addition of many circumstances which were the fruit, the author says, of further inquiry, and of diligent examination; but still with a total silence about miracles.  When Ignatius had been dead nearly sixty years, the Jesuits, conceiving a wish to have the founder of their order placed in the Roman calendar, began, as it should seem, for the first time, to attribute to him a catalogue of miracles which could not then be distinctly disproved; and which there was, in those who governed the church, a strong disposition to admit upon the slenderest proofs.

II.  We may lay out of the case accounts published in one country, of what passed in a distant country, without any proof that such accounts were known or received at home.  In the case of Christianity, Judea, which was the scene of the transaction, was the centre of the mission.  The story was published in the place in which it was acted.  The church of Christ was first planted at Jerusalem itself.  With that church others corresponded.  From thence the primitive teachers of the institution went forth; thither they assembled.  The church of Jerusalem, and the several churches of Judea, subsisted from the beginning, and for many ages; received also the same books and the same accounts as other churches did. (The succession of many eminent bishops of Jerusalem in the first three centuries is distinctly preserved; as Alexander, A.D. 212, who succeeded Narcissus, then 116 years old.)

This distinction disposes, amongst others, of the above-mentioned miracles of Apollonius Tyaneus, most of which are related to have been performed in India; no evidence remaining that either the miracles ascribed to him, or the history of those miracles, were ever heard of in India.  Those of Francis Xavier, the Indian missionary, with many others of the Romish breviary, are liable to the same objection, viz. that the accounts of them were published at a vast distance from the supposed scene of the wonders. (Douglas’s Crit. p. 84.)

III.  We lay out of the case transient rumours.  Upon the first publication of an extraordinary account, or even of an article of ordinary intelligence, no one who is not personally acquainted with the transaction can know whether it be true or false, because any man may publish any story.  It is in the future confirmation, or contradiction, of the account; in its permanency, or its disappearance; its dying away into silence, or its increasing in notoriety; its being followed up by subsequent accounts, and being repeated in different and independent accounts—­that solid truth is distinguished from fugitive lies.  This distinction is altogether on the side of Christianity.  The story did not drop.  On the contrary, it was succeeded by a train of action and events dependent upon it.  The accounts which we have in our hands were composed after the first reports must have subsided.  They were followed by a train of writings upon the subject.  The historical testimonies of the transaction were many and various, and connected with letters, discourses, controversies, apologies, successively produced by the same transaction.