Opening the text

A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.Ballou, Hosea

Religion

A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.

Name: A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.
Author: Ballou, Hosea

Ballou, Hosea

Revelation; Universalism -- Doctrines

"You finally come once more to the circumstance of the conversion of
St. Paul, where you again find some fault (and I must confess, not
without some reason) at my neglect to meet your arguments on this
subject; or in other words, to do away the scripture account, and
reconcile it with my hypothesis; i.e. that of supposing him to be
converted without a miracle. To be ingenuous with you, sir, I must
acknowledge that I have ever supposed this to be the most difficult
task I should have to do; and therefore I wished to hear all you had
to say on the subject of the resurrection before I attempted it.

"Since I wrote my last I have examined Paley's _Horæ Paulinæ_, a work
of extraordinary merit which had never before fallen into my hands:
his _Evidences of Christianity_, I have read several years ago, but
have not lately particularly examined that work. In the exposition of
the argument, (of the work first mentioned) Paley sets forth, as I
conceive, the only possible grounds on which either the epistles of
St. Paul, or the acts of the apostles, can be supposed to be
forgeries, in their full force. And then he attempts to prove their
genuineness by their internal evidence, which they contain within
themselves, entirely aside from those objections; and which would have
been of equal weight even on the supposition that the whole had been
concealed from the time they were written till now, and we should now,
for the first time, examine them. And although I might not fully agree
with him in all points, yet I think he proves, beyond all
contradiction or rational doubt, what he mainly attempts to prove; i.
e. that the epistles were written by some person acquainted with the
circumstances mentioned in the history, and that the writer of the
history must have been acquainted with the circumstances alluded to in
the epistles, where, at the same time, there is not the least apparent
design in those references or allusions; which, as he very justly
argues, prove the genuineness of both. I do not pretend to quote his
words, as the book is not now by me.

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.