not large and expensive establishments to dazzle to blindness, but we do need and ought to have a few patient, persevering, wise Christian ministers scattered over the territory of New-Mexico, and along the banks of the Rio Grande, sapping, and mining, and blasting for the overthrow of Romanism and the Americanization of the Mexicans. Where are the Churches making preparations for the future additions from Mexico, from Central America and the West India. Islands? Is the American Church ready for her part of the work of our country's world mission? Where are our missionary institutes, an immediate need of the Church, in which our young men can acquire the modern languages to fit them for the vast foreign fields of American missions? The miraculous gift of tongues is almost as necessary to prepare the American Church for her circumstances, as it was for the apostles on the day of Pentecost? And we might almost suppose that the Church was waiting for such a miraculous dispensation.

In obedience to the providence of God, we ought to apply ourselves to the work before us. In view of the signs of the times indicating future enlargement, we ought to lay our plans commensurate with the probabilities of the case, lest God take away our heritage from us. Whatever may be the result of the American government, whether it will hold together or not, under the expansion anticipated, Christianity, pushing its conquest coequal with it, and under it, is designed to fill the whole earth. It is no longer dependent upon civil government. Its conquests hereafter will be maintained May its triumph and establishment in the western world be accomplished by the American Churches!

ART. VIII.—THE OLDEST OPPOSITION TO CHRISTIANITY, AND ITS DEFENSE.

The Evidences of Christianity, as exhibited in the Writings of its Apologists down to Augustine. Hulsean Prize Essay. By W. J. BOLTON, Professor at Cambridge. Reprinted at Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 1854.

THE work of Professor Bolton, though not characterized either by eminent learning or ability, gives a tolerably complete view, more so than any other book in the English language, of the literary conflict of Christianity with its earliest opponents, and the rise of apologetic literature. This conflict is one of the most interesting and instructive chapters in the history of the ante-Nicene and Nicene age. shows that most of the objections of modern infidelity against Christianity have been anticipated by a Celsus, Lucian, Porphyry, FOURTH SERIES, VOL. X.-40

It

and others, in the second and third centuries, and ably and successfully refuted by Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, and other apologists of that age. Its faithful exhibition, therefore, is well calculated to destroy confidence in infidelity, and to strengthen faith in the inherent eternal truth of our holy religion.

Without any further reference to Bolton, and pursuing a very different plan, we shall present first the various kinds of attack made upon Christianity in the first three centuries, and then trace the origin and principal arguments of apologetic divinity, or the scientific defense of the Christian religion.

I. OPPOSITION TO CHRISTIANITY.

1. JEWISH OPPOSITION.

When Christianity first made its appearance in the world it found as little favor with the representatives of literature and art as with emperors, princes, and statesmen. In this point of view, also, it was not of the world, and was compelled to force its way through the greatest difficulties; yet it proved at last the mother of an intellectual and moral culture far in advance of the Græco-Roman, capable of endless progress, and full of the vigor of perpetual youth.

The hostility of the Jewish Scribes and Pharisees to the Gospel is familiar from the New Testament. Josephus mentions Jesus once in his Archæology, but in terms so favorable as to agree ill with his Jewish position, and thus to be, at least in their present form, open to critical suspicion. The attacks of the later Jews upon Christianity are essentially mere repetitions of those recorded in the Gospels; denial of the Messiahship of Jesus, and horrible vituperation of his confessors. We learn their character best from the Dialogue of Justin with the Jew Trypho. The avriλoyía Παπίσκου καὶ Ἰάσωνος, which has been once unjustly attributed to the Jewish Christian, Aristo of Pella, is lost.

2. TACITUS AND PLINY.

The Græco-Roman writers of the first century, and some of the second, as Seneca, the elder Pliny, and even the mild and noble Plutarch, either from ignorance or contempt, never allude to Christianity at all. Tacitus and the younger Pliny, cotemporaries and friends of the Emperor Trajan, are the first to notice it; and they speak of it only incidentally, and with stoical disdain and antipathy, as an "exitiabilis superstitio," "prava et immodica superstitio," "inflexibilis obstinatio." These celebrated, and in their way altogether estimable Roman authors thus, from manifest ignorance, saw in the Christians nothing but superstitious fanatics, and put

them on a level with the hated Jews; Tacitus, in fact, reproaching them also with the "odium generis humani." This will afford some idea of the immense obstacles which the new religion encountered in public opinion, especially in the cultivated circles of the Roman empire. The Christian apologies of the second century also show that the most malicious and gratuitous slanders against the Christians were circulated among the common people, even charges of incest and cannibalism,* which may have arisen in part from a misapprehension of the intimate brotherly love of the Christians, and their nightly celebration of the holy supper.

3. CELSUS.

The direct assault upon Christianity, by works devoted to the purpose, began about the middle of the second century, and was very ably conducted by a Grecian philosopher, Celsus, otherwise unknown; according to Origen, an Epicurean, and a friend of Lucian.

Celsus, with all his affected or real contempt for the new religion, considered it important enough to be opposed by an extended work, entitled, "A True Discourse," of which Origen has preserved considerable fragments in his refutation. These represent their author as an eclectic philosopher of varied culture, skilled in dialectics, and somewhat read in the writings of the apostles, and even in the Old Testament. He speaks now in the frivolous style of an Epicurean, now in the earnest and dignified tone of a Platonist. At one time he advocates the popular heathen religion, as, for instance, its doctrine of demons; at another time he rises above the polytheistic notions to a pantheistic or skeptical view. He employs all the aids which the culture of his age afforded, all the weapons of learning, common-sense, wit, sarcasm, and dramatic animation of style, to disprove Christianity; and he anticipates most of the arguments and sophisms of the deists and naturalists of later times. Still his book is, on the whole, a very superficial, loose, and lightminded work, and gives striking proof of the inability of the natural reason to understand the Christian truth. It has no savor of humility, no sense of the corruption of human nature and man's need of redemption; and it could, therefore, not in the slightest degree appreciate the glory of the Redeemer and of his work.

Celsus first introduces a Jew, who accuses the mother of Jesus of adultery with a soldier named Panthera,† adduces the denial of

* Οιδιπόδειοι μίξεις, incesti concubitus; and θνεστεῖα δείπνα, Thyesteæ epulme. † Пávýŋp, panthera, here, and in the Talmud, where Jesus is likewise called 771, is used, like the Latin lupa, as a type of ravenous lust, hence as a symbolical name for μοιχεῖα.

Peter, the treachery of Judas, and the death of Jesus, as contradictions of his pretended divinity, and makes the resurrection an imposture. Then Celsus himself begins the attack, and begins it by combating the whole idea of the supernatural, which forms the common foundation of Judaism and Christianity. The controversy between Jews and Christians appears to him as foolish as the strife about the shadow of an ass. The Jews believed, as well as the Christians, in the prophecies of a Redeemer of the world, and thus differed from them only in that they still expected the Messiah's coming. But then, to what purpose should God come down to earth at all, or send another down? He knows beforehand what is going on among men. And such a descent involves a change, a transition from the good to the evil, from the lovely to the hateful, from the happy to the miserable, which is undesirable, and indeed impossible for the Divine nature. In another place he says, God troubles himself no more about men than about monkeys and flies. Celsus thus denies the whole idea of revelation, now in pantheistic style, now in the levity of Epicurean deism; and thereby, at the same time, abandons the ground of the popular heathen religion. In his view Christianity has no rational foundation at all, but is supported by the imaginary terrors of future punishment. Particularly offensive to him are the promises of the Gospel to the poor and miserable, and the doctrines of forgiveness of sins and regeneration, and of the resurrection of the body. This last he scoffingly calls a hope of worms, but not of rational souls. The appeal to the omnipotence of God he thinks does not help the matter, because God can do nothing improper and unnatural. He reproaches the Christians with ignorance, obstinacy, agitation, innovation, division, and sectarianism, which they inherit mostly from their fathers, the Jews. They are all uncultivated, mean, superstitious peoplemechanics, slaves, women, and children. The great mass of them he regarded as unquestionably deceived. But where there are deceived, there must be also deceivers; and this leads us to the last result of this polemical sophistry. Celsus declared the first disciples of Jesus to be deceivers of the worst kind, a band of sorcerers, who fabricated and circulated the miraculous stories of the Gospels, particularly that of the resurrection of Jesus, but betrayed themselves by contradictions. The originator of the imposture, however, is Jesus himself, who learned the magical art in Egypt, and afterward made a great noise with it in his native country. But here this philosophical and critical sophistry virtually acknowledges its bankruptcy. The hypothesis of deception is the very last one to offer in explanation of a phenomenon so important as Christianity

was, even in that day. The greater and more permanent the deception, the more mysterious and unaccountable it must appear

to reason.

4. LUCIAN.

About the same period the rhetorician Lucian, (born at Samosata, in Syria, about 130, died in Egypt or Greece about 200,) the Voltaire of Grecian literature, attacked the Christian religion with the same light weapons of wit and ridicule with which, in his numerous elegantly written works, he assailed the old popular faith and worship, the mystic fanaticism imported from the East, the low vulgar life of the Stoics and Cynics of that day, and most of the existing manners and customs of the distracted period of the empire. An Epicurean worldling and infidel, as he was, could see in Christianity only one of the many vagaries and follies of mankind; in the miracles only jugglery; in the belief of immortality an empty dream; and in the contempt of death and the brotherly love of the Christians, to which he was constrained to testify, a silly enthusiasm.

Thus he represents the matter in a historical romance on the life and death of Peregrinus Proteus, a cotemporary Cynic philosopher, whom he makes the basis of his satire upon Christianity, and especially upon Cynicism. Peregrinus is here presented as a perfectly contemptible man, who after the commonest and grossest crimes, adultery, sodomy, and parricide, joins the credulous Christians in Palestine, cunningly imposes on them, soon rises to the highest repute among them, and becoming one of the confessors in prison, is loaded with presents by them, in fact almost worshiped as a god, but is afterward excommunicated for eating some forbidden food, (probably meat of the idolatrous sacrifices,) then casts himself into the arms of the Cynics, travels about everywhere in the filthiest style of that sect, and at last, about the year 165, in frantic thirst for fame, plunges into the flames of a funeral pile before the assembled populace of the town of Olympia for the triumph of philosophy. Perhaps this fiction of the self-burning was meant for a parody on the Christian martyrdom, possibly of Polycarp, who about that time suffered death by fire at Smyrna.

Lucian treats the Christians rather with a compassionate smile than with hatred. He nowhere urges persecution. He never calls Christ an impostor, as Celsus does, but a "crucified sophist ;" a term which he uses as often in a good sense as in the bad. But then, in the end, both the Christian and the heathen religions amount, in his view, to imposture; only, in his Epicurean indifferentism, he