rguments to prove that the books actually proceeded
from the authors whose names they bear (and have always borne, for there
is not a particle of evidence to show that they ever went under any
other); but the strict genuineness of the books is perhaps more than is
necessary to the support of our proposition. For even supposing that, by
reason of the silence of antiquity, or the loss of records, we knew not
who were the writers of the four Gospels, yet the fact that they were
received as authentic accounts of the transaction upon which the
religion rested, and were received as such by Christians at or near the
age of the apostles, by those whom the apostles had taught, and by
societies which the apostles had founded; this fact, I say, connected
with the consideration that they are corroborative of each other's
testimony, and that they are further corroborated by another
contemporary history taking up the story where they had left it, and, in
a narrative built upon that story, accounting for the rise and
production of changes in the world, the effects of which subsist at this
day; connected, moreover, with the confirmation which they receive from
letters written by the apostles themselves, which both assume the same
general story, and, as often as occasions lead them to do so, allude to
particular parts of it; and connected also with the reflection, that if
the apostles delivered any different story it is lost; (the present and
no other being referred to by a series of Christian writers, down from
their age to our own; being like-wise recognised in a variety of
institutions, which prevailed early and universally, amongst the
disciples of the religion;) and that so great a change as the oblivion
of one story and the substitution of another, under such circumstances,
could not have taken place: this evidence would be deemed, I apprehend,
sufficient to prove concerning these books, that, whoever were the
authors of them, they exhibit the story which the apostles told, and for
which, consequently, they acted and they suffered.

If it be so, the religion must be true. These men could not be
deceivers. By only not bearing testimony, they might have avoided all
these sufferings, and have lived quietly. Would men in such
circumstances pretend to have seen what they never saw; assert facts
which they had no knowledge of; go about lying to teach virtue; and,
though not only convinced of Christ's being an impostor, but having seen
t