In the foregoing analysis, or abridgment of the work on the Nature of the Gods, it will have been remarked, that two chasms occur in the argument of Cotta. Olivet enters into some discussion with regard to the latter and larger chasm. “I cannot,” says he, “see any justice in the accusation against the primitive Christians, of having torn this passage out of all the MSS. What appearance is there, that through a pious motive they should have erased this any more than many others in the same book, which they must undoubtedly have looked upon as no less pernicious?” Olivet seems inclined to suspect the Pagans; but, in my opinion, the chasms in the discourse of Cotta, if not accidental, are to be attributed rather to Christian than pagan zeal. Arnobius, indeed, speaking of this work, says, That many were of opinion that it ought to have been destroyed by the Roman Senate, as the Christian faith might be approved by it, and the authority of antiquity subverted(444). There is no evidence, however, that any such destruction or mutilation was attempted by the Pagans; and we find that the satire directed against the heathen deities has been permitted to remain, while the chasms intervene in portions of the work, which might have been supposed by a pious zealot, to bear, in some measure, against the Christian, as well as the Pagan faith. In the first of them, the Pontifex begins, and is proceeding to contend, that in spite of Acts of the Senate, temples, statues, and other commemorations of miraculous circumstances, all such prodigies were nothing but mere fables, however solemnly attested, or generally believed. Now, the transcriber might fear, lest a similar inference should be drawn by the sceptic, to that which has in fact been deduced by the English translator of this work, in the following passage of a note:—“Hence we see what little credit ought to be paid to facts, said to be done out of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles are well attested: They were recorded in the annals of a great people—believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been, which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be.” At the beginning of the other and larger chasm, Cotta was proceeding to argue against the proposition of the Stoics, that there is a Divine Providence which governs the world. Now, there is a considerable analogy between the system of the ancient Stoics, and the Christian scheme of Providence, both in the theoretical doctrine, and in the practical inference, of the propriety of a cheerful and unqualified submission to the chain of events—to the dispensations of nature in the Stoical, and of God in the purer doctrine. To Christian zeal, therefore, rather than to pagan prudence, we must