heard Peter the apostle preach, and the Acts of the Apostles as Paul delivered unto him. He accompanied the apostles in their peregrinations, but especially Paul. He died at Ephesus, where he was also buried;* and after many years, together with Andrew and Timothy, he was translated to Constantinople, in the time of Constantius, the son of Constantinus Magnus. PAUL, Being called of the Lord Jesus Christ himself after his assumption, and numbered in the catalogue of the apostles, began to preach the Gospel from Jerusalem, and travelled through Illyricum, Italy, and Spain. His epistles are extant at this day full of all heavenly wisdom. He was beheaded at Rome under Nero, the third kalends of July, so died a martyr, and lieth there, buried with Peter the apostle."-Thus far Dorotheus. Though there can be no doubt of the existence of St. Paul, of his being entirely such a character as he is in the New Testament represented to have been, and that the epistles which go under his name are competently authentic, and such as without a most unphilosophical and futile litigiousness, no man would think of denying to have been written by him, excepting only a few immaterial interpolations; yet for the fact of his having been beheaded by order of Nero, or having suffered martyrdom in any way, we have no better authority than such as those who would have us believe it, would be ashamed to produce; that is, neither other nor better authority than that of Linus, the imaginary successor of the imaginary St. Peter in the bishopric of Rome, who would persuade us, that "after Paul's head was struck off by the sword of the executioner, it did with a loud and distinct voice utter forth, in Hebrew, the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, while, instead of blood, it was nought but a stream of pure milk that flowed from his veins;" or that of Abdias, bishop of Babylon, who assures us, that when his head The particular care which this historian shows for having all his saints and martyrs authentically buried is, to attest the identity of their relics, which retained their miraculous virtue for ages, and thus achieved as many miracles after their decease as they had ever done while living. From the time when these worthies were buried till the accession of Constantius must have been upwards of 300 years, so that in the natural order of things, every particle of their bodies must have evaporated or mouldered away; but Manet post funera virtus! + This heavenly wisdom is a very particular sort of wisdom. was cut off, instead of blood, ran milk, so that the milky wave flowed all over the sword, and washed over the executioner's arm.* In a church at Rome, at this day called At the three fountains, the place where St. Paul was beheaded,.they show the identical spot where the milk spouted forth from his apostolical arteries, and where, moreover, his head, after it had done preaching, took three jumps (to the honour of the holy Trinity), and at each spot on which it jumped there instantly struck up a spring of living water, which retains at this day a plain and distinct taste of milk. Of all which facts, Baronius, Mabillon, and all the gravest authors of the Roman Catholic communion, give us the most credible and unquestionable assurance.† It would be an injustice, however, to father such miraculous accounts exclusively on the writers of the Roman Catholic communion. We should not have even a single credible witness left to ascertain to us, that Christianity, in any shape or guise, continued in existence, or what it was, after it passed from the first to other hands, should we consider the most egregious, atrocious, impudent lying as a disparagement to the credibility of Christian historians. It is no fanatic or enthusiast who is himself deceived, but it is the calm, serious, calculating, most sincere, most accomplished, most veracious St. Augustin, who, in his 33rd Sermon addressed to his reverend brethren, fearlessly stakes his eternal salvation to the fact, which was as true as the Gospel, and for which there can be no doubt that he would as cheerfully as for the Gospel have suffered himself to be burned at the stake; that he himself being at that time bishop of Hippo Regius, had preached the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to a whole nation of men and women that had no heads, but had their eyes in their bosoms; and in countries still more southerly, he preached to a nation among whom each individual had but one eye, and that situate in the middle of the forehead. While the no less credible Eusebius assures us, that on some occasions the bodies of the martyrs who had been devoured by wild *Flexis genibus, crucisque se signo muniens, cervicem præbuit percussori ; E cujus gladio, desecto capite, pro sanguine lac cucurrit ita ut percussoris dextram lactea unda perfunderet.—Apostol. Hist. lib. 2, p. 455. See the statement to the sense, not the letter, in Dr. Middleton's Letter from Rome, p. 127. Syntagma, p. 33. beasts, upon the beasts being strangled, were found alive in their stomachs, even after having been completely digested.* Such statements, and ecclesiastical history is little better than a continued series of such, must surely convince every impartial inquirer, that the professors and preachers of Christianity, however a few honourable exceptions may have from time to time arisen, (as never was the society so bad, but that there must have been some among them not quite so bad as the worst), yet generally they were men who had no respect for truth, and no governing principle but a wicked esprit du corps, which determined them à toute outrance to impose on the credulity and ignorance of the vulgar. That there is no difference between the Popish legends and the canonical Acts of the Apostles. The great difficulty is to draw the line between ecclesiastical history, and that which is truly apostolical; since it is hardly possible to fix on a legend so egregiously absurd, or a pretended miracle so monstrously ridiculous, in all that is absurd and ridiculous in Popish superstition, but that its original type and first draft shall be to be found even in our own canonical and inspired Scriptures. After have laughed at St. Dunstan's taking the Devil by the nose with a pair of red-hot tongs, in the golden legend, we are made to laugh on the other side of the mouth, or rather to tremble and adore, at the account, which nobody may doubt, of the fate of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew, in conflict with whom it was the Devil who proved victorious, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. Nor was the wonder-working name of "Jesus, whom Paul preached," sufficient to lay him; for, said the Devil, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?"-Acts xix. 15. In like manner we Protestants, who despise all the stories of miracles wrought by old rags, rotten bones, rusty nails, pocket-handkerchiefs, and aprons; that stand on no better authority than those monkish tales which our church has rejected, do bow with implicit faith to the miracles wrought by relics, which stand on the authority of those monkish tales which our church has not rejected; and it is to be believed, or at least not laughed at, under peril of *Lardner, vol. 4, p. 91. being sent to jail, that " God wrought special miracles by the hand of Paul, so that from his body were brought unto the ck, handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out from them."—Acts xix. 12. Here again is an egregious atopism.-How could St. Paul have aprons? or what use could Jews have of pocket handkerchiefs? Are we to forget that their sleeves and beards answered all the purpose, and saved washing? We are at full liberty to have our mirth out at the story of St. Bartholomew possessing the faculty of becoming invisible, and appearing and disappearing, as the cause of the gospel required, because that story rests only on the authority of the apostolic history of Abdias, a few pages further on than our canonical Acts of the Apostles has continued to make extracts from it; but had it been introduced, as many arguments would have been adduced by our clergy, to justify it, and as great peril of incarceration incurred for snuffing at it, as at precisely the parallel story of St. Philip, who, in the canonical part of the book, is described as riding in the air, as picked up by the Spirit of the Lord in one place, and popped down in another (Acts vi. 40). That no such persons as the Twelve Apostles ever existed. Thus the glorious company of the apostles, having glistened upon the world's darkness like the sparks on a burnt rag, go out in like manner, leaving no more vestige of their existence, or of any effect of the miraculous powers with which they are believed to have been invested, than "the bird's wing on the air, or the pathway of the keel through the wave." No credible history whatever recognizes the existence of any one of them, or of any one result of all their stupendous labours and sufferings. The very criterion miracle itself, the most critical and important of all, that which if not true, leaves not so much as a possibility that any other should be so-the miracle of the gift of tongues, not only has no one particle of concurrent evidence in all the world to make it credible, or even to make it conceivable, but absolutely breaks down and gives way, and is attended by positive demonstration of its falsehood, even in the immediate context of the legend which relates it. In sequence, on the passage which instructs us that the assembled apostles were by the immediate power of God" enabled to speak all the languages of the earth in a moment of time," and thus T unquestionably must have been rendered the most consummate and accomplished scholars that ever lived, we find Peter and John, the most distinguished of them, in the next scene, brought before the magistrates as notorious tricksters and cheats, and then and there availing themselves of their supernatural gift of eloquence to no better effect, than to show that they were unlearned and ignorant men, (Acts iv. 13). The Arabian Nights Entertainments are more consistent. Consult the records of history, and what has become of these most extraordinary personages that ever existed, if indeed they ever existed? Not only their names are no where to be found, but the mighty works which should have perpetuated their names have no records. The churches which they are said to have founded, have all shared the fate of Aladdin's castle: the nations which they converted, have all relapsed into idolatry; the light that was to lighten the Gentiles, only served to introduce the dark ages. Not only chronology and history withhold all countenance from the fabulous adventures of these fabulous personages, but geography itself recoils from the story; not only were there no such persons as themselves, and no such persons as the kings and potentates whom they are said to have baptized and converted, but no such countries, cities, and nations as many of those in which they are said to have achieved their mightiest works. Like their divine Master, their kingdoms were not of this world. Where, for instance, was the country of the Magicians, of the Amazons, of the Acephali, the Monoculi, and the Salamanders? Where but in the same latitude with Brobdignag and Lilliputa? CHAPTER XXXIX. THE ARGUMENT OF MARTYRDOM. FROM the self-evident absurdity of all arguments drawn from miracles, which could be of avail only to those who witnessed them, and even to them of no further avail than to make them stare and wonder, but to leave them in as great ignorance as ever as to the what then, or what inference, from an unaccountable fact to the truth or falsehood of an unaccountable doctrine, divines have been driven upon the dernier resort of a desperate attempt to connect ། |