It was presented also to the imagination of the learned Heathen under additional disadvantage, by reason of its real, and still more of its nominal, connexion with Judaism.  It shared in the obloquy and ridicule with which that people and their religion were treated by the Greeks and Romans.  They regarded Jehovah himself only as the idol of the Jewish nation, and what was related of him as of a piece with what was told of the tutelar deities of other countries; nay, the Jews were in a particular manner ridiculed for being a credulous race; so that whatever reports of a miraculous nature came out of that country were looked upon by the Heathen world as false and frivolous.  When they heard of Christianity, they heard of it as a quarrel amongst this people about some articles of their own superstition.  Despising, therefore, as they did, the whole system, it was not probable that they would enter, with any degree of seriousness or attention, into the detail of its disputes or the merits of either side.  How little they knew, and with what carelessness they judged of these matters, appears, I think, pretty plainly from an example of no less weight than that of Tacitus, who, in a grave and professed discourse upon the history of the Jews, states that they worshipped the effigy of an ass. (Tacit.  Hist. lib. v. c. 2.) The passage is a proof how prone the learned men of those times were, and upon how little evidence, to heap together stories which might increase the contempt and odium in which that people was holden.  The same foolish charge is also confidently repeated by Plutarch. (Sympos. lib. iv. quaest. 5.)

It is observable that all these considerations are of a nature to operate with the greatest force upon the highest ranks; upon men of education, and that order of the public from which writers are principally taken:  I may add also upon the philosophical as well as the libertine character; upon the Antonines or Julian, not less than upon Nero or Domitian; and, more particularly, upon that large and polished class of men who acquiesced in the general persuasion, that all they had to do was to practise the duties of morality, and to worship the Deity more patrio; a habit of thinking, liberal as it may appear, which shuts the door against every argument for a new religion.  The considerations above mentioned would acquire also strength from the prejudices which men of rank and learning universally entertain against anything that originates with the vulgar and illiterate; which prejudice is known to be as obstinate as any prejudice whatever.

Yet Christianity was still making its way:  and, amidst so many impediments to its progress, so much difficulty in procuring audience and attention, its actual success is more to be wondered at, than that it should not have universally conquered scorn and indifference, fixed the levity of a voluptuous age, or, through a cloud of adverse prejudications, opened for itself a passage to the hearts and understandings of the scholars of the age.