and it is hard to know why Paley drags it in, unless he wants to make us believe that his eye-witnesses suffered all the tortures he quotes; but even Paley cannot pretend that there is a scintilla of proof of their undergoing any such trials.  Thus falls the whole argument based on the “twelve men, whose probity and good sense I had long known,” dying for the persistent assertion of “a miracle wrought before their eyes,” who are used as a parallel of the apostles, as an argument against Hume.  For we have not yet proved that there were any eye-witnesses, or that they made any assertions, and we have entirely failed to prove that the eye-witnesses were martyred at all, or that the death of any one of them, save that of Peter, is even mentioned in the alleged documents, so that the “satisfactory evidences” of the “original witnesses of the Christian miracles” suffering and dying in attestation of those miracles amount to this, that in a disputed document Peter is said to have been martyred, and in another, still more doubtful, “the rest of the apostles” are said to have “suffered.”  Thus the first proposition of Paley falls entirely to the ground.  The honest truth is that the history of the twelve apostles is utterly unknown, and that around their names gathers a mass of incredible and nonsensical myth and legend, similar in kind to other mythological fables, and entirely unworthy of credence by reasonable people.

Nor is proof less lacking of submission “from the same motives, to new rules of conduct.”  Nowhere is there a sign that Christian morality was enforced by appeal to the miracles of Christ; miracles were, in those days, too common an incident to attract much attention, and, indeed, if they could not win belief in the mission from those Jews before whom they were said to have been performed, what chance would they have had when the story of their working was only repeated by hearsay?  Again, the rules of conduct were not “new;” the best parts of the Christian morality had been taught long before Christ (as we shall prove later on by quotations), and were familiar to the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, from the writings of their own philosophers.  There would have been nothing remarkable in a new sect growing up among these peoples, accustomed as they were to the schools of the philosophers, with their various groups of disciples distinguished by special names.  Why is there anything more wonderful in these Christian societies with a high moral code, than in the severe and stately morality inculcated and practised by the Stoics?  For the submission of conduct to the “new rules,” the less said the better. 1 Corinthians does not give us a very lofty idea of the morality current among the Christians there, and the angry reproaches of Jude imply much depravity; the messages to the seven Churches are generally reproving, not to dwell on many scattered passages of the same character.  Outsiders, moreover, speak very harshly of the Christian