Wesley Corpus

Sir, this is not the cant of zealots: You must not escape so: It is plain, sober reason. If the credibility of witnesses, of all witnesses, (for you make na distinction,) depends, as you peremptorily affirm, on a variety of principles wholly concealed from us, and, consequently, though it may be presumed in many cases, yet can be certainly known in none; then it is plain, all history, sacred or profane, is utterly precarious and uncertain. Then I may indeed presume, but I cannot certainly know, that Julius Caesar was killed in the Senate-house; then I cannot certainly know that there was an Emperor in Germany, called Charles the Fifth; that Leo the Tenth ever sat in the See of Rome, or Lewis the Fourteenth on the throne of France. Now, let any man of common understanding judge, whether this objection has any sense in it, or no. 12. Under this same head, you fall again upon the case of witchcraft, and say, “There is not in all history any one mira culous fact so authentically attested as the existence of witches. All Christian ” (yea, and all heathen) “nations whatsoever have consented in the belief of them. Now, to deny the reality of facts so solemnly attested, and so universally believed, seems to give the lie to the sense and experience of all Christendom; to the wisest and best of every nation, and to public monu ments subsisting to our own times.” (Page 221.) What obliges you, then, to deny it? You answer: “The incredibility of the thing.” (Page 223.) O Sir, never strain at the incredibility of this, after you have swallowed an hundred people talking without tongues! 13. What you aim at in this also is plain, as well as in your account of the Abbé de Paris. The point of your argument is, “If you cannot believe these, then you ought not to believe the Bible: The incredibility of the things related ought to overrule all testimony whatsoever.” Your argument, at length, would run thus: “If things be incredible in themselves, then this incredibi lity ought to overrule all testimony concerning them. “But the gospel miracles are incredible in themselves.” Sir, that proposition I deny. You have not proved it yet. You have only now and then, as it were by the by, made any attempt to prove it.