with any pretension to reasonableness, would build his faith upon the testimony of such men? A more graceless band of sanctified sinners than the saints and apostolic fathers of the Christian church certainly never before nor since profaned literature. They were truly fishers of men-not forgetting to draw up all other good things; indeed, all was fish that came to their net. There was no fable, however extravagant, they would hesitate to trumpet forth as a divine truth!—no assertion they did not feel themselves warranted in making for the glory of the church of Christ, and the support of popular delusion! This may he considered as an overcharged picture of their viciousness, but what shall we think of St. Irenæus, who tells us that "Lot's wife remains in the country of Sodom, not in corruptible flesh, but in a state of permanent salt, and shewing by her natural parts, all the ordinary effects!" or, of Tertullian, a famed father of the church, in his poem on the same delicate subject, which is curious, and should be translated, but our readers would think it richly indecent, so we leave the lines as untranslateable:— Di citur et vivens alio sub corpore sexus, Mosheim, a great friend to the saints, nevertheless deals them some heavy blows in his Ecclesiastical History (p. 124), where he observes, "that multitudes of people of all kinds were everywhere admitted without examination, and without choice, into the body of the clergy; the greatest part of whom had no other view than the enjoyment of a lazy and inglorious repose. Many of these ecclesiastics were confined to no fixed places or assemblies-had no employment of any kind, but sauntered wherever they pleased, gaining their maintenance by imposing upon the ignorant multitude, and sometimes by mean and dishonest practices. But if any one should ask how this is reconcileable with the number of saints who, according to the testimonies of both eastern and western writers, are said to have shone forth in this century? the answer is obvious—these saints were canonized by the ignorance of the times." If the friends of Christianity write thus about its prime supporters, the saints, what can be expected from its enemies? But the infamy of the saints and fathers is so well established, that it would have been dangerous to the reputation and authority of any historian to throw a cloak over their enormities; and justice compels us to add, that there is much less of bitterness and more of candour in Mosheim, than in the generality of Christian writers; this it is which raises his evidence against Christianity beyond the reach of cavil from the friends of that religion; and as to its enemies, it must be confessed, they have but slight cause of complaint; for he has unconsciously furnished one of the most efficient moral battering-rams that can be desired by sceptical destructives, who desire to beat down the walls of the Christian citadels; and certainly nothing that has been written by Hume, Gibbon, or Voltaire, ever did such damage to the character of Christian writers. Mark his candour when speaking of the Christians,-"This disingenuous and vicious method of surprising their adversaries by artifice, and striking them down, as it were, by lies and fictions, produced, among other disagreeable effects, a great number of books which were falsely attributed to certain men in order to give their spurious productions more credit and weight." Who, after this, will presume to talk about the undoubted authority, or respectable character, of the saints, fathers, and doctors of the Christian church ?—and yet the gospels of Christ-the Evangelical books-were selected by these worthies, with great carefulness, from an immense heap of spurious and apocryphal trash, which true and holy gospels they have, with equal carefulness, handed down to their descendants in the church. But who will guarantee us from deception-who can now prove that these CAREful rogues only selected the true and authentic-leaving the false and the forged? If it be answered that they were favored in their selection by divine assistance, and therefore could not have made mistakes, such an answer assumes the whole question in dispute; for if it be allowed that men, such as Mosheim describes the saints and fathers to have been, were divinely inspired, and, as a consequence, infalliblenothing more could be reasonably advanced upon the matter; but, it is quite impossible that there can be divinely inspired rogues and hypocrites-there cannot be infallible liars-such men cannot be infallible, divine, or trustworthy, whatever name we please to call them; and they who, according to Mosheim, "were desirous of surpassing all others in piety, and looked upon it as lawful, and even laudable to advance the cause of piety by artifice and fraud, cannot in the eye of the moralist, no matter what their pretensions to divine inspiration and infallibility, be considered in any other light than as deceivers upon principle, and by system, either knaves or fools-characters equally mischievous, and equally unworthy of our confidence. London: H. Hetherington; A. Heywood, Manchester; and all Booksellers. EXISTENCE OF CHRIST AS A HUMAN BEING, DISPROVED! BY IRRESISTIBLE EVIDENCE, IN A SERIES OF LETTERS, FROM A GERMAN JEW, ADDRESSED TO CHRISTIANS OF ALL DENOMINATIONS. LETTER 26. WEEKLY. ONE PENNY. "I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel. Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am the Lord, and besides me there is no Saviour."-ISAIAH XLIII. 3, 10, 11. CHRISTIANS, The famous forgery in Josephus, once thought genuine, but now given up by the learned (as a passage interpolated by some friend to Christianity) runs thus, "Now, there was about this time Jesus a wise man-if it be lawful to call him a man-for he was the doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those who loved him at the first did not forsake him-for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophet had foretold these, and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day." Strange to say, the above forged paragraph, together with the observation of Tacitus, that "the name Christian was derived from one Christ, put to death under Pontius Pilate, &c., and the extract from Suetonius, who, when writing about the disturbances among the Jews, under Claudius, says, "they (the Jews) were moved by a certain Christ—a turbulent seditious man, whose abettors were banished from Rome," constitute all the external evidence in support of the reality of the man Jesus, so confidently believed in by Christians, Deists, and very many Philosophers! By external evidence is meant that evidence furnished by writers who were either opposed, or indifferent to Christianity; as we call internal evidence all facts, or assumed facts, collected either by Christians themselves, or those who from political motives, regarded Christianity with a favorable eye. The first kind of evidence is of by far the most weight, as it is freed from all suspicion of partiality, which ever attaches more or less to the writing of partizans or sectaries, when engaged in defending their favorite creed, system, or party-nay, if there be any partiality at all in external evidence, it is a partiality decidedly hostile to the system or creed to which it refers; hence, an admission made in favor of any set of opinions by a writer known to be opposed to them, is justly considered of far more authority and consequence than the most extravagant laudations of friendly or interested minds; for these latter do not always set down what is, but that they wish to be--and too often, as in the case of the early Christians, not finding the evidence they seek, scruple not to invent it; and those writers have a very slender knowledge of human nature who expect all truth without any alloy of falsehood from the defenders of religious and political systems, whose hopes and feelings are strongly enlisted; for, as justly remarked by Heraclitus, "The light of the human understanding is not a pure dry light, but drenched in the will and the affections." It is certain many Pagan writers noticed the sect of Christians, but in a manner far from satisfying, flattering, or honorable-dealing with them as immoral disturbers of political order-mischievous fanatics, whose doctrines, strangely compounded of mysticism, atheism, and superstition, were so pernicious and absurd, that their best refutation was loathing and contempt. Of this any one may assure himself by reading Juvenalis (A. D. 100)-Plinius and Trajanus (A. D. 106)-Antonius (A. D. 170)-Lucianus (A. D. 176)Celsus (A. D. 176)—Epictetus (A. D. 109)—Aristides (A. D. 176) Tacitus (A. D. 105)—and Suetonius (A. D. 115). However mortifying the reflection may be, it is unquestionably true, that these writers have treated the Christ and his followers with a most provoking indifference, rarely deigning even to hold them up to derision and scorn, as in no case have they done more than give a brief and passing notice of the Christians, invariably considering them as deluded fanatics, misguided followers of some obscure impostor. The writings of Hierocles, Celsus, and Pophyry, may be considered as exceptions to the above remark; but as these were carefully destroyed by the Christians, we are left without a clue as to the merits of any, except the writings of Celsus, some of whose arguments and reasonings have reached our times; but then they cannot be relied on, as they are just what his opponent Origines (in whose writings they are preserved) has thought proper to make them-a writer of whom it has been justly observed by Bishop Horsley, "was not incapable of asserting in argument that which he believed not." Many writers of well earned and great reputation, who flourished about the time Jesus is said to have played the Christ, do not even so much as mention him. Not a syllable about him, or his followers can be found in Pomponius Mela (A. D. 40)-Plinius, the naturalist (A. D. 70)-Aulus Persius (A. D. 60)-Annæus Lucanus (A. D. 63)-Seneca, the philosopher (A. D. 60)-Papinius Statius (A. D. 90)-Petronius Arbiter (A. D. 60)-Quinctilianis (A. D. 100) Lucius Florus (A. D. 110)-Elianis (A. D. 120)-Dio Pruseus (A. D. 98)-Arrianus (A. D. 140)-Appianus (A. D. 133)Ptolomæus (A. D. 130)-Pomponius Mena (A. D. 40)-Pansanius (A. D. 170)—and a host of others. Strange that so wonderful a person as Jesus is represented to have been,-such an astonishing reformer and dabbler in magic-whose boldness had made authority tremble and whose skill in the art of legerdemain filled the earth with the fame of his seditions and miracles, should have been passed by in utter contempt, or forgotten by so many philosophers and sages. As to Luciana (who unceremoniously calls the Christ a crucified sophist), and Ulpianus, Eunapius, Porphyry, Tacitus, and Suetonius, all good Christians must feel how very equivocal was the mention they made of them-how utterly valueless when considered as evidence, that the man Jesus was the Christ, or actually existed. The mere reference of Tacitus and Suetonius to a noisy and seditious sect of Christians, followers of one Christ, or a certain Christ, cannot be admitted as of a feather's weight in the balance of arguments for or against the existence of Jesus; their testimony, at best, only proving that there were, during the times of Nero and Claudius, certain persons calling themselves disciples of the Christ (the anointed), the Messiah long expected by the Jewish people, whose coming upon earth in power and glory, they believed, was clearly prefigured in the Sacred Books; but, surely no man in his senses will contend, that it is thereby proved that Jesus was the Christ, or that he really existed! It will be seen in future numbers, that there were, at the time Jesus is said to have lived, many Christs-twenty at least all having their fanatic followers who believed in their divine character; and whose sincerity will hardly |