which Heathenism itself punished, nor for the lax manners which the easy spirit of Paganism had made venial but for spiritual vices, of which it took account, some of which it had even consecrated virtues; and, on the other hand, an other of a which promised nothing but delights of a spiritual order; a paradise which, whatever material or imaginative adjuncts it might have, certainly disclosed none; which presented no one thing to gratify the prurient curiosity of man’s fancy, or the eager passions of his sensual nature; which must, in fact, have been about as inviting to the soul of a Heathen as the promise of an eternal Lent to an epicure!  Surely these were resistless seductions.  Yet it is to such things as auxiliaries that Gibbon refers me for the success of Christianity.  Verily it is not without reason that he is called a master of irony!

My friend fairly acknowledged the difficulties of the subject, but said he could not believe in the truth of Christianity.

I repaired to another infidel acquaintance.  “It is a perplexing, a very perplexing controversy, no doubts,” was his reply; “but every thing tends to show that Christianity resembles in its principal features all those other religions which you admit to be false.  All have their prodigies and miracles,—­their revelations and Inspirations,—­their fragments of truth and their masses of nonsense.  They are all to be rejected together.”

I again puzzled for a long time over this aspect of the case.  At last I said to him,—­This seems a curious way of disposing of the evidence for Christianity; for if there be any true religion, it is likely, as in all other cases, that the counterfeits will have some features in common with it.  It would follow, also, that there can be no true philosophy; since, while there are scores of philosophies, only one can be true.  But I have another difficulty:  on comparing Christianity with other systems, I find vital differences, both as regards theory and fact.  As regards theory, I find an insuperable difficulty, not merely in imagining how Jews, Greeks, or Romans, any or all of them, should have been the originators of Christianity, but how human nature should have been fool enough to originate it at all!  For I am asked to believe that man, such as I know him through all history, such as he appears in so many forms of religion which have been his undoubted and most worthy fabrication, did, whether fraudulently or not, whether designedly or unconsciously, frame a religion which is in striking contrast with all his ordinary handiwork of this sort!  This religion enjoins the austerest morality; human religions generally enjoin a very lax one:—­this demands the most refined purity, even of the thoughts and desires; other religions usually attach to external and ceremonial observances greater weight than to morality itself;—­this is singularly simple in its rites; they for the most part consist of little else;—­this exhibits a singular silence and abstinence in relation to the