of rational possibility, and draw for no more than an ordinary and indifferent testimony of history, to command the mind’s assent.  The mere relation of any historian, living near enough to the time supposed to guarantee the probability of his competent information on the subject, would have been entitled to our acquiescence.  We could have no reason to deny or to doubt what such an historian could have had no motive to feign or to exaggerate.  The proof, even to demonstration, of these circumstances would constitute no step or advance towards the proof of the truth of the Christian religion; while the absence of a sufficient degree of evidence to render even these circumstances unquestionable must, a fortiori, be fatal to the credibility of the less credible circumstances founded upon them” ("Diegesis,” p. 7).

But Paley pleads some indirect evidence on behalf of Christianity, which deserves a word of notice since the direct evidence so lamentably breaks down.  He urges that:  “there is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily under-gone, in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives, to new rules of conduct.”  Nearly 200 pages are devoted to the proof of this proposition, a proposition which it is difficult to characterise with becoming courtesy, when we know the complete and utter absence of any “satisfactory evidence” that the original witnesses did anything of the kind.

It is pleaded that the “original witnesses passed their lives in labours, etc., in attestation of the accounts they delivered.”  The evidence of this may be looked for either in Pagan or in Christian writings.  Pagan writers know literally nothing about the “original witnesses,” mentioning, at the utmost, but “the Christians;” and these Christians, when put to death, were not so executed in attestation of any accounts delivered by them, but wholly and solely because of the evil deeds and the scandalous practices rightly or wrongly attributed to them.  Supposing—­what is not true—­that they had been executed for their creed, there is no pretence that they were eye-witnesses of the miracles of Christ.

Paley’s first argument is drawn “from the nature of the case”—­i.e., that persecution ought to have taken place, whether it did or not, because both Jews and Gentiles would reject the new creed.  So far as the Jews are concerned, we hear of no persecution from Josephus.  If we interrogate the Christian Acts, we hear but of little, two persons only being killed.  We learn also that “many thousands of Jews” belonged to the new sect, and were propitiated by Christian conformity to the law; and that, when the Jews rose against Paul—­not as a Christian, but as a breaker of the Mosaic law—­he was promptly