The same father Baltus examines, with equal success, a second point in dispute, namely, the cessation of oracles. Mr. Vandale, to oppose with some advantage a truth so glorious to Jesus Christ, the subverter of idolatry, had falsified the sense of the Fathers, by making them say, “that oracles ceased precisely at the moment of Christ’s birth.” The learned apologist for the Fathers shows, that they all allege that oracles ceased after our Saviour’s birth, and the preaching of his Gospel; not on a sudden, but in proportion as his salutary doctrines became known to mankind, and gained ground in the world. This unanimous opinion of the Fathers is confirmed by the unexceptionable evidence of great numbers of the Pagans, who agree with them as to the time when the oracles ceased. What an honour to the Christian religion was this silence imposed upon the oracles by the victory of Jesus Christ! Every Christian had this power. Tertullian, in one of his _Apologies_,(100) challenges the Pagans to make the experiment, and consents that a Christian should be put to death, if he did not oblige these givers of oracles to confess themselves devils. Lactantius informs us, that every Christian could silence them by only the sign of the cross.(101) And all the world knows, that when Julian the Apostate was at Daphne, a suburb of Antioch, to consult Apollo, the god, notwithstanding all the sacrifices offered to him, continued mute, and only recovered his speech to answer those who inquired the cause of his silence, that they must ascribe it to the interment of certain bodies in the neighbourhood. Those were the bodies of Christian martyrs, amongst which was that of St. Babylas. This triumph of the Christian religion ought to give us a due sense of our obligations to Jesus Christ, and, at the same time, of the darkness to which all mankind were abandoned before his coming. We have seen amongst the Carthaginians, fathers and mothers, more cruel than wild beasts, inhumanly giving up their children, and annually depopulating their cities, by destroying the most vigorous of their youth, in obedience to the bloody dictates of their oracles and false gods.(102) The victims were chosen without any regard to rank, sex, age, or condition. Such bloody executions were honoured with the name of sacrifices, and designed to make the gods propitious. “What greater evil,” cries Lactantius, “could they inflict in their most violent displeasure, than thus to deprive their adorers of all sense of humanity, to make them cut the throats of their own children, and pollute their sacrilegious hands with such execrable parricides?”