of the first century did observe stated days of assembling.  Our histories record the institution of the rite which we call the Lord’s Supper, and a command to repeat it in perpetual succession:  we find, amongst the early Christians, the celebration of this rite universal.  And, indeed, we find concurring in all the above-mentioned observances, Christian societies of many different nations and languages, removed from one another by a great distance of place and dissimilitude of situation.  It is also extremely material to remark, that there is no room for insinuating that our books were fabricated with a studious accommodation to the usages which obtained at the time they were written; that the authors of the books found the usages established, and framed the story to account for their original.  The Scripture accounts, especially of the Lord’s Supper, are too short and cursory, not to say too obscure, and in this view, deficient, to allow a place for any such suspicion.*

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* The reader who is conversant in these researches, by comparing the short Scripture accounts of the Christian rites above-mentioned with the minute and circumstantial directions contained in the pretended apostolical constitutions, will see the force of this observation; the difference between truth and forgery. _________

Amongst the proofs of the truth of our proposition, viz.  That the story which we have now is, in substance, the story which the Christians had then, or, in other words, that the accounts in our Gospels are, as to their principal parts, at least, the accounts which the apostles and original teachers of the religion delivered, one arises from observing, that it appears by the Gospels themselves that the story was public at the time; that the Christian community was already in possession of the substance and principal parts of the narrative.  The Gospels were not the original cause of the Christian history being believed, but were themselves among the consequences of that belief.  This is expressly affirmed by Saint Luke, in his brief, but, as I think, very important and instructive preface:—­“Forasmuch (says the evangelist) as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed amongst us, even as they delivered them unto us, which, from the beginning, were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed.”—­This short introduction testifies, that the substance of the history which the evangelist was about to write was already believed by Christians; that it was believed upon the declarations of eye-witnesses and ministers of the word; that it formed the account of their religion in which Christians were instructed; that the office