continuation of the same powers; if they be false, it was an imitation,
I will not say of what had been wrought, but of what had been reported
to have been wrought, by those who preceded them. That imitation should
follow reality, fiction should be grafted upon truth; that, if miracles
were performed at first, miracles should be pretended afterwards; agrees
so well with the ordinary course of human affairs, that we can have no
great difficulty in believing it. The contrary supposition is very
improbable, namely, that miracles should be pretended to by the
followers of the apostles and first emissaries of the religion, when
none were pretended to, either in their own persons or that of their
Master, by these apostles and emissaries themselves.





CHAPTER VII.

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.

It being then once proved, that the first propagators of the Christian
institution did exert activity, and subject themselves to great dangers
and sufferings, in consequence and for the sake of an extraordinary and,
I think, we may say, of a miraculous story of some kind or other; the
next great question is, whether the account, which our Scriptures