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and prejudices of mankind; which presents greater obstacles to its reception, morally and intellectually; so that it is amongst the most unaccountable things to me, not that it should be rejected by some, but that it should be accepted by any. "It is, I grant," said an old Deist, "a very strange thing that Christianity should be embraced; for I do not perceive in myself any inclination to receive the New Testament." There spake, not Deism only, but

HUMAN NATURE.

You cannot say, that, like other religions," Christianity panders to man's passions or vices, or promises him a sensual paradise." On the contrary, its morality is not easy, its heaven by no means attractive, and its hell very disagreeable !

Similarly, you cannot say that intellectually, especially for the last sceptical century or two,—it has not made your task, if it were feasible at all, as easy as possible; for the wonders of the Old and New Testament, if not true, are the very wildest of fables and romances; they equal―so some of you say—those of Æsop, of the Iliad, the "Arabian Nights," Ovid's "Metamorphoses." How mortifying, my friend, that you should have any difficulty in exploding such monstrous follies! What if your greatest philosophers had in vain striven for twenty-nay, eighteen hundred years, to show the world that Ovid's "Metamorphoses" were not to be received as literal facts! Now it ought to be as easy, if your theory be true, to convince people that Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego never came safe out of the fiery furnace, and that "swine" never ran off with the "devils," or rather the "devils" never ran off with the "swine!" One of two things must be conceded; either the pressure of historical proof, — the marks of nature and sincerity in the New Testament must be irresistible, thus to prevent your success with those who, with you, reject all similar things in other cases as mere fables; or else, if these things be fables, as you assert, the folly of these capricious folks, enlightened on all else, dark as midnight here, - must be indomitable, and your attempts to enlighten them must be hopeless!

the

It is vain to say,

"Oh! but there are millions of men who be

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lieve millions of other extravagant fables." It is true; but I must once more remind you that the way to measure the difficulty of disabusing Christians (and I fancy it will be a long time before your friends even attempt to disabuse anybody except Christians they leave Hindoos very quietly to themselves) is to imagine a number of races and nations, as different in origin, culture, and language, and as distant in space, as those which have adopted Christianity, all enamoured of the Vedas, say, devoutly believing them-ready to die for them-writing endless books to prove all their fables true; men, among all these people, like Locke, Butler, Pascal, swearing, in the very focus of light and civilisation, that the Vedas are all proved true, and accomplished sceptics among their very compatriots assailing them in vain! Now when you do find such a case, I should say what I say of your assaults on Christianity, "You may as well leave the Vedas alone;" which, by the way, I dare say the Deist will do at any rate; for, it seems, mankind may believe anything in the world, for any pains he will take to enlighten them, except Christianity!

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I have just been reading a beautiful book now in course of publication, which has suggested some reflections showing still more strongly (as I conceive) the hopelessness of your enterprise. But I must reserve them for another sheet.

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The book to which I referred in my last is Conybeare and Howson's beautiful work on the "Life and Epistles of Paul."

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The Apostle Paul wrote, perhaps, nearly as much as would fill a volume of the "Traveller's Library," at least, if it were printed in a little larger type: or, to put the matter otherwise, his compositions would make no less than three or four columns of the "Times' Debates!"- - surely a voluminous author. Yet he has had more thought, time, toil, and ingenuity, expended on him, in the investigation of his history, and of the times in which he is supposed to have lived, in the correction of his text, - in the criticism of his style, in the illustration of his beauties, - in the elucidation of his difficulties-than Plato, Aristotle, and Bacon, Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Shakspeare, all put together, voluminous and zealous as criticism on each of these authors has been.

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Now, I know just what you will say: "That when an author has so much written upon him and about him, it is an argument rather of his worthlessness than of his worth; that, if his meaning were quite plain, and his merits unambiguous, he might dispense with commentators." Very good; but then be pleased to observe the consequence; it will follow that St. Paul being the very worst, the writers just mentioned must be the next worse of the tribe; for perhaps, after him-though all at a distance immeasurable. the great writers I have named have most attracted the attention and stimulated the zeal of critics. And, further, in bar of any such brief solution of the paradox, it may be said that though the most worthless of writers may need most commentary, somehow they do not get it; mankind go a shorter way to work with them, by quietly suffering them to sink to the bottom. It will be long before Blackmore will enlist a Warburton or Malone in his service, or a Muggleton find a commentator in a Locke! Least of all do men of widely different countries and races thus expend their energies, and, worse still, their money, in everlastingly translating and elucidating dull common-place or obscure

nonsense.

Now, here is St. Paul in more languages than all the best classic authors put together; and scores of writers in all the more cultivated modern tongues, that is, among all the most civilised

nations, have been poring over the Apostle, and commenting upon him, without end. The tractates and treatises on separate on single chapters, on single epistles, on parts of on the whole collectively, character, and history, and on the

texts, them,

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the commentaries on his life, churches he is supposed to

have founded: these writings, I say, gathered from all the languages of Europe, would constitute an immense library! An immense library sprung out of a few tracts, which would have hardly made as much as a single play of Shakspeare or one of the longer of Plato's Dialogues! tracts which, however, exist in twenty times as many languages as any production of these authors can be found in. Whatever may have been the case with his Corinthian converts, the Apostle may certainly now say of all mankind" that he speaks with more tongues than they all!" Such a contrast between his scanty authorship, and his prodigious and enduring popularity—popularity which the most gigantic and aspiring genius may well look at with despairing envy is certainly a curious phenomenon.

These reflections have been forced upon me by Conybeare and Howson's splendid volumes. Two portly quartos! While every other author is shrinking into duodecimos, Paul can still afford to come out in quarto, illustrated by all that the printer's and engraver's arts can do for him accompanied by a large apparatus of maps and plates and plans, and with profuse impressions of gems, and coins, and statues, and medals, and inscriptions. One author, I see, has expended a whole volume think of that! on the single episode of Paul's last voyage to Rome, while the press teems with ever new works of critics and commentators on this curious tract-writer.

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Now, on the supposition, which, for your sake, I of course take for granted, that the Apostle Paul was as little under the influence of preternatural inspiration as any other man, all this portentous absurdity of mankind is at least very perplexing and unaccountable. "Not at all," I imagine I hear you say. "It proves only the infinite folly of man, and the slowness and difficulty with which Truth gains admission to his mind." Very

true; if your theory be right, it proves that, sure enough; but, as I think, something more; even something like the impossibility of your disabusing the world by any direct means; for if, at this time of day, in the most enlightened nations of Europe, at an infinite remove, in point of race, customs, laws, education, from everything that can create sympathy with the Jewish fanatic,— in the midst of learning, knowledge, art, and science, you find men, and among them many of the most acute and comprehensive intellects, the most capable of judging of evidence, still spellbound by this desperate delusion, how can you hope that it will be ever dissipated?

You will hardly say, I think, that it is only just now that the pretensions of Paul have been disputed.

If you do, I beg to remind you that Herbert and Bolingbroke, and Chubb, and Tindal, and Collins, and a host of Deists, derided and proscribed both Paul and his readers, for a whole century together; and what was done in our own country was also doing in Holland, Germany, and France. Nothing can be more contemptible, in the estimate of a number of Deists in all these countries for a century past, than the "besotted admiration" of the writings of Paul and of Paul himself. Yet the tide of love and veneration still flows on; readers and writers go on poring over his alleged "impertinences and extravagances," just as if the great Deistical oracles had never spoken. Indeed, they might as well never have spoken, for no one (unless it be one in a generation or so, very curious in the history of opinion) ever deigns to look into them. If Bolingbroke, who declares St. Paul "a vain-glorious boaster," guilty of "great hypocrisy and dissimulation," "obscure and unintelligible," and where not so, "profane, absurd, and trifling," could rise from the dead, how would he be mortified to find how little he had affected the conclusions of the world! How vexed to think that while his own volumes are covered with dust and cobwebs, St. Paul speaks some scores of languages more than when Bolingbroke "spat" on his "Jewish gaberdine," and that "a few thousand more volumes have been admiringly written about him than existed then!

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