Deity: they must needs discuss his quality, his nature, his seat; whether He is corporeal or incorporeal; whether He consists of atoms or of numbers; whether He is active or inactive. With respect to the world, whether it is created or uncreated. With respect to the soul, whether it is eternal or dissoluble. Nay, such are some of their fabulous corruptions of the truth, that they have exposed it to ridicule; and a judgment to come is scoffed at, because they have established a tribunal in the shades below; and a hell, because they have their Pyriphlegethon; and a paradise, because they have their Elysian Fields. But whence is it that these caricatures are derived, save from those mysteries of our own, which are long anterior to them; the one the substance, the other the distorted reflection? (§ xlviii.) Yet, mark the unfairness of mankind. If a philosopher, a Pythagoras, for example, holds the opinion that a man may be made out of a beast, and that animals are to be avoided as food, lest in devouring them we should be eating our ancestors, he makes proselytes; whereas if a Christian maintains that a future body is fashioned out of an antecedent one, Caius out of Caius, the identity preserved, he is pelted with sticks and stones: yet, what is incredible in the proposition, that whereas the man who did not exist once, does exist now, the same after he has ceased to exist shall exist again?-the second process presenting fewer difficulties than the first, and nature full of analogies to confirm it.

(§ xlix.) But even if the doctrines of the Christians were false, they are at any rate useful. Those who hold them, having a fear of punishment and hope of reward ever before their eyes, are improved by them; and that which is beneficial should rather be presumed to be true. At the very least they are harmless; and should be punished, if at all, by derision, not the sword, fire, the cross,

and the wild beast-and these are the weapons wielded against the Christians not merely by the populace, but by their superiors, who are desirous to pay them court; though, after all, they cannot be touched except of their own free choice, for a matter of choice it is, whether they will be Christians. (§ 1.) Why, then, complain, it will be replied, if they have their own wish? They have it as the soldier has it when he fights a battle: he does not take delight in the danger, but incurs it in the hope of victory and spoil. The battle of the Christian is to be condemned to death in the heathen courts for the truth's sake, and his victory and spoil is the glory of pleasing God and the gain of everlasting life. Meanwhile the world cannot extinguish the Christians. The seed of the Christians is their blood. Their very obstinacy, which is objected to them, pleads their cause and propagates their principles. Lookers-on are set to inquire what prompts it; those who inquire pass over to them; those who pass over are eager to suffer with them, that so they may obtain the favour of God and forgiveness of Him through the blood of his Son.

Such is a specimen of these Apologies, the earliest of which, as I have said, made their appearance under Hadrian, the effects of whose reign upon the cause of Christianity I am now considering. It is obvious they were not intended as bodies of evidence for the truth of Christianity, formally composed with a view to the conversion of the heathen, in which light Mr. Gibbon contemplates them. They were writings of which the object was altogether different, meant to obtain for the Christians licence to live, and eat their bread unmolested. So far as they bear upon the evidences, and this they undoubtedly do, it is incidentally and by the by. The time was not come for the essays of "able advocates." It was just the comChapter xv. at the end.

1

2

plaint of Theophilus, a writer about the middle of the
second century, that Autolychus, the friend to whom he
addresses his work, though devoted to the study of all
profane literature, would give himself no trouble to in-
vestigate the affairs or the writings of the Christians.' It
was equally the complaint of Justin, another writer of
nearly the same date, that Crescens, he, too, a philosopher,
took upon himself to rail at the Christians without show-
ing any concern to learn the character and tenets of the
parties he was attacking. The dissertation of Origen
against "the Word of Truth" by Celsus, may be reck-
oned the first elaborate work on the Evidences of Chris-
tianity that was published; the details of that religion
having at length forced themselves on the attention of
the schools (for Celsus, too, was a philosopher), and the
necessity of conducting the attack, if an attack there
must needs be, with more knowledge of the subject
having become apparent. The quotations from Celsus
made by Origen, are enough to show that he had thought
it expedient to possess himself of some acquaintance at
least with the facts of the Revelation he was libelling,
and not waste his weapons by shooting them altogether
at random. It is probable, however, that even Origen, in
the choice of his arguments, would not satisfy Mr. Gib-
bon, or always give the preference to such as would seem
to him the most judicious. But it may be suspected that
he and the other early Christian writers were better
judges of the reasoning likely to prove effectual amongst
those to whom it was addressed, than Mr. Gibbon. What
is called the "spirit of the age," is with difficulty appre-
ciated or even apprehended by any but contemporaries;
and for the historian, who writes seventeen or eighteen
hundred years after the events of which he is telling,
and under circumstances totally changed, to pronounce
1 Theophilus, iii. § 4
2 Justin, 2 Apol. § 3.

with confidence on the line which the advocates of any given cause ought to have adopted, is mere presumption. How very greatly the character of the times when the Apologies were produced differed from our own, may be guessed, by observing the controversies of those days, especially those carried on with the Heretics; the champions of the Church then spending all their strength in refuting opinions which would now be regarded simply as the ravings of delirium, utterly unworthy of a thought.

CHAPTER XIII.

Continued Persecutions of the Christians.—Hadrian.—Antoninus Pius.-M. Aurelius.-Deaths of Polycarp and Justin Martyr.— Commodus.-More favourable Condition of the Christians.Severus, a Persecutor. Libelli.-Deaths of Leonidas and others. -Variable conduct of Severus.

BUT to return to the reign of Hadrian, and the troubles to Christianity which attended it. However unfair it may be to number him amongst the persecutors of the Christians, he was indirectly the means of others being so, in one quarter at least of his dominions.

The Jews-who had never been reconciled to the authority of the Romans; who were ever burning to cast off a yoke which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear-were driven to extremities by this Emperor, whose contumely was even more trying than the absolute wrongs inflicted by his predecessors. Though Titus had scarcely left one stone upon another in Jerusalem, still a town seems to have risen out of the ruins, and to have been occupied by a remnant of the native race, unable to tear themselves away from a spot hallowed by so many glorious associations. But Hadrian now threatened to extinguish utterly the religious capital of the nation; to convert Jerusalem, the Holy City, into a Roman colony, and build a Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus on the very site of the Temple of Jehovah. The Jews flew to arms the more readily, as at this moment there presented himself a leader in the person of Barchocab, the son of a