this, there came forth a dove, and a great quantity of blood, so that
the fire was extinguished" ("Apostolic Fathers," p. 92). What reliance
can be placed on historians(?) who gravely relate that fire does not
burn, and that when a man is pierced with a dagger a dove flies out,
together with sufficient blood to quench a flaming pile? To make this
precious epistle still more valuable, one of its transcribers adds to
it:--"I again, Pionius, wrote them (these things) from the previously
written copy, having carefully searched into them, and the blessed
Polycarp having manifested them to me through a revelation[!] even as I
shall show in what follows. I have collected these things, when they had
almost faded away through the lapse of time" (Ibid, p. 96). If this is
history, then any absurd dream may be taken as the basis of belief. We
may add that this epistle does not mention the martyrdoms of the
eye-witnesses, 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