d, has been secured by that Revolution. We could scarcely
know whether most to pity or contemn the man who should labor to
persuade us that such a Revolution had never occurred, or that the
facts had been essentially misrepresented.

Now it is precisely on this kind of evidence that we believe the great
facts of the Christian Revolution. We have contemporary histories,
formal and informal; letters, public and private, from the principal
agents in it, and opposers of it, dispersed from Babylon to Rome, and
addressed to Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Asiatics, written by physicians,
fishermen, proconsuls, emperors, and apostles. We have miles of
monuments, paintings, statuary, cabinets of coins, and all the heraldry
of Christendom. And these great facts stand out more prominently on the
theater of the world's business as effecting changes on our laws and
lives, and their introduction as authenticated by public commemorations,
more solemn and more numerous than those resulting from the English or
the American Revolution. Our main difficulty lies in selecting, from the
vast mass of materials, a portion sufficiently distinct and manageable
to be handled in a single essay.

We shall be guided by the motto already announced as the rule of
inductive research. One thing at a time; and the nearest first. The
Epistles, being nearer our own times than the Gospels, claim our first
notice, and first among these, those which stand latest on the page of
sacred history, the letters of John; two from Peter to the Christians of
Asia; and those which Paul, in chains for the gospel, dictated from
imperial Rome.

From the abundant notices of the early Christians by historians and
philosophers, satirists and comedians, martyrs and magistrates, Jewish,
Christian, and heathen, I shall select only two for comparison with the
Epistles and of the apostles; and both those heathen--the celebrated
letter of Pliny to Trajan, and the well-established history of Tacitus;
both utterly undeniable, and admitted by the most skeptical to be above
suspicion. Not that I suppose that the testimony of men who do not take
the trouble of making any inquiry into the reality of the facts of the
Christian religion is more accurate than that of those whose lives were
devoted to its study; or that we have any just reason to attach as much
weight to the assertions of persons, who, by their own showing, tortured
and murdered men and women convicted of no crime but that of b