ore than is common
in such conditions. His companions that were with him appear not to have
suffered in the same manner, for they were well enough to lead him the
remainder of the journey; neither did they pretend to have seen any
vision.

The character of the person called Paul, according to the accounts
given of him, has in it a great deal of violence and fanaticism; he had
persecuted with as much heat as he preached afterwards; the stroke
he had received had changed his thinking, without altering his
constitution; and either as a Jew or a Christian he was the same zealot.
Such men are never good moral evidences of any doctrine they preach.
They are always in extremes, as well of action as of belief.

The doctrine he sets out to prove by argument, is the resurrection of
the same body: and he advances this as an evidence of immortality.
But so much will men differ in their manner of thinking, and in the
conclusions they draw from the same premises, that this doctrine of
the resurrection of the same body, so far from being an evidence of
immortality, appears to me to be an evidence against it; for if I have
already died in this body, and am raised again in the same body in which
I have died, it is presumptive evidence that I shall die again. That
resurrection no more secures me against the repetition of dying, than an
ague-fit, when past, secures me against another. To believe therefore in
immortality, I must have a more elevated idea than is contained in the
gloomy doctrine of the resurrection.

Besides, as a matter of choice, as well as of hope, I had rather have a
better body and a more convenient form than the present. Every animal
in the creation excels us in something. The winged insects, without
mentioning doves or eagles, can pass over more space with greater ease
in a few minutes than man can in an hour. The glide of the smallest
fish, in proportion to its bulk, exceeds us in motion almost beyond
comparison, and without weariness. Even the sluggish snail can ascend
from the bottom of a dungeon, where man, by the want of that ability,
would perish; and a spider can launch itself from the top, as a playful
amusement. The personal powers of man are so limited, and his heavy
frame so little constructed to extensive enjoyment, that there is
nothing to induce us to wish the opinion of Paul to be true. It is too
little for the magnitude of the scene, too mean for the sublimity of the
subject.

But all other argum