And this seemed the more remarkable in the case of their war with Antiochus, because _that_ (if any that history has recorded) was a holy war. But, after one tragical experience, which cost the lives of a thousand martyrs, the Maccabees--quite as much on a level with their scrupulous brethren in piety as they were superior in good sense--began to reflect that they had no shadow of a warrant from Scripture for counting upon any miraculous aid; that the whole expectation, from first to last, had been human and presumptuous; and that the obligation of fighting valiantly against idolatrous compliances was, at all events, paramount to the obligation of the Sabbath. In one hour, after unyoking themselves from this monstrous millstone of their own forging, about their own necks, the cause rose buoyantly aloft as upon wings of victory; and, as their very earliest reward--as the first fruits from thus disabusing their minds of windy presumptions--they found the very case itself melting away which had furnished the scruple; since their cowardly enemies, now finding that they would fight on all days alike, had no longer any motive for attacking them on the Sabbath; besides that their own astonishing victories henceforward secured to them often the choice of the day not less than of the ground. But, without lingering on these outworks of the true religion, namely, 1st, the Temple of Jerusalem; 2dly, the Sabbath,--both of which the divine wisdom often saw fit to lay prostrate before the presumption of idolatrous assaults, on principles utterly irreconcilable with the Oracle doctrine of the fathers,--there is a still more flagrant argument against the fathers, which it is perfectly confounding to find both them and their confuter overlooking. It is this. Oracles, take them at the very worst, were no otherwise hostile to Christianity than as a branch of Paganism. If, for instance, the Delphic establishment were hateful (as doubtless it was) to the holy spirit of truth which burned in the mind of an apostle, _why_ was it hateful? Not primarily in its character of Oracle, but in its universal character of Pagan temple; not as an authentic distributor of counsels adapted to the infinite situations of its clients--often very wise counsels; but as being ultimately engrafted on the stem of idolatrous religion--as deriving, in the last resort, their sanctions from Pagan deities, and, therefore, as sharing _constructively_ in all the pollutions of that tainted source. Now, therefore, if Christianity, according to the fancy of the fathers, could not tolerate the co-presence of so much evil as resided in the Oracle superstition,--that is, in the derivative, in the secondary, in the not unfrequently neutralized or even redundantly compensated mode of error,--then, _à fortiori_, Christianity could not have tolerated for an hour the parent superstition, the larger evil, the fontal error, which diseased the very organ of vision--which not merely distorted a few