facts admitted as will
serve our present purpose. There did exist, then, undeniably, in the
year 325, large numbers of Christian churches in the Roman Empire,
sufficiently numerous to make it politic, in the opinion of Infidels,
for a candidate for the empire to profess Christianity; sufficiently
powerful to secure his success, notwithstanding the desperate struggles
of the heathen party; and sufficiently religious, or if you like
superstitious, to make it politic for an emperor and his politicians to
give up the senate, the court, the camp, the chase, and the theater,
and weary themselves with long prayers, and longer speeches, of
preachers about Bible religion. Now that is certainly a remarkable fact,
and all the more remarkable if we inquire, How came it so? For these
men, preachers, prince, and people, were brought up to worship Jupiter
and the thirty thousand gods of Olympus, after the heathen fashion, and
to leave the care of religion to heathen priests, who never troubled
their heads about books or doctrines after they had offered their
sacrifices. In all the records of the world there is no instance of a
general council of heathen priests to settle the religion of their
people. How happens it then that the human race has of a sudden waked up
to such a strange sense of the folly of idolatry and the value of
religion? The Council of Nice, and the Emperor Constantine, and his
counselors, making a Bible is a proof of a wonderful revolution in the
world's religion; a phenomenon far more surprising than if the
Secretaries of State, and the Senate, and President Grant should leave
the Capital to post off to London, to attend the meetings of a Methodist
Conference, assembled to make a hymn book. Now what is the cause of this
remarkable conversion of prince, priests, and people? How did they all
get religion? How did they get it so suddenly? How did they get so much
of it?

The Infidel gives no answer, except to tell us[67] that the austerity,
purity, and zeal of the first Christians, their good discipline, their
belief in the resurrection of the body and the general judgment, and
their persuasion that Christ and his apostles wrought miracles, had made
a great many converts. This is just as if I inquired how a great fire
originated, and you should tell me that it burned fast because it was
very hot. What I want to know is, how it happened that these licentious
Greeks, and Romans, and Asiatics, became austere and pure; h