well as
interest many in its preservation by the advantage which they drew from
it. "It was moreover interwoven," as Mr. Gibbon rightly represents it,
"with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public or private
life, with all the offices and amusements of society." On the due
celebration also of its rites, the people were taught to believe, and
did believe, that the prosperity of their country in a great measure
depended.

I am willing to accept the account of the matter which is given by Mr.
Gibbon: "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world
were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as
equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful:" and I would ask
from which of these three classes of men were the Christian missionaries
to look for protection or impunity? Could they expect it from the
people, "whose acknowledged confidence in the public religion" they
subverted from its foundation? From the philosopher, who, "considering
all religious as equally false," would of course rank theirs among the
number, with the addition of regarding them as busy and troublesome
zealots? Or from the magistrate, who, satisfied with the "utility" of
the subsisting religion, would not be likely to countenance a spirit of
proselytism and innovation:--a system which declared war against every
other, and which, if it prevailed, must end in a total rupture of public
opinion; an upstart religion, in a word, which was not content with its
own authority, but must disgrace all the settled religions of the world?
It was not to be imagined that he would endure with patience, that the
religion of the emperor and of the state should be calumniated and borne
down by a company of superstitious and despicable Jews.

Lastly; the nature of the case affords a strong proof, that the original
teachers of Christianity, in consequence of their new profession,
entered upon a new and singular course of life. We may be allowed to
presume, that the institution which they preached to others, they
conformed to in their own persons; because this is no more than what
every teacher of a new religion both does, and must do, in order to
obtain either proselytes or hearers. The change which this would produce
was very considerable. It is a change which we do not easily estimate,
because, ourselves and all about us being habituated to the institutions
from our infancy, it is what we neither experience nor o