licentiousness of manners prevailed among great numbers of those who affected the name of Christians.  A Pagan magistrate, who possessed neither leisure nor abilities to discern the almost imperceptible line which divides the orthodox faith from heretical depravity, might easily have imagined that their mutual animosity had extorted the discovery of their common guilt” ("Decline and Fall,” Gibbon, vol. ii., pp. 204, 205).  It was fortunate, the historian concludes, that some of the magistrates reported that they discovered no such criminality.  It is, be it noted, simultaneously with the promulgation of these charges that the persecution of the Christians takes place; during the first century very little is heard of such, and there is very little persecution [see ante, pp. 209-213].  In the following century the charges are frequent, and so are the persecutions.

To these strong arguments may be added the acknowledgment in 1.  Cor. xi., 17, 22, of disorder and drunkenness at these Agapae; the habit of speaking of the communion feast as “the Christian mysteries,” a habit still kept up in the Anglican prayer-book; the fact that they took place at night, under cover of darkness, a custom for which there was not the smallest reason, unless the service were of a nature so objectionable as to bring it under the ban of the tolerant Roman law; and lastly, the use of the cross, and the sign of the cross, the central Christian emblem, and one that, especially in connection with the mysteries, is of no dubious signification.  Thus, in the twilight in which they were veiled in those early days, the Christians appear to us as a sect of very different character to that bestowed upon them by Paley.  A little later, when they emerge into historical light, their own writers give us sufficient evidence whereby we may judge them; and we find them superstitious, grossly ignorant, quarrelsome, cruel, divided into ascetics and profligates, between whom it is hard to award the palm for degradation and indecency.

Having “proved”—­in the above fashion—­that a number of people in the first century advanced “an extraordinary story,” underwent persecution, and altered their manner of life, because of it, Paley thinks it “in the highest degree probable, that the story for which these persons voluntarily exposed themselves to the fatigues and hardships which they endured, was a miraculous story; I mean, that they pretended to miraculous evidence of some kind or other” ("Evidences,” p. 64).  That the Christians believed in a miraculous story may freely be acknowledged, but it is evidence of the truth of the story that we want, not evidence of their belief in it.  Many ignorant people believe in witchcraft and in fortune-telling now-a-days, but their belief only proves their own ignorance, and not the truth of either superstition.  The next step in the argument is that “the story which Christians have now” is “the story which Christians had then” and it is urged