How different the apostles! boldly attacking all vice, superstition, and error, at all hazards, in all places, not counting their lives dear unto them so that they might ‘testify the gospel of the grace of God.’ But where else shall we turn for a parallel to the work we have described? What efforts, independently of the gospel, were ever successful in the moral regeneration of whole communities of the superstitious and licentious?” (McIlvaine’s Evid., Lect. IX.) This excellent writer adds, in a note: “The early advocates of Christianity, in controversy with the heathen of Greece and Rome, were accustomed to dwell with great stress upon the argument from its propagation. Chrysostom, of the fourth century, writes: ‘The apostles of Christ were twelve; and they gained the whole world.’ ‘Zeno, Plato, Socrates, and many others, endeavored to introduce a new course of life, but in vain; whereas Jesus Christ not only taught, but settled, a new polity, or way of living, all over the world.’ ‘The doctrines and writings of fishermen, who were beaten and driven from society, and always lived in the midst of dangers, have been readily embraced by learned and unlearned, bondmen and free, kings and soldiers, Greeks and barbarians.’ ‘Though kings and tyrants and people strove to extinguish the spark of faith, such a flame of true religion arose as filled the whole world. If you go to India and Scythia, and the utmost ends of the earth, you will everywhere find the doctrine of Christ enlightening the souls of men.’ Augustine, of the same century, speaking of the heathen philosophers, says: ‘If they were to live again, and should see the churches crowded, the temples forsaken, and men called from the love of temporal, fleeting things, to the hope of eternal life and the possession of spiritual and heavenly blessings, and readily embracing them, provided they were really such as they are said to have been, perhaps they would say, ”These are things which we did not dare to say to the people; we rather gave way to their custom than endeavored to draw them over to our best thoughts and apprehensions.“’” “After the death of Jesus Christ, twelve poor fishermen and mechanics undertook to teach and convert the world. Their success was prodigious. All the Christians rushed to martyrdom, all the people to baptism: the history of these early times was a continual prodigy.”—_Rousseau._