genuine or spurious, they certainly did appear, this supposition cannot
be maintained for a moment; because I think it impossible to believe
that passages, which must be deemed not only unintelligible, but false,
by the persons into whose hands the books upon their publication were to
come, should nevertheless be inserted, for the purpose of producing an
effect upon remote generations. In forgeries which do not appear till
many ages after that to which they pretend to belong, it is possible
that some contrivance of that sort may take place; but in no others can
it be attempted.





CHAPTER IV.

There is satisfactory evidence that many professing to be original
witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours,
dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the
accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief
of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives,
to new rules of conduct.

The account of the treatment of the religion, and of the exertions of
its first preachers, as stated in our Scriptures (not in a professed
history of persecutions, or in the connected manner in which I am about
to recite it, but dispersedly and occasionally, in the course of a mixed
general history, which circumstance, alone negatives the supposition of
any fraudulent design), is the following: "That the Founder of
Christianity, from the commencement of his ministry to the time of his