terminating his own life in an agony of sorrow for his fault; are alleviating considerations, which must render him, with all but bad-hearted people, rather an object of pity than of hatred; and when Peter, who cursed and swore, and lied and perjured, till the very cock crowded shame on him, was forgiven upon a wink, Judas must certainly be considered as having been very unfairly used. But no ingenuity of critical chicane can reconcile the character of the Judas of the gospels with the personage who bears the same name in the Acts of the Apostles; they are wholly different characters. The Judas of the Gospels Repented; Returned the money to the chief priests and elders; Cast it down in the temple, and departed; Died by his own act and will. The Judas of the Acts Kept the money for his own use; Bought a field with it; Died by accident. Next to the immediate apostles, in apostolic dignity, and first of all real personages whose existence there is no reason to doubt, however much there may be to question whether their adventures and performances were such as have been ascribed to them, are the two unapostolical evangelists, Mark and Luke, and that least of the apostles, who was not meet to be called an apostle,* Paul of Tarsus, the apostolic chief of sinners.† MARK The evangelist, according to Eusebius, was bishop of Alexandria." He preached the Gospel," says Dorotheus, "unto the people of Alexandria, and all the bordering regions from Egypt unto Pentapolis. In the time of Trajan, he had a cable-rope tied about his neck at Alexandria, by which he was drawn from the place called Bucolus unto the place called Angels, where he was burned to ashes by ⚫ the furious idolaters, in the month of April, and buried at Bucolus. LUKE The evangelist, of the city of Antioch, by profession a physician (i. e. a Therapeut), wrote the Gospel as he * 1 Cor. xv. 9. † 1 Tim. i. 15. heard Peter the apostle preach, and the Acts of the Apostles as Paul delivered unto him. He accompanied the apostles in their peregrinations, but especially Paul. He died at Ephesus, where he was also buried;* and after many years, together with Andrew and Timothy, he was translated to Constantinople, in the time of Constantius, the son of Constantinus Magnus. PAUL, Being called of the Lord Jesus Christ himself after his assumption, and numbered in the catalogue of the apostles, began to preach the Gospel from Jerusalem, and travelled through Illyricum, Italy, and Spain. His epistles are extant at this day full of all heavenly wisdom.† He was beheaded at Rome under Nero, the third kalends of July, so died a martyr, and lieth there, buried with Peter the apostle." Thus far Dorotheus. Though there can be no doubt of the existence of St. Paul, of his being entirely such a character as he is in the New Testament represented to have been, and that the epistles which go under his name are competently authentic, and such as without a most unphilosophical and futile litigiousness, no man would think of denying to have been written by him, excepting only a few immaterial interpolations; yet for the fact of his having been beheaded by order of Nero, or having suffered martyrdom in any way, we have no better authority than such as those who would have us believe it, would be ashamed to produce; that is, neither other nor better authority than that of Linus, the imaginary successor of the imaginary St. Peter in the bishopric of Rome, who would persuade us, that "after Paul's head was struck off by the sword of the executioner, it did with a loud and distinct voice utter forth, in Hebrew, the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, while, instead of blood, it was nought but a stream of pure milk that flowed from his veins;" or that of Abdias, bishop of Babylon, who assures us, that when his head · * The particular care which this historian shows for having all his saints and martyrs authentically buried is, to attest the identity of their relics, which retained their miraculous virtue for ages, and thus achieved as many miracles after their decease as they had ever done while living. From the time when these worthies were buried till the accession of Constantius must have been upwards of 300 years, so that in the natural order of things, every particle of their bodies must have evaporated or mouldered away; but Manet post funera virtus! + This heavenly wisdom is a very particular sort of wisdom. was cut off, instead of blood, ran milk, so that the milky wave flowed all over the sword, and washed over the executioner's arm.* In a church at Rome, at this day called At the three fountains, the place where St. Paul was beheaded, they show the identical spot where the milk spouted forth from his apostolical arteries, and where, moreover, his head, after it had done preaching, took three jumps (to the honour of the holy Trinity), and at each spot on which it jumped there instantly struck up a spring of living water, which retains at this day a plain and distinct taste of milk. Of all which facts, Baronius, Mabillon, and all the gravest authors of the Roman Catholic communion, give us the most credible and unquestionable assurance.t It would be an injustice, however, to father such miraculous accounts exclusively on the writers of the Roman Catholic communion. We should not have even a single credible witness left to ascertain to us, that Christianity, in any shape or guise, continued in existence, or what it was, after it passed from the first to other hands, should we consider the most egregious, atrocious, impudent lying as a disparagement to the credibility of Christian historians. It is no fanatic or enthusiast who is himself deceived, but it is the calm, serious, calculating, most sincere, most accomplished, most veracious St. Augustin, who, in his 33rd Sermon addressed to his reverend brethren, fearlessly stakes his eternal salvation to the fact, which was as true as the Gospel, and for which there can be no doubt that he would as cheerfully as for the Gospel have suffered himself to be burned at the stake; that he himself being at that time bishop of Hippo Regius, had preached the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to a whole nation of men and women that had no heads, but had their eyes in their bosoms; and in countries still more southerly, he preached to a nation among whom each individual had but one eye, and that situate in the middle of the forehead. While the no less credible Eusebius assures us, that on some occasions the bodies of the martyrs who had been devoured by wild *Flexis genibus, crucisque se signo muniens, cervicem præbuit percussori; E cujus gladio, desecto capite, pro sanguine lac cucurrit ita ut percussoris dextram lactea unda perfunderet.-Apostol. Hist. lib. 2, p. 455. † See the statement to the sense, not the letter, in Dr. Middleton's Letter from Rome, p. 127. Syntagma, p. 33. beasts, upon the beasts being strangled, were found alive in their stomachs, even after having been completely digested.* Such statements, and ecclesiastical history is little better than a continued series of such, must surely convince every impartial inquirer, that the professors and preachers of Christianity, however a few honourable exceptions may have from time to time arisen, (as never was the society so bad, but that there must have been some among them not quite so bad as the worst), yet generally they were men who had no respect for truth, and no governing principle but a wicked esprit du corps, which determined them à toute outrance to impose on the credulity and ignorance of the vulgar. That there is no difference between the Popish legends and the canonical Acts of the Apostles. The great difficulty is to draw the line between ecclesiastical history, and that which is truly apostolical; since it is hardly possible to fix on a legend so egregiously absurd, or a pretended miracle so monstrously ridiculous, in all that is absurd and ridiculous in Popish superstition, but that its original type and first draft shall be to be found even in our own canonical and inspired Scriptures. After having laughed at St. Dunstan's taking the Devil by the nose with a pair of red-hot tongs, in the golden legend, we are made to laugh on the other side of the mouth, or rather to tremble and adore, at the account, which nobody may doubt, of the fate of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew, in conflict with whom it was the Devil who proved victorious, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. Nor was the wonder-working name of "Jesus, whom Paul preached," sufficient to lay him; for, said the Devil, "Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?"-Acts xix. 15. In like manner we Protestants, who despise all the stories of miracles wrought by old rags, rotten bones, rusty nails, pocket-handkerchiefs, and aprons; that stand on no better authority than those monkish tales which our church has rejected, do bow with implicit faith to the miracles wrought by relics, which stand on the authority of those monkish tales which our church has not rejected; and it is to be believed, or at least not laughed at, under peril of * Lardner, vol. 4, p. 91. being sent to jail, that "God wrought special miracles by the hand of Paul, so that from his body were brought unto the sick, handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out from them."-Acts xix. 12. Here again is an egregious atopism.-How could St. Paul have aprons? or what use could Jews have of pocket handkerchiefs? Are we to forget that their sleeves and beards answered all the purpose, and saved washing? We are at full liberty to have our mirth out at the story of St. Bartholomew possessing the faculty of becoming invisible, and appearing and disappearing, as the cause of the gospel required, because that story rests only on the authority of the apostolic history of Abdias, a few pages further on than our canonical Acts of the Apostles has continued to make extracts from it; but had it been introduced, as many arguments would have been adduced by our clergy to justify it, and as great peril of incarceration incurred for snuffing at it, as at precisely the parallel story of St. Philip, who, in the canonical part of the book, is described as riding in the air, as picked up by the Spirit of the Lord in one place, and popped down in another (Acts 8. 40). That no such persons as the Twelve Apostles ever existed. Thus the glorious company of the apostles, having glistened upon the world's darkness like the sparks on a burnt rag, go out in like manner, leaving no more vestige of their existence, or of any effect of the miraculous powers with which they are believed to have been invested, than "the bird's wing on the air, or the pathway of the keel through the wave. No credible history whatever recognizes the existence of any one of them, or of any one result of all their stupendous labours and sufferings. The very criterion miracle itself, the most critical and important of all, that which if not true, leaves not so much as a possibility that any other should be so-the miracle of the gift of tongues, not only has no one particle of concurrent evidence in all the world to make it credible, or even to make it conceivable, but absolutely breaks down and gives way, and is attended by positive demonstration of its falsehood, even in the immediate context of the legend which relates it. In sequence, on the passage which instructs us that the assembled apostles were by the immediate power of God "enabled to speak all the languages of the earth in a moment of time," and thus |