tailed circumstantial accounts of miracles, with specifications of
time, place, and persons; and these accounts many and various. In the
Gospels, therefore, which bear the names of Matthew and John, these
narratives, if they really proceeded from these men, must either be true
as far as the fidelity of human recollection is usually to be depended
upon, that is, must be true in substance and in their principal parts,
(which is sufficient for the purpose of proving a supernatural agency,)
or they must be wilful and mediated falsehoods. Yet the writers who
fabricated and uttered these falsehoods, if they be such, are of the
number of those who, unless the whole contexture of the Christian story
be a dream, sacrificed their ease and safety in the cause, and for a
purpose the most inconsistent that is possible with dishonest
intentions. They were villains for no end but to teach honesty, and
martyrs without the least prospect of honour or advantage.

The Gospels which bear the names of Mark and Luke, although not the
narratives of eye-witnesses, are, if genuine, removed from that only by
one degree. They are the narratives of contemporary writers, or writers
themselves mixing with the business; one of the two probably living in
the place which was the principal scene of action; both living in habits
of society and correspondence with those who had been present at the
transactions which they relate. The latter of them accordingly tells us
(and with apparent sincerity, because he tells it without pretending to
personal knowledge, and without claiming for his work greater authority
than belonged to it) that the things which were believed amount
Christians came from those who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and
ministers of the word; that he had traced accounts up to their source;
and that he was prepared to instruct his reader in the certainty of the
things which he related.* Very few histories lie so close to their
facts; very few historians are so nearly connected with the subject of
their narrative, or possess such means of authentic information, as
these.

_________

* Why should not the candid and modest preface of this historian be
believed, as well as that which Dion Cassius prefixes to his Life of
Commodus? "These things and the following I write, not from the report
of others, but from my own knowledge and observation." I see no reason
to doubt but that both passages describe truly enough the situation of
the