23. "Else what shall they do, dead, if the dead rise not at all? for the dead?"-1 Cor. xv. 29.

which are baptized for the Why are they then baptized

Here is a reference to some, then well known and established religious ceremony, existing in a Christian church; of which ceremony and its significancy, and purport, no trace or vestige has come down to us: nor can our commentators come to any sort of agreement, as to what sense should be attached to the words. It is utterly impossible, that such a baptism could have come into use, or have acquired such a notoriety, as to make it stand for so general an argument, as that of the resurrection of the dead, within the term of life of any one who had conversed with St. Peter, on whom it hath been pretended, that the Christian church is founded. Let the reader, if he can, conceive any other way of accounting for the text, than its reference to some ancient ceremony of the Egyptian Therapeuts, which, after the schismatics and seceders from their communion, had acquired the name of Christians, grew gradually into disuse, and so finally sunk in oblivion.*

24. Acts xx. 18. St. Paul addresses the elders of the Ephesian church,-" I have been with you at all seasons. Ye all among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom of God;" a style of the most affectionate intimacy. Yet the writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians, addresses them as a stranger, who had only heard of their faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints." (Eph. i. 15.)— QUERY.-Could the Paul, who declared in the one case, and the Paul who wrote in the other, be the same individual? Query.-Who were all the saints, who were loved by the Ephesians, at least twelve years before any one of our gospels was written? and consequently as many years before there could be any saints whatever, whose faith had been founded on those gospels?

25. "Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time." -1 John ii. 12.

Here is a full confession of the comparatively modern character of this epistle:-1. The time which could be spoken of as "the last," with relation to Christianity, could not but at least have been late, and late enough to have given the persons so addressed, time to have heard *They joined themselves to Baal-Peor, and ate the offerings of the dead. -Psalm. The reader is to make what use he pleases of this conjecture.

of the prophecy that Antichrist should come: and, 2. To have had faith in it, and expectation of its accomplishment, beforehand: 3. And if the time when this epistle was written (about A. D. 80) was the last of Christianity, there can have been no Christianity in the world since then: 4. And if then, while St. John was living, Antichrist was come, and it was the last time, the Christ whom St. John intended to preach, must have been much earlier in the world than that time. All which agrees in style and manner with the character of an angry Egyptian monk, complaining of the corruptions and perversions which his contemporaries had put upon the pure and original Therapeutan doctrines; but presents not a single feature in keeping with the character of one, supposed to be himself one of the earliest preachers of an entirely new religion, who existed not in the last time, but in the first; not after Christianity had run to seed, but before it had fully sprung up. "And if Christianity," says Archbishop Wake," remained not uncorrupted so long, surely we may say, it came up and was cut down like a flower, and continued not even so long as the usual term of the life of man.'

26. "I wrote unto the church; but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the pre-eminence among them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words; and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the FRIARS, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the church."John iii. 9. 10.

1. If this John were the disciple of Christ, this text is fatal to the claims of St. John's Gospel, since it shows that the rulers of the church had rejected his writings. 2. Its reference to the circumstances of mendicant friars, or travelling quack-doctors, is as clear as the day. 3. But who was this Diotrephes, whose name signifies literally the ward or pupil of Jupiter? Any thing rather than a Christian name. 4. And with what conceivable state of a Christian community, that could have existed during the life-time of one of its first preachers, can we associate the idea of such a struggle for pre-eminence? The phanomena admit of no solution but that which determines that these writings are the compositions of no such persons as is supposed, and that, however ancient we take them to be, they refer to a state of ecclesiastical polity still more ancient.

27. "Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves, for they watch for your souls, as THEY that must give an account."-Heb. xiii. 17.

28. "Remember them that have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God!"-Heb. xiii. 7.

What have we here, but references to ecclesiastical government and spiritual power, already established in all its plenitude? A state of things which could not possibly have existed-a sort of language that could not possibly have been used, in any reference to an authority which had originated within the life-time of the persons so addressed, or to a word of God, of which the then preachers, were the first.

29. "For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ; and no marvel, for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”. 2 Cor. xi. 13. Aye! aye! And with what state of a religion, whose founder had been crucified, and whose doctrines had not yet passed into the hands of a second generation, and whose apostles had nothing but spiritual blessings to confer on others, and nothing but martyrdom to expect for themselves, can we imagine that apostleship to be so winning a game, that the Devil himself would play it? *

THE CONCLUSION

Is inevitable. We are not, perhaps, entitled certainly to pronounce that it was so; but the hypothesis (if it be no more), that Paul and his party were sent out, in the first instance, as apostles, or missionaries, from this previously existing society of Monks, which had for ages, or any length of time before, fabricated and been in possession of the allegorical fiction of Jesus Christ; that the Acts of the Apostles, with the exception of all their supernatural details, are a garbled journal of his real adventures; and the Epistles, with the exception of some improved passages and superior sentiments that have been foisted into them, are such as he wrote to the various communities in which he had established his own independent supremacy, by a successful schism from the mother church: this hypothesis will solve all the phænomena; which is what no other will.

There are innumerable other passages to the like effect; such as the wild man John preaching in the wilderness: A voice crying in the wilderness: the miraculous fasting of the old woman Anna: the pass-word of the vigilant monks, Watch and pray! &c. &c. whose further tractation would detain me too long from worthier matter. Let the reader glance his eye over the New Testament, with this observance.

CHAPTER XIII.

ON THE CLAIMS OF THE SCRIPTURES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TO BE CONSIDERED AS GENUINE AND AUTHENTIC.

PRELIMINARY.

THERE is no greater nor grosser delusion perhaps in the world, than that of the common sophistry of arguing for the genuineness and authenticity of the writings of the New Testament, upon the ridiculous supposition, that the state of things of which we are witnesses, with respect to these writings in our times, is the same, or much like what it was, in the primitive ages; that is, that these writings were generally in the hands of professing Christians, were distinguished as pre-eminently sacred, had their authority universally acknowledged, or were so extensively diffused, that material alterations in them from time to time, could not have been effected without certain discovery, and as certain reprobation of so sacrilegious an attempt.

The very reverse of such an imaginary resemblance of past to present circumstances, is the truth of history, as borne out by the admissions of all who have devoted their time and labours to the investigation of ecclesiastical antiquity.

The learned Dr. Lardner is constrained to admit, that "even so late as the middle of the sixth century, the canon of the New Testament had not been settled by any authority that was decisive and universally acknowledged; but Christian people were at liberty to judge for themselves concerning the genuineness of writings proposed to them as apostolical, and to determine according to evidence."-Vol. 3, pp. 54-61.

We have shown also, that the scriptures were not entrusted to the hands of the laity. The mystical sense which we find by the very earliest Fathers to have been attached to them, is the strongest corroboration of those positive testimonies which we have, that the Christian people were kept in the profoundest ignorance of the contents of the sacred volume. The clergy only, were

held to be the fit depositaries of those mystical legends, which in the hands of the common people, were so liable to be "wrested to their own destruction." Not to insist on the deplorable ignorance of lay-people all over Christendom for so many ages, during which, scarce any but the clergy were able to read at all.

It would be hard to authenticate a single instance of the existence of a translation of the gospels into the vulgar tongue, of any country in which Christianity was established, at any time within the first four centuries.

The clergy, or those engaged and interested in the business of dealing out spiritual edification, whose testimony alone we have on the subject, mutually criminate and recriminate each other, according as they grasp or lose their hold on the ascendancy, (and so are held to be orthodox or heretical) with corrupting the scriptures.

The epistolary parts of the New Testament, entirely independent and wholly irrelevant of the gospels as they manifestly are, may be considered as the fairest and most liberal specimen of the manner, in which the stewards of the mysteries of God, "brought forth things new and old,”* according to the spiritual necessities of the congregations which they addressed, while they steadily kept the key of the sacred treasure, the right of expounding it, and even of determining what it was, exclusively in their own hands. Hence, though the gospel is spoken of in innumerable passages of these epistles, (written, as we have seen they were, before any gospels which have come down to us, except those which are deemed apocryphal,) there occurs not in them, a single quotation or text seeming to be taken from the gospel so spoken of, or sufficient to show what the contents of that gospel, were.

Hence the authenticity and genuineness of the writings of St. Paul, and of all those parts of the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles, which Paley in his Hore Paulina has shown, present such striking coincidences. with his writings, is a wholly distinct and irrelevant question, to that of the genuineness and authenticity of the writings on which the Christian faith is founded: for, as all persons must see and admit at once, that if the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which have come down to us, could be shown to be the compositions of such

Every Scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure, things new and old.-Matt. xiii. 52.-i. e. he practices the art of deceiving the people.