e this
precious epistle still more valuable, one of its transcribers adds to
it:--"I again, Pionius, wrote them (these things) from the previously
written copy, having carefully searched into them, and the blessed
Polycarp having manifested them to me through a revelation[!] even as I
shall show in what follows. I have collected these things, when they had
almost faded away through the lapse of time" (Ibid, p. 96). If this is
history, then any absurd dream may be taken as the basis of belief. We
may add that this epistle does not mention the martyrdoms of the
eye-witnesses, and it is hard to know why Paley drags it in, unless he
wants to make us believe that his eye-witnesses suffered all the
tortures he quotes; but even Paley cannot pretend that there is a
scintilla of proof of their undergoing any such trials. Thus falls the
whole argument based on the "twelve men, whose probity and good sense I
had long known," dying for the persistent assertion of "a miracle
wrought before their eyes," who are used as a parallel of the apostles,
as an argument against Hume. For we have not yet proved that there were
any eye-witnesses, or that they made any assertions, and we have
entirely failed to prove that the eye-witnesses were martyred at all, or
that the death of any one of them, save that of Peter, is even mentioned
in the alleged documents, so that the "satisfactory evidences" of the
"original witnesses of the Christian miracles" suffering and dying in
attestation of those miracles amount to this, that in a disputed
document Peter is said to have been martyred, and in another, still more
doubtful, "the rest of the apostles" are said to have "suffered." Thus
the first proposition of Paley falls entirely to the ground. The honest
truth is that the history of the twelve apostles is utterly unknown, and
that around their names gathers a mass of incredible and nonsensical
myth and legend, similar in kind to other mythological fables, and
entirely unworthy of credence by reasonable people.

Nor is proof less lacking of submission "from the same motives, to new
rules of conduct." Nowhere is there a sign that Christian morality was
enforced by appeal to the miracles of Christ; miracles were, in those
days, too common an incident to attract much attention, and, indeed, if
they could not win belief in the mission from those Jews before whom
they were said to have been performed, what chance would they have had
when the story of their