CHRISTIAN ADMISSIONS

 

Taken from “Diegesis” by Robert Taylor

 

a collection of statements by early Popes, Church Fathers
and Christian writers which proves that Christianity is a man-made religion

 

 

published by:

 

PROPHET YAHWEH

Seer Of Yahweh

Master Salvation Teacher

Master UFO Caller

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 a.  In the year 1444, Caxton published his first book ever printed in England . In 1474, the then Bishop of London , in a convocation of his clergy, said, “If we do not destroy this dangerous invention, it will one day destroy us.” The reader should compare Pope Leo the Tenth’s avowal, that “it was well knownhow profitable this fable of Christ has been to us”… chapter 6, page 30, see footnotes

 

 

CHAPTER 6

Admissions Of Christian Writers

 

In studying the writings of the early advocates of Christianity, and fathers of the Christian Church; where we should naturally look for the language that would indicate the real occurrence of the facts of the gospel, if real occurrences they had ever been; not only do we find no such sort of language, but ever where, find we, any sort of sophistical ambages, ramblings from the subject and evasions of the very business before them, as if of purpose to balk our research, and insult our skepticism. If we travel to the very sepulcher of Christ, we have only to discover that he was never there: history seeks evidence of his existence as a man, but finds no more trace of it, than of a shadow that flitted across the wall. The star of Bethlehem shone not upon her path, and the order of the universe was suspended without her observance. She asks with the Magi of the east, “where is he that is born king of the Jews,” and like them, finds no solution of her inquiry, but the guidance that guides as well  to one place as another; descriptions that apply to Esculapius, as well as to Jesus; prophecies, without evidence that they were ever prophesied; miracles, which those  who are said to have seen are said also to have denied that they saw; narratives without authorities, facts without dates, and records without names.

 

Where we should naturally look for the evidence of recentness, and a mode of expression suitable to the character of witness, or of those who had conversed with witnesses, we not only find now such modes of expression; but both the recorded language and actions of the parties, are found to be entirely incongruous, and out of keeping with the supposition of such great character. We find the discourses of the very first preachers and martyrs of this religion, outraging all chronology, by claiming the honors of an even then remote antiquity, for the doctrines they taught.

 

ADMISSION 1

 

We find St. Stephen, the very first martyr of Christianity, in the very city where its stupendous events are supposed to have happened, and, as our Bible chronologies inform us, within the very year in which they happened: and on the very occasion on which above all others that could be imagined, he must, and would have borne testimony to them, as constituting the evidences of his faith, that justification of his conduct, and the grounds of his martyrdom; nevertheless, bearing no such testimony, yea! not so much as glancing at those events, but founding his whole argument on the ancient legends of the Jewish superstition. What a falling off is there!

 

ADMISSION 2

 

We find St. Paul, the very first Apostle of the Gentiles, expressly avowing that “he was made a minister of the gospel, which had already been preached to every creature under heaven;” (Col. i. 23,) preaching a god manifest in the flesh, who had been “believed on in the world,” (1 Tim. iii. 16,) before the commencement of his ministry; and who therefore could have been no such person as the man of Nazareth, who had certainly not been preached at that time, nor generally believed on in the world, till ages after that time.

 

ADMISSION 3

 

We find him, moreover, out of all character and consistency of circumstance, assuming the most intolerant airs of arrogance, and snubbing Peter at Antioch , as if he were nobody, or had absolutely been preaching a false doctrine, of which Paul were the more proper judge, and the higher authority.  A circumstance absolutely demonstrative that the Peter of the Acts was no such person as the Peter of the Gospels, who would certainly not have suffered himself to be called over the coals, by one who was but a new setter up in the business, but would in all probability have cut his ear off, rapt out a good oath or two, or knock him down with his keys, for such audacious presumption.

 

ADMISSION 4

 

It is most essentially remarkable, that as these Acts of the Apostles bear internal evidence of being a much later production than the epistles and gospels, and are evidently mixed up with the journals of real adventures of some traveling missionaries; they are not mentioned with the epistles and gospels which had constituted the ancient writings of the Therapeutae.  Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, (A.D. 393,) informs us, that at that time, “this book was unknown to many, and by others it was despised.”

 

ADMISSION 5

 

Mill, one of the very highest authorities in biblical literature, tells us, “that the gospels were soon spread abroad, and came into all men’s hands; but the case was somewhat different with the other books of the New Testament, particularly the Acts of the Apostles, which were not thought to be so important, and had few transcribers.”

 

ADMISSION 6

 

And Beausobre acknowledges that the book of the Acts, had not at the beginning in the eastern churches the same authority with the gospels and the epistles. 

 

ADMISSION 7

 

LARDNER, (vol. 2, p. 605,) would rather give St. Chrysostom the lie, than surrender to the pregnant consequence of so fatal an admission. The gospels were soon received, for they were ready before the world was awake.  The Acts were a second attempt.  Where we should look for marks of distinction, as definite as those which must necessarily and eternally exist between truth and falsehood, between divine wisdom and human weakness, between what man knew by the suggestion of his own unassisted shrewdness, and what he only could have known by the further instruction of divine revelation; not only find we no such lines or characters of distinction, but alas! in the stead and place thereof, we find the most entire and perfect amalgamation, an entire surrender of all challenge to distinction, a complete capitulation, going over, and “hail-fellow-well-met” conjunction, of Jesus and Jupiter.  Christianity and Paganism are frankly avowed to have been never more distinct from each other, than six from half-a-dozen, never to have been at variance of divided, but by the mere accidental substitution of one set of names for the other, and the very trifling and immaterial misunderstanding, that the new nomenclature had occasioned.

 

“Some of the ancientest writers of the church have not scrupled expressly to call the Athenian SOCRATES and some others of the best of the heathen moralists, by the name of CHRISTIANS, and to affirm, that as the law was as it were a schoolmaster, to bring the Jews unto Christ, so true moral philosophy was to the Gentiles a preparative to receive the gospel.”-Clarke’s Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion, p. 284.

 

ADMISSION 8

 

“And those who lived according to the Logos, (says Clemens Alexandrinus) were really Christians, though they have been thought to be Atheists; as Socrates and Heraclitus were among the Greeks, and such as resembled them.”

 

 ADMISSION 9

 

For God, says Origen, revealed these things to them, and whatever things have been well spoken.

 

ADMISSION 10

 

And if there had been any one to have collected the truth that was scattered and diffused, says Lactantitus, among sects and individuals, into one, and to have reduced it into a system, there would, indeed, have been no difference between him and us.

 

ADMISSION 11

 

And if Cicero ’s works, says, Arnobius, had been read as they ought to have been by the heathens, there would have been no need of Christian writers.

 

ADMISSION 12

 

“That, in our times is the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, (says St. Augustin,) which to know and follow is the most sure and certain health, called according to that name, but not according to the thing itself, of which it is the name; for the thing itself, which is now called the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, really was known to the ancients, nor was wanting at any time from the beginning of the human race, until the time when Christ came in the flesh from whence the true religion, which had previously existed, began to be called Christian ; and this in our days is the Christian religion, not as having been wanting in former times, but as having in later times received this name”

 

ADMISSION 13

 

“What then? and do the philosophers recommend nothing like the precepts of the gospel?” asks Lactantius.  Yes, indeed, they do very many, and often approach to truth ; only their precepts have no weight, as being merely human and devoid of that greater and divine authority; and nobody believes, because the hearer thinks himself as much a man, as he is who prescribes them.

 

ADMISSION 14

 

Monsieur Daillee, in his most excellent treatise, called, La Religion Catholique Romaine, instituee par Numa Pompile, demonstrated, that “ the papists took their idolatrous worship of images, as well as all other ceremonies from the old heathen religion,” and

 

ADMISSION 15

 

Ludovicus Vivus, a learned Catholic confesses, that “there could be found no other difference between Paganish and Popish worship before images, but only this, that names and titles are changed” –Quoted in Blount’s Philostratus, p. 113, 114.

 

ADMISSION 16

 

Epiphanius freely admits, of all the heretical forms of Christianity, that is, of all that differed from his own, that they were derived from the heathen mythology.

 

ADMISSION 17

 

The Manichees, the most distinguished of all who dissented from the established church, and unquestionably the most intelligent and learned of all who ever professed and called themselves Christians, boasted of being in possession of a work called the Theosophy, or the Wisdom of God; (and such a work we actually find quoted by St. Paul, 1 Corinth. 2,) in which the purport was to show, that Judaism, Paganism, and Manicheeism, i.e. as they understood it, Christianity, were one and the same religion....

 

 ADMISSION 18

 

Even our own orthodox Doctor Burnet, in his treatise De Statu Mortuorum, purposely written in Latin, that it might serve for the instruction of the clergy only, and not come to the knowledge of the laity, because, as he says, “too much light is hurtful for weak eyes;” not only justifies, but recommends the practice of the most consummate hypocrisy, and that too, on the most awful of all subjects ; and would have his clergy seriously preach and maintain the reality and eternity of hell torments, even though they should believe nothing of the sort themselves.

 

What is this, but an edition, by a Christian bishop, of the very sentiment which Cicero reproves in Pagan philosophers;-“Quid? ii qui dixerunt totam de Diis immortalibus opinionem fictam esse ab hominibus sapientibus, Reipublicae causa, ut quos Ratio non posset, eos ad officium Religio duceret, nonne omnem religionem funditus sustulerunt.”-De Nat. Deor. lib. 1, ch. 42, p. 405.-Can there be any doubt that the Rev. Dr. Burnet, with all his cant abut Christianity and truth, was afraid to promulgate the latter sincerely and openly to the people?

 

ADMISSION 19

 

Dr. Mosheim, among his, many and invaluable writings, published a dissertation, showing the reasons and causes of supposititious writings in the first and second century.  And all own, says Lardner, that Christians of all sorts were guilty of this fraud; indeed, we may say, it was one great fault of the times.

 

ADMISSION 20

 

“And in the last place, (says the great Casaubon,) it mightily affects me, to see how many there were in theearliest times of the church, who considered it as a capital exploit, to lend to heavenly truth the help of their own inventions, in order that the new doctrine might be more readily allowed by the wise among the Gentiles. These officious lies, they were wont to say, were devised for a good end.  From which source, beyond question, sprung nearly innumerable books, which that and the following age say published by those who were far from being bad men, (for we are not speaking of the books of heretics,) under the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the apostles, and other saints.”

 

The reader has only to satisfy himself with his own solution of the question emergent from such an admission.  If those who palmed what they knew to be a lie, upon the world, under the name and sanction of a God of truth, are to be considered as still worthy of our confidence, and far from being bad men: who are the bad men?  Illud me quoque vehementer movet.

 

ADMISSION 21

 

“There is scarce any church in Christendom at this day, (says one of the church’s most distinguished ornaments) which doth not obtrude, not only plain falsehoods, but such falsehoods as will appear to any free spirit, pure contradictions and impossibilities ; and that with the same gravity, authority, and importunity, as they do the holy oracles of God.”-Dr. Henry Moore.

Here again emerge the anxious queries.-Why should not a man have a free spirit? and what credit can be due to the holy oracles of God, standing on no better evidence of being such, than the testimony of those, who we know have palmed the grossest falsehoods on us, with the same gravity, and as of equal authority with those holy oracles? and

 

ADMISSION 22

 

“This opinion has always been in the world, that to settle a certain and assured estimation upon that which is good and true, it is necessary to remove out of the way, whatsoever may be an hindrance to it.  Neither ought we to wonder, that even those of the honest innocent primitive times made use of these deceits, seeing for a good end they made no scruple to forge whole books.”-Daille, on the Use of the Fathers, b. 1, c. 3.

  

What good end was that, which needed to be prosecuted by the forgery of whole books?

 

ADMISSION 23

 

“But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we say?”-Rom. Iii. 5.  “For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie, unto his glory, why yet am I also judged as a sinner?”-Romans, iii. 7.

 

ADMISSION 24

 

The apostle father, Hermas, who was the fellow-labourer of St. Paul in the work of the ministry; who is greeted as such in the New Testament: and whose writings are expressly quoted as of divine inspiration by the early fathers, ingenuously confess that LYING was the easily-besetting sin of a Christian.  His words are,

 

“O Lord, I never spake a true word in my life, but I have always lived in dissimulation, and affirmed a lie for truth to all men, an no man contradicted me, but all gave credit to my words.”  To which the holy angels, whom he addresses, condescendingly admonishes him, that “as the lie was UP, now, he had better keep it up, and as in time it would come to be believed, it would answer as well as truth.”

 

ADMISSION 25

 

Even Christ himself is represented in the gospels as inculcation the necessity, and setting the example of deceiving and imposing upon the common people, and purposely speaking unto them in parables and double entendres, “that seeing, they might see, and not perceive; and hearing, they might hear, but, not understand.”-Mark, iv. 12.

  

ADMISSION 26

 

And divine inspiration, so far from involving any guarantee that truth would be spoken under its immediate influence, is in the scripture itself, laid down as the criterion whereby we may know that nothing in the shape of truth is to be expected:-“And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord, have deceived that prophet.-Ezek. Xiv. 9.

 

ADMISSION 27

 

When it was intended that King Ahab should be seduced to his inevitable destruction, God is represented as having employed his faith and piety as the means of his overthrow:-“Now, therefore, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all thy prophets.”-1 Kings, xxii. 23.  There were four hundred of them, all speaking under the influence of divine inspiration, all having received the spirit from on high, all of them the servants of God, and engaged in obeying none other than his godly notions, yet lying as fast as if the father of lies himself had commissioned them.  Such a set of fellows, so employed, cannot at least but make us suspect some sort of sarcasm in our TE DEUM, where we say, “the goodly fellowship of the prophets praise thee.”  The devil would hardly think such sort of praise, a compliment.  Happy would it have been for Ahab, had he been an Infidel.

 

ADMISSION 28

 

The New Testament, however, one might hope, as being a second revelation from God, would have given him an opportunity of “repenting of the evil he had spoken;” but alas! orthodoxy itself is constrained to tremble and adore, before that dreadful declaration, than which no religion that ever was in the world besides, ever contained any thing half so horrible:-“For this cause, God shall send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie, that they all might be damned.”-2 Thess. Ii. 11, 12.  Such was to be the effect of divine revelation.

  

Should then, our further prosecution of the inquiry proposed by this DIEGESIS, lead us to the conviction that the amount of evidence for the pretensions of the Christian religion, is as strong as it may be, it will yet remain for an inquiry, which we shall never venture to prosecute, whether that strength of evidence itself, may not be strong delusion.  Strong enough must that delusion needs be, by which Omnipotence would intend to impose on the credulity and weakness of his creatures.  Is it for those who will defend the apparentinferences of such a passage, to point out any thing in the grossest conceits, of the grossest forms of paganism, that might not have admitted of a palliative interpretation?

 

ADMISSION 29

 

St. Paul himself, in an ambiguous text, either openly glories in the avowal, or but faintly repels the charge of practicing a continued system of imposture and dissimulation.  “For unto the Jews, (says he) I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews.  To the weak, became I as men.”-1 Corinth . ix. 22.

 

ADMISSION 30

 

And in a passage still more pregnant with inference to our great inquiry, (2 Galat. Ii.) he distinguishes the gospel which he preached on ordinary occasions, from “that gospel which he preached privately to them that were of reputation.”

 

ADMISSION 31

 

Dr. Mosheim admits, that the Platonists and Pythagoreans held it as a maxim, that it was not only lawful, but praiseworthy to deceive, and even to use the expedient of a lie, in order to advance the cause of truth and piety.

 

The Jews who lived in Egypt , had learned and received this maxim from them, before the coming of Christ, as appears incontestably from a multitude of ancient records, and the Christians were infected from both these sources, with the same pernicious error.-Mosheim, vol. 1. p. 197.

 

ADMISSION 32

 

In the fourth century, the same great author instructs us “that it was an almost universally adopted maxim, that it was an act of virtue to deceive and lie, when by such means the interests of the church might be promoted.”-Vol. 1. p. 198.

 

ADMISSION 33

 

And as it regards the fifth century, he continues, the simplicity and ignorance of the generality in those times, furnished the most favorable occasion for the exercise of fraud; and the impudence of impostors in contriving false miracles, was artfully proportioned to the credulity of the vulgar: while the sagacious and the wise, who perceived these cheats, were overawed into silence by the dangers that threatened their lives and fortunes, if they should expose the artifice.”-Mosheim, Eccl. Hist. vol. 2. p. 11.

 

ADMISSION 34

 

Nor must we, in any part of our subsequent investigation, quit our hold on the important admission of the fact supplied to us by the research of that most eminent of critics, the great SEMLER-that the sacred books of the Christian Scriptures (from which circumstance, it may be they derive their name of sacred) were, during the early.

 

………………………………………..

 

Items 35-40 Are Missing From My Copy Of The Document

I will find another copy of this book and include the
missing Admissions in the next edition of this research paper.

 

………………………………………..

  

 

ADMISSION 41

 

But these compliances, as Bishop Stillingflect observes, were attended with very bad consequences; sinceChristianity became at last, by that means, to be nothing else but reformed Paganism, as to its divine worship.

 

ADMISSION 42

 

The learned Christian advocate, M. Turretin, in describing the state of Christianity in the fourth century, has a well turned rhetoricism, the point of which is “that it was not so much the empire that was brought over to the faith, as the faith that was brought over to the empire: not the Pagans who were converted to Christianity, but Christianity that was converted to Paganism.

 

ADMISSION 43

 

“From this era, then, according to the accounts of all writers, though Christianity became the public and established religion of the government, yet it was forced to sustain a perpetual struggled for many ages, against the obstinate efforts of Paganism, which was openly espoused by some of the emperors; publicly tolerated and privately favored by others; and connived at in some degree by all.”-Middleton’s Letters from Rome .

 

ADMISSION 44

 

Within thirty years after Constantine , the emperor Julian entirely restored Paganism, and abrogated all the laws which had been made against it.  Though it is utterly untrue that he was ever guilty of any act of persecution or intolerance towards Christians.  The three emperors, who next in order succeeded Julian,i.e. Jovian Valentinian, Valens; though they were Christians by profession, were yet wholly indifferent and neutral between the two religions; granting an equal indulgence and toleration to them both.  Do that they may be as fairly claimed to be Pagan as Christian emperors.  Nor had even Constantine himself, the first for whom the designation of a Christian emperor has been challenged, accepted the rite of Christian baptism before he was dying, or ever in his life ceased to be, and to officiate, as a priest of the gods.

 

Gratian, the seventh emperor from him, and fourth after Julian, though a sincere believer, never thought fit to annul what Julian had restored.  He was the first however of the emperors who refused the title and habit of the Pontifex Maximus, as incompatible with the Christian character.  So that till then, up to the year 384, there was no actual disunion between Christ and Belial; no evidence of miracles or strength of reason had been offered to attest the superiority of the Christian religion, to demonstrate that there was any material distinction between that and Paganism, or to determine the mind of any one of the Roman emperors, that there was an inconsistency in being a Christian and a Pagan at the same time.

 

ADMISSION 45

 

The affront put by Gratian upon the Pagan priesthood, in refusing to wear their pontifical robe, was so highly resented, that one of them is recorded to have said, since the emperor refuses to be our Pontifex Maximus, we will very shortly take care that our Pontifex shall be Maximus.

 

ADMISSION 46

 

In the subsequent reign of Theodosius, whose laws were generally severe upon the Pagans, Symmachus, the governor of Rome , presented a memorial in the strongest terms, and in the name of the Senate and people of Rome , for leave to replace the altar of victory in the senate house, whence it had been removed by Gratian.  This memorial was answered by St. Ambrose, who in a letter upon it to the emperor, observes, that “ when the petitioners had so many temples and altars of their own, in all the streets of Rome , where they might freely offer their sacrifices, it seemed to be a mere insult on Christianity, to demand still one altar more; and especially in the senate house, where the greater part were then Christians.”  This petition was rejected by Valentinian, against the advice of all his council, but was granted presently after by the Christian emperor, Eugenius, who murthered and succeeded him.

 

Thus entering on the fifth century, and further surely we need not descend: we have the surest and most unequivocal demonstration, that Christianity, as a religion distinct from the ancient Paganism, up to that time, had gained no extensive footing in the world.  After that period, all that there was of religion in the world, merges in the palpable obscure of the dark ages.  The pretence to an argument for the Christian religion, from any thing either miraculous or extraordinary in its propagation, is therefore, a sheer defiance of all evidence and reason whatever.

 

ADMISSION 47

 

“Pantaenus, the head of the Alexandrian school, was probably the first who enriched the church with a version of the sacred writings, which has been lost among the ruins of time.-Mosh. Vol. I. 186.-Compare with No. 34 in this Chapter.

 

ADMISSION 48

 

“They all, (i.e. all the fathers of the second century) attributed a double sense to the words of Scripture, the one obvious and literal, the other hidden and mysterious, which lay concealed, as it were, under the veil of the outward letter.  The former they treated with the utmost neglect,” &c.-Ibid. 186.

 

 ADMISSION 49

 

“God also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”-2 Corinth . iii. 6.

 

ADMISSION 50

 

“It is here to be attentively observed (says Mosheim, speaking of the church in the second century) that the form used in the exclusion of heinous offenders from the society of Christians, was, at first, extremely simple; but was, however, imperceptibly altered, enlarged by an addition of a vast multitude of rites, and new-modeled according to the discipline used in the ancient mysteries.”-Mosh. Vol. I. p. 199.

 

ADMISSION 51

 

“The profound respect that was paid to the Greek and Roman mysteries, and the extraordinary sanctity that was attributed to them, induced the Christians, (of the second century) to give their religion a mystic air, in order to put it upon an equal footing, in point of dignity, with that of the Pagans.  For this purpose, they gave the name of mysteries to the institutions of the gospel, and decorated, particularly the holy sacrament, with that solemn title.  They used, in that sacred institution, as also in that of baptism, several of the termsemployed in the heathen mysteries, and proceeded so far at length, as even to adopt some of the rites and ceremonies of which those renowned mysteries consisted”-Ibid. 204.

 

ADMISSION 52

 

“It may be further observed, that the custom of teaching their religious doctrines, by images, actions, signs, and other sensible representations, which prevailed among the Egyptians, and indeed in almost all the eastern nations, was another cause of the increase of external rites in the church.”-Ibid. 204.

 

ADMISSION 53

 

“Among the human means that contributed to multiply the number of Christians, and extend the limits of the church in the third century, we shall find a great variety of causes uniting their influence, and contributing jointly to this happy purpose.  Among these must be reckoned the zeal and labors of Origen, and the different works which were published by learned and pious men in defense of the gospel.  If among the causes of the propagation of Christianity, there is any place due to PIOUS FRAUDS, it is certain that theymerit a very small part of the honor of having contributed to this glorious purpose, since they were practiced by few, and that very rarely.”-Mosheim, vol. I, p. 246.

 

ADMISSION 54

 

“Origen, invited from Alexandria by an Arabian prince, converted by his assiduous labors a certain tribe of wandering Arabs to the Christian faith.  The Goths, a fierce and warlike people, received the knowledge of the gospel by the means of certain Christian doctors, sent thither from Asia .  The holy lives of these venerable teachers, and the MIRACULOUS POWERS with which they were endowed, attracted the esteem, even of a people educated to nothing but plunder and devastation, absolutely uncivilized by letters or science: and their authority and influence became so great, and produced in process of time such remarkable effects, that a great part of this barbarous people professed themselves the disciples of Christ, an put off, in a manner, that ferocity which had been so natural to them.”-Vol. I, 247.

  

 ADMISSION 55

 

“Among the superhuman means,” which, after all that he has admitted, this writer thinks can alone sufficiently account for the successful propagation of the gospel, “we not only reckon the intrinsic force of celestial truth, and the piety and fortitude of those who declared it to the world, but also that especial andinterposing providence, which by dreams and visions, presented to the minds of many, who were either inattentive to the Christian doctrine, or its professed enemies, touched their hearts with a conviction of the truth, and a sense of its importance; and engaged them without delay to profess themselves the disciples of Christ.”

 

ADMISSION 56

 

“To this may also be added, the healing of diseases, and other miracles, which many Christians were yet enabled to perform, by invoking the name of the Divine Savior.-Mosheim, vol. I. pl 245.

 

On these last four most important admissions; the reader will observe, that it may be enough to remark that the principle on which this work is conducted, so well expressed in its motto, that philosophy which is agreeable to nature, approve and cherish; but that which pretends to commerce with the deity, a- void! Pledges us to view all references to supernatural agency, as being no proof of such agency, but as demonstration absolute of the idiotish stupidity, or arrant knavery of the party, resting any cause whatever on such references.  It is not in the former of these predicaments, that such an historian as Mosheim, can be impeached; nor could either the emoluments or dignities of the theological chair a Helmstadt, or the chancellorship of the University of Gottingen, allay the smartings of sentiment, and the anguish of conscious meanness, in holding them at so dear a price, as the necessity of making such statements, of thus selling his name to the secret scorn of all whose praise was worth ambition, thus outraging his own convictions, thus confliction with his own statements; thus bowing sown his stupendous strength of talent, to harmonize with the figments of driveling idiocy, making learning do homage to ignorance, and the clarion that should have roused the sleeping world, pipe down to concert with the rattle-trap and Jew’s-harp of the nursery.

 

Of the pious frauds, which this historian admits to share only a small part of the honor of contributing to the propagation of the gospel, because they were “practiced by so few,” he had not the alleviation to his feelings, of being able to be ignorant that he had falsifies that statement in innumerable passages of this and his other writings; and that his whole history of the church, from first to last, contains not so much as a single instance, of one of the fathers of the church, or first preachers of the gospel, who did not practice those pious frauds.

 

ADMISSION 57

 

“The authors who have treated of the innocence and sanctity of the primitive Christians, have fallen into the error of supposing them to have been unspotted models of piety and virtue, and a gross error indeed it is, as the strongest testimonies too evidently prove.”-Ibid. p. 120.

 

ADMISSION 58

 

“Such was the license of inventing, so headlong the readiness of believing, in the first ages, that the credibility of transactions derived from thence, must have been hugely doubtful: nor has the world only, but the church of God also, has reasonably to complain of its mystical times.” –Bishop Fell, so rendered in the Author’s SYNTAGMA, p. 34.

 

ADMISSION 59

 

“The extravagant notions which obtained among the Christians of the primitive ages, (says Dupin) sprang from the opinions of the Pagan philosophers, and from the mysteries, which crack-brained men put on the history of the Old and New-Testament, according to their imaginations.  The more extraordinary these opinions were, the more did they relish, and the better did they like them; and those who invented them, published them gravely, as great mysteries to the simple, who were all disposed to receive them.”-Dupin’s Short History of the Church, vol. 2. c. 4, as quoted by Tindal, p. 224.

 

ADMISSION 60

 

“They have but little knowledge of the Jewish nation, and of the primitive Christians, who obstinately refuse to believe that such sort of notions could not proceed from thence; for on the contrary, it was their very character to turn the whole scripture into allegory.”-Arch-bishop Wake’s Life of the apostle Barnabas, p. 73.

 

Of the MIRACULOUS POWERS with which Mosheim would persuade us that the Christians of the third century were still endowed; we have but to confront him with his own conflicting statement, on the 11^th page of his second volume: concluding with his own reflection on that admission:-“Thus does it generally happen in human life, that when danger attends the discovery and the profession of the truth, the prudent are silent, the multitude believe, and impostors triumph.”

 

 Of the DREAMS AND VISIONS, of which he speaks; it is enough to answer him with the intuitive demonstration, that such sort of evidence for Christianity, might be as easily pretended for one religion as another; it is such as none but a desperate cause would appeal to, such as no rational man would respect, and no honest man maintain; not only of no nature to afford proof to the claims of a divine revelation, but itself unproved; and not alone unproved; but of its own nature, both morally and physically, incapable of receiving any sort of proof.  The heart smarts for the degradation of outraged reasons for the humiliation of torn and lacerated humanity; that a Mosheim should talk of dreams and vision-that it should come to this!  O Christianity, how great are thy triumphs!

 

 Of the HEALING OF DISEASES, by the invoking of a name.  It is impossible not to see, that this author did not believe his own argument: because it is impossible not to know that no man in his senses could believe it, and impossible not to suspect, that so weak and foolish an argument, was by this author, purposely exhibited as one of the main pillars of the Christian evidence, in order to betray to future times, how weak that evidence was, and to encourage those who should come to live in some happier day when the choused  world might better endure to being undeceived; to blow it down with their breath.  Beausobre, Tillotson, South, Watson, Paley, and some high in the church, yet living, have given more than pregnant innuendoes of their acting on this policy.

 

Nothing is more obvious, than that persons diseased in body, must labor under a corresponding weakness of mind.  There is no delusion of such obvious practicability on a weak mind in a diseased body; as that which should hold out hopes of cure, beyond the promise of nature.  A miracle of healing, is therefore of all miracles, in its own nature most suspicious, and least capable of evidence.

 

It was the pretence to these gifts of healing, that have name to the Therapeutae, or Healers; and consequently supplies us with an infallible clue to lead to the birth-place and cradle of Christianity.  The cure being performed by invocation of a name, still lights us on to the germ and nucleus of the whole system.  Neither slight nor few are the indications of this magical or supposed charming operation of the Brutum fulmen; the mere name only of the words, Jesus Christ, in the New Testament itself; and consequently neither weak nor inconsecutive are our reasons, for maintaining that it was in the name, and the name only, that the first preachers of Christianity believed; that it was not supposed by them to be the designation of any person who had really existed, but was a vox et  praeterea nihil,-a charm more powerful than the Abraxas, more sacred than Abracadabra; in short, those were but the spells that bound the services of inferior demons- this, conjured the assistance of omnipotence, and was indeed, the God’s spell.  “There is none other   NAME under heaven, (says the Peter of the Acts of the Apostles) given among men, whereby we must be saved.”-Chap. iv. 12.

 

ADMISSION 61

 

Origen, ever the main strength and sheet-anchor of the advocates of Christianity, expressly maintains, that “the miraculous powers which the Christians possessed, were not in the least owing to enchantments, (which he makes Celsus seem to have objected,) but to their pronouncing the name

I.E.S U.S, and making mention of some remarkable occurrences of his life.  Nay, the name of I.E.S.U.S, has had such power over demons, that it has sometimes proved effectual, though pronounced by very wicked persons.”-Answer to Celsus, chap. 6.

 

ADMISSION 62

 

“And the name of I.E.E.U.S., at this very day, composes the ruffled minds of men, dispossesses demons, cures diseases; and works a meek, gentle, and amiable temper in all those persons, who make profession of Christianity, from a higher end than their worldly interests.”-Ibid. 57.  So says Origen.  No Christian will for a moment think that there is any salving of the matter in such a statement.  Friar’s balsam was found in every case without fail; to heal the wound, even after a man’s head was clean cut off, provided his head were set on again the right way.

 

ADMISSION 63

 

“When men pretend to work miracles, and talk of immediate revelations, of knowing the truth by revelation, and of more than ordinary illumination; we ought not to be frightened by those big words, from looking what is under them; nor to be afraid of calling those things into question, which we see set off with such high-flown pretences.  It is somewhat strange that we should believe men the more, for that very reason, upon which we should believe them the less.-Clagit’s Persuasive to an Ingenuous Trial of Opinions, p. 19, as quoted by Tindal, p. 217.

 

ADMISSION 64

 

St. Chrysostom declared, “that miracles are only proper to excite sluggish and vulgar minds, that men of sense have no occasion for them, and that they frequently carry some untoward suspicion along with them.”-Quoted in Middleton’s Prefatory Discourse to his Letter from Rome , p. 104.

 

In this sentiment it must be owned, that the Christian saint strikingly coincides with the Pagan philosopher Polybius, who considered all miracles as fables, invented to preserve in the vulgar a due sense of respect for the deity.”-Reimmann, Hist. Ath. P. 233.

 

ADMISSION 65

 

The great theologian, Beausobre, in his immense Histoire de Manichee, tom. 2, p. 568, says, “We see in the history which I have related, a sort of hypocrisy, that has been perhaps, but too common at all times: that churchmen not only do not say what they think, but they do say, the direct contrary of what they think. Philosophers in their cabinets; out of them, they are content with fables, though they well know that they are fables.  Nay more: they deliver honest men to the executioner, for having uttered what they themselves know to be true.  How many Atheists and Pagans have burned holy men under the pretext of heresy?  Every day do hypocrites consecrate, and make people adore the host, though as well convinced as I am, that it is nothing but a bit of bread. 

 

ADMISSION 66

 

The learned Grotius has a similar avowal: “He that reads ecclesiastical history, reads nothing but the roguery and folly of bishops and churchmen.”-Grotii Epist. 22.

 

No man could quote higher authorities.

 

 

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The end