of Christianity--that Christ died for our sins, and rose again from the
dead--stands absolutely alone in the history of religions. The priests
of Baal, Brahma, or Jupiter, never dreamed of such a thing. The prophets
of Mohammedanism, Mormonism, or Pantheism, have never attempted to
imitate it. The great object of all counterfeit Christianity is to deny
it.

There is no instance in the whole world's history of any other religion
ever producing the same effects. We demand an instance of men destitute
of wealth, arms, power, and learning, converting multitudes of lying,
lustful, murdering idolaters, into honest, peaceable, virtuous men
simply by prayer and preaching. When the Infidel tells us of the rapid
spread of Mohammedanism and Mormonism--impostures which enlist disciples
by promising free license to lust, robbery, and murder, and retain them
by the terror of the scimeter and the rifle ball; which reduce mankind
to the most abject servitude, and womanhood to the most debasing
concubinage; which have turned the fairest regions of the earth to a
wilderness, and under whose blighting influence commerce, arts, science,
industry, comfort, and the human race itself, have withered away--he
simply insults our common sense, by ignoring the difference between
backgoing vice and ongoing virtue; or acknowledges that he knows as
little about Mohammedanism, as he does about Christianity. The gospel
stands alone in its doctrines, singular in its operation, unequaled in
its success.

2. The next important point for consideration is, that the Christianity
preached by Christ and his apostles is a whole--a single system, which
we must either take or leave--believe entirely, or entirely reject it as
an imposture. There is no middle ground for you to occupy. It is all
true, or all false. For instance, you can not take one of Paul's
Epistles and say, "this is true," and take another of the same man's
letters, containing the very same religion, and say, "this is false." If
you accept the very briefest of Paul's Letters, that to Philemon,
containing only thirteen sentences on private business, you accept
eleven distinct assertions of the authority, grace, love, and divinity
of our Lord. Nor can you say you will accept Peter's Letters and reject
Paul's; for you will find the very same facts asserted by the one as by
the other; and moreover, Peter indorses "all the epistles of our beloved
brother Paul" as on the same pedestal of authority wi