gave up all their prejudices, both personal and national; they corrected their constitutional and habitual failings; they resigned their wills and affections, to the extraordinary enterprize in which they were engaged; they denied themselves of every indulgence; they censured the slightest laxity in their followers; they jealously guarded them against the shadow of evil; they affected the most tender sympathy with them in their distresses; they fully shared their persecutions; and were equally their leaders, in the time of the fiercest attacks of their enemies, and in moments of comparative peace and prosperity. They yielded up all right to the personal attachment of their people, except on the ground of having brought them under the influence of Christianity. In short, they walked before the eyes of men, the living examples of the truths they taught.

Nor was their conduct less remote from what is enthusiastic, than from what is vicious. They made no effort at display, either in virtue or endurance. They shunned danger, as carefully as if they had feared it, and sought to retain their liberties and lives, at every sacrifice not inconsistent with the enterprize to which they had bound themselves. They availed themselves of every civil right which appeared to promise any, even temporary, relief from suffering and oppression; and when they were ill-treated in one place, they sought security by flying to another. In all these respects, they appear to have felt and

acted as other men, and to have possessed as little desire of infamy and pain, and as strong a love of ease and life. Yet when at last retreat was cut off, and escape was no longer possible, there was no yielding to the pressure of calamity on the one hand, nor any thing of saucy bravado on the other. They died with the coolest and most unperturbed heroism, employing their last breath in calling upon God for the pardon of those, whose hands were red with their blood.

All this the infidel must and does acknowledge. He must and tacitly does confess, that they were men of the most undaunted wickedness, who lived and died in the practice of the most exalted virtue; that they sacrificed every good for no conceivable advantage;—that they rendered themselves and all around them wretched for the promulgation of a lie ;-that they loved vice for its own sake, and under the influence of that love, practised themselves, and inculcated on others, an irreproachable moral purity, and that the foundation and source of all their excellence was a scheme of flagrant villany. It is difficult to say, whether they approached nearest our ideas of the benignity and holiness of God, or the malice and depravity of the devil. They were men whose lives had no motive, no meaning, no object. They can be measured by no known rule, nor understood by any known principles. They were in short, perfect self-contradictions-contra

dictions to all reason, and to human nature itself, in every form which it has yet assumed, or of which we can ever conceive it capable.

To illustrate yet more fully the argument of this chapter, let us suppose one of the apostles thus haranguing the rest, after the death of Christ :

"No truth can be so deeply impressed on our minds, as that our master continues under the dominion of death; and we all know that truth stands so ready at the door of the lips, that the greatest liar among us has hitherto uttered a thousand truths for one falsehood. But henceforth, on this most interesting subject, we must never let a single truth escape us, either in our most unguarded moments, or when put to the torture; for all will be lost, if one person in whom we may place confidence, should reveal to our enemies what should be known to ourselves alone.

"Others have been wonderfully supported under violent and tedious sufferings, by the internal persuasion that they suffered for the truth, but as we are called upon to give new proofs of courage, by suffering for what we know to be an impious falsehood, every reflection which tended to support them will torment us, and tempt us in the most forcible manner, to betray our cause. All our

designs will prove abortive, if we suffer the fear of God to get possession of our minds. Assertions of falsehood will no doubt cost us something in the beginning, but we must endeavour to make ourselves as easy as we can, by imprinting strongly on our minds, how glorious and disinterested it will be, to suffer without hope either from God or man, and even with the certainty of being punished both by God and man, not only in this life, but eternally in the next, if there be another. All the men and women of our company, must be capable of braving Omnipotence, and of deriving new vigour and resolution from the prospect of uninterrupted misery.

"Our rulers, and indeed our countrymen in general, expect that the Messiah shall be a great and invincible hero. As such, they say, he is foretold by the prophets; but the person we mean to impose upon them as the Messiah, expressly disclaimed all worldly greatness, and made the sufferings of himself and his followers, one test of the truth of his pretensions to the character which he assumed. Some of the most subtle among us, therefore, must carefully examine the books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and wrest all the prophecies of the true Messiah in favour of him whom we know to be an impostor. The enterprize, as it is directly opposed, not only by truth, but also by all the prejudices and hopes of the nation, is indeed bold, but what is the whole design but the excess of boldness?

"We have hitherto believed that the religion of our forefathers is true, and was given by God to Moses. It is certainly the most ancient, the most authorized, and the purest religion in the world, and the only one founded on divine revelation, or that boasts of such a foundation. But if we are to preach to the whole world that our master, whom we know to be an impostor, is the true and only Messiah, and if we are to apply to him prophecies which have another object, we must necessarily despise this most ancient religion, which our fathers and we have hitherto deemed divine and incontrovertible.

"We have but the interval between the present moment and the feast of Pentecost, in which to prepare the order of false apparitions, and fix it in the memories of our numerous coadjutors, both male and female; to study in the scriptures all that relates to the Messiah; to form the plan and adjust the parts of a new religion; to efface in our minds all traces of the ancient one, and to fortify ourselves against our prejudices, our fears, and our worldly interests; for we must get quit of all these, since we are going most generously to renounce all the good of this life, and all the hopes of the next.

"I am sure that with our Galilean pronunciation, and with the goodly appearance we shall make in our fisherman's garments, we shall persuade a multitude of people. Nay, so confident am I of our success, that I include in my design,