You need not be informed, what the Christian world all knows, that the doctrine of Jesus Christ, founded on the miracles recorded in the four Evangelists and in the Acts of the Apostles, was propagated among Jews and Gentiles, whose superstitions, though various, rendered them both hostile to this new religion, and incited them to persecutions which subjected the "weak and defenceless disciples of the meek and lowly Jesus" to trials and sufferings, fears and temptations of which we can have but a faint conception.--The grand hypothesis on which the gospel was advocated, and by which it succeeded in obtaining vast multitudes of Jewish as well as Gentile converts, was the resurrection of Jesus, who was publicly executed on a cross by the Roman authority instigated by the rulers of the Jews. All this must be accounted for in a rational way. The facts are as well attested as any thing of which history gives any account. The four gospels have been commented on, and quoted, and adverted too by a greater number of controversial writers, than any other book of which we have any knowledge. The epistles of St. Paul when compared with the Acts and with each other have all the necessary characteristics of being genuine, and of relating nothing but realties. You, sir, allow that the authority on which this religion rests, would be sufficient to support it, if it were not for the consideration of your three propositions, the first of which, I trust, you will acknowledge stands in its vindication. Your second proposition may now be noticed. That part of mankind have believed and still are believing in miracles and revelations which are spurious, we have no interest in denying, but we feel under no obligation to admit this fact as any evidence against Christianity, or of any force to counterbalance the evidences which stand in its favour. What would you think of such kind of reasoning as should contend, that as it is evident that many have been, and still are imposed on by counterfeit money, it justifies serious doubts whether there ever was any true money in the world? Would you not reply, that as the counterfeit is entirely dependent on the true for its imposition, in room of being evidence that there is no true money, it demonstrates that there is? It being well known, nor ever doubted by the friends or enemies of Christianity, that its founder and his apostles proved the divinity of their missions by miracles alone, it was nothing more than might be rationally expected, that impostors would rise up under those sacred pretensions, with a view to establish themselves. But if this religion of Jesus Christ, had not at first been built upon this foundation, impostors would never have thought of imposing on people with such pretensions. Impostors, therefore, together with all their deceptions, cannot, as I humbly conceive, be admitted as evidence _against_ the genuineness of the gospel, but in _favour_ of it.