interlocutor goes on to make a distinction in favor of the Jews,
who had once a temple, altars, victims, &c.]
[Footnote 10: It is difficult (says Plato) to attain, and
dangerous to publish, the knowledge of the true God. See the
Theologie des Philosophes, in the Abbe d'Olivet's French
translation of Tully de Natura Deorum, tom. i. p. 275.]

[Footnote 11: The author of the Philopatris perpetually treats
the Christians as a company of dreaming enthusiasts, &c.; and in
one place he manifestly alludes to the vision in which St. Paul
was transported to the third heaven. In another place, Triephon,
who personates a Christian, after deriding the gods of Paganism,
proposes a mysterious oath.]

It might appear less surprising, that the founder of
Christianity should not only be revered by his disciples as a
sage and a prophet, but that he should be adored as a God. The
Polytheists were disposed to adopt every article of faith, which
seemed to offer any resemblance, however distant or imperfect,
with the popular mythology; and the legends of Bacchus, of
Hercules, and of Aesculapius, had, in some measure, prepared
their imagination for the appearance of the Son of God under a
human form. ^12 But they were astonished that the Christians
should abandon the temples of those ancient heroes, who, in the
infancy of the world, had invented arts, instituted laws, and
vanquished the tyrants or monsters who infested the earth, in
order to choose for the exclusive object of their religious
worship an obscure teacher, who, in a recent age, and among a
barbarous people, had fallen a sacrifice either to the malice of
his own countrymen, or to the jealousy of the Roman government.