been instructed; and those who cannot see enough in the force of this reason to account for their conduct towards our Saviour, do not sufficiently consider how such opinions may sometimes become very general in a country, and with what pertinacity, when once become so, they are for that reason alone adhered to.  In the suspense which these notions and the prejudices resulting from them might occasion, the candid and docile and humble-minded would probably decide in Christ’s favour; the proud and obstinate, together with the giddy and the thoughtless, almost universally against him.

This state of opinion discovers to us also the reason of what some choose to wonder at, why the Jews should reject miracles when they saw them, yet rely so much upon the tradition of them in their own history.  It does not appear that it had ever entered into the minds of those who lived in the time of Moses and the prophets to ascribe their miracles to the supernatural agency of evil being.  The solution was not then invented.  The authority of Moses and the prophets being established, and become the foundation of the national polity and religion, it was not probable that the later Jews, brought up in a reverence for that religion, and the subjects of that polity, should apply to their history a reasoning which tended to overthrow the foundation of both.

II.  The infidelity of the Gentile world, and that more especially of men of rank and learning in it, is resolvable into a principle which, in my judgment, will account for the inefficacy of any argument or any evidence whatever, viz. contempt prior to examination.  The state of religion amongst the Greeks and Romans had a natural tendency to induce this disposition.  Dionysius Halicarnassensis remarks, that there were six hundred different kinds of religions or sacred rites exercised at Rome. (Jortin’s Remarks on Eccl.  Hist.  Vol. i. p. 371.) The superior classes of the community treated them all as fables.  Can we wonder, then, that Christianity was included in the number, without inquiry into its separate merits, or the particular grounds of its pretensions?  It might be either true or false for anything they knew about it.  The religion had nothing in its character which immediately engaged their notice.  It mixed with no politics.  It produced no fine writers.  It contained no curious speculations.  When it did reach their knowledge, I doubt not but that it appeared to them a very strange system,—­so unphilosophical,—­dealing so little in argument and discussion, in such arguments however and discussions as they were accustomed to entertain.  What is said of Jesus Christ, of his nature, office, and ministry, would be in the highest degree alien from the conceptions of their theology.  The Redeemer and the destined Judge of the human race a poor young man, executed at Jerusalem with two thieves upon a cross!  Still more would the language in which the Christian doctrine was delivered be dissonant and barbarous to their ears.  What knew they of grace, of redemption, of justification, of the blood of Christ shed for the sins of men, of reconcilement, of mediation?  Christianity was made up of points they had never thought of; of terms which they had never heard.