understandings, to compare it with a case in which we have some assistance from past experience.

For instance, would it not have been natural to believe, that the persecutions which the converts to Christianity underwent during the three first centuries, were a needless trial of their sincerity and constancy? God, it might be argued, knew their hearts and saw their faith. Attachment to an earthly ruler can only be shown by open risk; but the Searcher of hearts does not require the same actual displays of fidelity, since he knows beforehand who will and who will not abide the fiery ordeal. To what purpose then did he suffer such refinements of cruelty to be exercised on one side and undergone on the other, as might appear to the contemporaries a plausible proof that he did not approve or support the cause?* Such

* Οι ἐπιεκιέστεροι καὶ κατὰ ποσὸν συμπαθεῖν δοκοῦντες, ὠνείδιτον πολὺ λέγοντες· ποῦ ὁ θεὸς αυτῶν, καὶ τί αυτοὺς ὤνησεου ἡ θρησκεια, ἡ καὶ πρὸ τῆς ἑαυτῶν ἕλοντο ψυχῆς. Euseb. de Martyribus Lugdunensibus, Hist. v. c. 1.

reasoning, I can imagine, might have occurred in the days of Decius or Dioclesian. But to us, now, there appears an evident and intelligible design in the permission of those very martyrdoms. The zeal with which they were incurred, and the constancy with which they were endured, form the strongest links in that chain of arguments by which the certainty of the facts on which the Christian revelation rests, is supported. Had the trial been confined to a few individuals, they might have been denounced as enthusiasts; had it been less severe, their perseverance might have been termed obstinacy; had it been less universal or enduring, they might have been supposed mistaken and in any of these cases, the most convincing evidence we at present enjoy of the truth of Christianity would be taken away: for, strong as the internal testimony assuredly is, it is more open to dispute, and comes less home to all understandings. All this, however, would not appear to the eye-witnesses of the martyrdoms: nor does it always appear to us who are familiar with the evils resulting from

human depravity, why that corruption is allowed to disturb the calm of the moral world, and deform the beauty of virtue.

II. It may possibly be argued, that it was inconsistent with divine justice to place intelligent beings, without any consent of their own, in a situation of such hazard: in which there was a moral certainty undoubtedly foreseen, that liability to err would end in transgression; that wickedness would ultimately prevail in the world to a great extent: that many would plunge themselves into final ruin, from whose fall, too, the heaviest dangers and temptations must necessarily ensue to the whole race of mankind.

This objection, if valid, renders it inconsistent with the justice of God to create any being with the power of acting well or ill, and to make him accountable for his use of such power. Therefore, it would oppose an insuperable bar to the creation of man in his present preparatory state, or in any state at all

similar to the present. For it is evident, even if we were not told so, that the rewards and punishments awaiting mankind in a state of existence where their faculties will be altogether renewed and changed, and their mode and place of existence inconceivably different, could not possibly be comprehended by the human understanding, as it is now constituted; and therefore could not be more clearly presented to it. Neither could the circumstances of the risk, even if intelligible, be possibly proposed to man at his entrance into life, or at any period of it that we can assign, so as to enable him to act according to a regular contract, rather than according to a positive command. Therefore we are at once driven to the regions of fancy; the Deity might have created other imaginable natures; but it was not conformable to his goodness to create such a being as man, and to render him responsible.

This obliges us to inquire whether there is no fallacy in the reasoning which leads to such an absolute conclusion. If we trace to their

origin the notions of justice on which it is founded, they appear to spring from the acknowledged impossibility of one man's deciding with respect to a fellow-creature, by what motive he may, under any given circumstance, be most forcibly swayed, and to which of opposite interests he may be inclined to yield. In addition to this undeniable objection against any individual, unauthorized, placing another in a situation of hazard, it is also impossible that human faculties should so appreciate the dangers of such a risk, varying in nature and degree with every different temper and circumstance, as to apportion the reward in any tolerable exactness. The conclusion, therefore, must be admitted, as far as regards the dealings of man with his fellow-men.

It cannot however, on due consideration, be pretended that the analogy is just, which applies this mode of argument to any dispensation of the Deity. For, in the first place, he is able, though creatures of limited faculties are