all religious as equally false," would of course rank theirs among the
number, with the addition of regarding them as busy and troublesome
zealots? Or from the magistrate, who, satisfied with the "utility" of
the subsisting religion, would not be likely to countenance a spirit of
proselytism and innovation:--a system which declared war against every
other, and which, if it prevailed, must end in a total rupture of public
opinion; an upstart religion, in a word, which was not content with its
own authority, but must disgrace all the settled religions of the world?
It was not to be imagined that he would endure with patience, that the
religion of the emperor and of the state should be calumniated and borne
down by a company of superstitious and despicable Jews.

Lastly; the nature of the case affords a strong proof, that the original
teachers of Christianity, in consequence of their new profession,
entered upon a new and singular course of life. We may be allowed to
presume, that the institution which they preached to others, they
conformed to in their own persons; because this is no more than what
every teacher of a new religion both does, and must do, in order to
obtain either proselytes or hearers. The change which this would produce
was very considerable. It is a change which we do not easily estimate,
because, ourselves and all about us being habituated to the institutions
from our infancy, it is what we neither experience nor observe. After
men became Christians, much of their time was spent in prayer and
devotion, in religious meetings, in celebrating the Eucharist, in
conferences, in exhortations, in preaching, in an affectionate
intercourse with one another, and correspondence with other societies.
Perhaps their mode of life, in its form and habit, was not very unlike
the Unitas Fratrum, or the modern methodists. Think then what it was to
become such at Corinth, at Ephesus, at Antioch, or even at Jerusalem.
How new! How alien from all their former habits and ideas, and from