzzled for a long time over this aspect of the case. At
last I said to him,--This seems a curious way of disposing of the
evidence for Christianity; for if there be any true religion, it is
likely, as in all other cases, that the counterfeits will have some
features in common with it. It would follow, also, that there can
be no true philosophy; since, while there are scores of philosophies,
only one can be true. But I have another difficulty: on comparing
Christianity with other systems, I find vital differences, both as
regards theory and fact. As regards theory, I find an insuperable
difficulty, not merely in imagining how Jews, Greeks, or Romans,
any or all of them, should have been the originators of Christianity,
but how human nature should have been fool enough to origi