help suspecting that, as real martyrs were not forthcoming in as vast numbers as their supposed bones, martyrs were invented to fit the wealth-producing relics, as the relics did not fit the historical martyrs.  “The total disregard of truth and probability in the representations of these primitive martyrdoms was occasioned by a very natural mistake.  The ecclesiastical writers of the fourth and fifth centuries ascribed to the magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts against the heretics, or the idolaters of their own time....  But it is certain, and we may appeal to the grateful confessions of the first Christians, that the greatest part of those magistrates, who exercised in the provinces the authority of the Emperor, or of the Senate, and to whose hands alone the jurisdiction of life and death was entrusted, behaved like men of polished manners and liberal education, who respected the rules of justice, and who were conversant with the precepts of philosophy.  They frequently declined the odious task of persecution, dismissed the charge with contempt, or suggested to the accused Christian some legal evasion by which he might elude the severity of the laws. (Tertullian, in his epistle to the Governor of Africa, mentions several remarkable instances of lenity and forbearance which had happened within his own knowledge.)...  The learned Origen, who, from his experience, as well as reading, was intimately acquainted with the history of the Christians, declares, in the most express terms, that the number of martyrs was very inconsiderable....  The general assertion of Origen may be explained and confirmed by the particular testimony of his friend Dionysius, who, in the immense city of Alexandria, and under the rigorous persecution of Decius, reckons only ten men and seven women who suffered for the profession of the Christian name” ("Decline and Fall,” vol. ii., pp. 224-226.  See throughout chap. xvi.).  Gibbon calculates the whole number of martyrs of the Early Church at “somewhat less than two thousand persons;” and remarks caustically that the “Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels” (pp. 273, 274).  Supposing, however, that the most exaggerated accounts of Church historians were correct, how would that support Paley’s argument?  His contention is that the “eye-witnesses” of miraculous events died in testimony of their belief in them; and myriads of martyrs in the second and third centuries are of no assistance to him.  So we will retrace our steps to the eye-witnesses, and we find the position of Gibbon—­as to the lives and labours of the Apostles being written later by men not confining themselves to facts—­endorsed by Mosheim, who judiciously observes:  “Many have undertaken to write this history of the Apostles, a history which we find loaded with fables, doubts,