pages each, so that we have in it an elaborate attack upon Christianity
of very considerable length. The first 200 pages of the first volume are
filled with arguments to prove that a Revelation, such as the one we
profess to believe in, supernatural in its origin and nature and
attested by miracles, is simply incredible, and so, on no account, no
matter how evidenced, to be received.

But, inasmuch as the author has to face the fact, that the Christian
Religion professes to be attested by miracles performed at a very late
period in the history of the world, and said to have been witnessed by
very large numbers of persons, and related very fully in certain books
called the Canonical Gospels, which the whole body of Christians have,
from a very early period indeed, received as written by eye-witnesses,
or by the companions of eye-witnesses, the remaining 800 pages are
occupied with attempts at disparaging the testimony of these writings.
In order to this, the Christian Fathers and heretical writers of a
certain period are examined, to ascertain whether they quoted the four
Evangelists. The period from which the writer chooses his witnesses to
the use of the four Evangelists, is most unwarrantably and arbitrarily
restricted to the first ninety years of the second century (100-185 or
so). We shall have ample means for showing that this limitation was for
a purpose.

The array of witnesses examined runs thus: Clement of Rome, Barnabas,
Hermas, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Hegesippus, Papias of
Hierapolis, the Clementines, the Epistle to Diognetus, Basilides,
Valentinus, Marcion, Tatian, Dionysius of Corinth, Melito of Sardis,
Claudius Apollinaris, Athenagoras, Epistle of Vienne and Lyons,
Ptolemaeus and Heracleon, Celsus and the Canon of Muratori.