“Friend, you are either an enthusiast, a mad man, or something worse.  As to your ’ signs and wonders,’ I have been warned in my father’s letter to pay no regard to any such things in this case.  Besides, you ought to be sensible, that your identity with the person I am taught by my father’s letter to expect, can be only determined by comparing you with the description of him given therein.  Whether your ‘wonderful works’ are real miracles or not, I neither know, nor care.  At any rate, they cannot, in the nature of things, be any thing to the purpose in; this case.  For you to pretend, that they prove what you offer them to prove, is quite absurd; you might as well, and as reasonably, pretend, that they could prove Aristotle to have been Alexander; or the Methodist George Whitfield to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte!”

To conclude, if any person should feel inclined to attempt to refute this book, let him do it like a man; without evading the question, or equivocating, or caviling about little things.  Let him consider the principal question, and the main arguments on which he perceives that the author relies, and not pass over these silently, and hold up a few petty mistakes and subsidiary arguments as specimens of the whole book.  Such a mode of defence would be very disengenuous, and with a discerning reader, perfectly futile and insufficient.  It would be as if a man prostrate, and bleeding under a lion whose teeth and claws were infixed in his throat, should tear a handful of hairs out of the animal’s mane, and hold them up as proofs of victory.

In fine, let him, before his undertaking, carefully consider these pungent words of Bishop Beveridge, “Opposite answers, and downright arguments advantage a cause; but when a disputant leaves many things untouched, as if they were too hot for his fingers; and declines the weight of other things, and alters the true state of the question:  it is a shrewd sign, either that he has not weighed things maturely, or else (which is more probable,) that he maintains a desperate cause.”

Finis.

APPENDIX A.#

As reasons for this assertion, (that “the account of the resurrection given by the evangelists is no better, nay, worse, than conjecture, as it is a mere forgery of the second century.—­Vide page 86) take the following facts, which are now ascertained, and can be proved:—­1.  Several sects of Christians in the first century, in the apostolic era, denied that Jesus was crucified, as the Basildeans, &c.  The author of the epistle ascribed to Barnabas, I think, denied it, and the author of the gospel of Thomas certainly did. 2.  The Jewish Christians, the disciples of the twelve apostles, never received, but rejected every individual book of the present New Testament.  They held in especial abomination the writings of Paul, whom they called “an apostate;” and there is extant, in " Cotelerius’ Patres