les should be pretended to by the
followers of the apostles and first emissaries of the religion, when
none were pretended to, either in their own persons or that of their
Master, by these apostles and emissaries themselves.

CHAPTER VII.

There is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original
witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours,
dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the
accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief
of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives,
to new rules of conduct.

It being then once proved, that the first propagators of the Christian
institution did exert activity, and subject themselves to great dangers
and sufferings, in consequence and for the sake of an extraordinary and,
I think, we may say, of a miraculous story of some kind or other; the
next great question is, whether the account, which our Scriptures
contain, be that story; that which these men delivered, and for which
they acted and suffered as they did? This question is, in effect, no
other than whether the story which Christians have now be the story
which Christians had then? And of this the following proofs may be
deduced from general considerations, and from considerations prior to
any inquiry into the particular reasons and testimonies by which the
authority of our histories is supported.

In the first place, there exists no trace or vestige of any other story.
It is not, like the death of Cyrus the Great, a competition between
opposite accounts, or between the credit of different historians. There
is not a document, or scrap of account, either contemporary with the
commencement of Christianity, or extant within many ages afar that
commencement, which assigns a history substantially different from ours.
The remote, brief, and incidental notices of the affair which are found
in heathen writers, so far as they do go, go along with us. They bear
testimony to these facts--that the institution originated from Jesus;
that the Founder was put to death, as a malefactor, at Jerusalem, by the
authority of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate; that the religion
nevertheless spread in that city, and throughout Judea; and that it was
propagated thence to distant countries; that the converts were numerous;
that they suffered great hardships and injuries for their profession;
and that all this took place in the age