less offensively translated) that he overlooked the errors and the degeneracy of former ages, is a point where many unbelievers are agreed with us. But the Christian maintains that, in the fulness of time, God published a Law, for the sake of rectifying those errors, and of reforming that degeneracy. The infidel, who professes a regard equally delicate, and a zeal equally sincere, for the honour of his Maker, asserts the contrary. Whose hypothesis, think ye, redounds most to the glory of God? According to the tenets of the Christian, the depravity of mankind, and the long train of miseries attendant on it, have in some measure been lessened, and will be lessened yet further. If the infidel be right, the remedy of an acknowledged evil has not yet been applied; and though, according to the natural descent of things from bad to worse, the longer any salutary expedient is delayed the more urgent becomes the occasion for it; that very delay constitutes a presumption that no such expedient ever will be applied. I will not insult your understandings by entering into any superfluous comparison between hypotheses so notoriously disproportionate in point both of good sense and of piety.

I mean not to speak with intemperate indignation of those arrogant and almost exclusive claims which some champions of infidelity have set up, to a correct and enlarged way of thinking. But I wish them to consider whether the invectives which they have thrown out against the late publication of the Gospel be not the result of reasonings as

Near and remote,

narrow as they are erroneous. great and little, are relative expressions; and each of them may be applied to the same object, as it is viewed through different mediums. Thus the four thousand years which preceded the appearance of the Gospel may swell, in our imaginations, to a stupendous bulk, on the supposition that the world were to continue in its redeemed state for twice or three times that space. But, if the world be ordained to continue forty thousand years after the coming of Christ, the time that preceded it will shrink into a less formidable compass; and, as there is no apparent absurdity in supposing the duration of our present system to be extended indefinitely, the proportion of the definite time that passed before the mission of Christ may, by gradual diminutions, be reduced to a very trifling, and, as it were, a fugitive quantity.

If the progress which mankind have lately made in the arts of social life, if the important enquiries in which philosophy has been engaged, if the unexplored paths it has opened for new investigation, be brought into one point of view, we may be led to imagine, that the world has not yet reached more than a state of comparative infancy. Should this be the case, and should our future improvements flow on with an equal, or an increasing tide of success, posterity may reverse the argument. Tracing back the growing excellence of their fellow-creatures through the stages it shall have already passed, they may look up with admiration and thankfulness to that Being who, according to

their estimate of things, interposed so speedily in behalf of his creatures. But without having recourse to such descriptions of succeeding ages, as are neither unpleasing nor incredible, we may find, upon a retrospective view of the condition in which mankind has been placed, many probable arguments for the truth of St. Paul's assertion, that in the fulness of time God sent forth his Son.

Had the Almighty ordained a more early period for the Gospel, we might have lost much of that evidence which arises from Prophecy.

The Son of God appeared at a season when the propagation of his religion was much facilitated by the extent of the Roman empire, and the popularity of the Greek language. But, if he had lived in the days of Moses, the little intercourse that prevailed between nation and nation, the very inconsiderable proficiency of mankind in arts and language, the total want of concurrent historical testimony, and a variety of other circumstances, which were not unfriendly to the Jewish Law, intended as it was to operate for a short time, and among an obscure people, might have proved very powerful impediments to the establishment and the diffusion of the Christian Law.

The Gospel, upon its first publication, was in many instances affected by the religious and the political state of Judea. But the spirit of the Mosaic institutions was quite exhausted, and the observance of many precepts was scarce practicable, during the subjection of the Jews to the Roman yoke. Deprived, therefore, as was this people, of the advantages which had resulted from ceremonial duties, it

was likely, or at least it was proper for them, to have turned their attention more readily towards a ritual less irksome, and a scheme of morality far more adapted to their intellectual and social improvements. As prophecy had long ceased among them, they might have been induced to consider the miracles of Christ as a renewal of those divine interpositions with which their forefathers had been honoured. The opinions concerning a future state, which they had caught up during their captivity at Babylon, and their intercourse with the Romans, should have prepared them to welcome a religion which throws the clearest and fullest light upon the comfortable doctrines of life and immortality. Had the arrival of the Messiah been hastened, the expectations of the Jew would not have been excited to a sufficient pitch of solicitude. Had it been longer delayed, those expectations, which eventually induced many persons to examine the claims of Christ, and some to admit them, might have languished after repeated disappointments.

In this question concerning the fulness of time, the state of the heathen world deserves our consideration. If the Gospel had been preached in a very barbarous age, the reception of it would, probably, have been ascribed to the want of ability or the want of inclination to detect imposture, to the artifices of priests, or the credulity of the vulgar. But it challenged the attention of mankind at a most enlightened æra, when the jealous wisdom of

* φωτίσαντος ζωὴν καὶ ἀφθαρσίαν. Tim. Epist. 2. cap. i. v. 10.

politicians, and the no less jealous pride of philosophers, were leagued against religious innovation. The same causes which harrassed Christianity during its growth, must, if its vital principle had not been sound, have stifled it in its very birth. The same opposition that had been roused in the reign of Augustus against false miracles, must have hunted down the credit of the Christian miracles, had they not been really performed. The same vigilance, which afterwards dragged to light all the childish fallacies of Apollonius Tyanæus, would have been more fatally employed in crushing the firmer and more interesting pretensions of Christ, if they had not been founded upon a rock.

The ceremonies prescribed by the religions of antiquity tended to debase the spirit, and even to deprave the morals of the people. As to the doctrines of philosophy, they were seldom employed, as, in truth, they were seldom qualified, to remedy the evil. It must, however, be confessed, that the more important truths of Religion, such, I mean, as relate to a providence and a future state, though intermixed with many errors, yet retained a feeble hold upon the minds of the multitude, and produced, too, a partial effect upon their behaviour. To arraign and to ridicule such truths was a distinction reserved for those presumptuous sophists whom their infatuated admirers affect to exalt as the guides of life, though they speculated for the sake of victory, not of truth; though they confounded the received notions of right and wrong, without substituting others more, intelligible and more useful; though they veiled the being and at