Wesley Corpus

We are come at last to your general conclusion: “There is no sufficient reason to believe, that any miraculous powers subsisted in any age of the Church after the times of the Apostles.” (Page 91.) But pretended miracles, you say, arose thus: “As the high authority of the apostolic writings excited some of the most learned Christians” (prove that !) “to forge books under their names; so the great fame of the apostolic miracles would naturally excite some of the most crafty, when the Apostles were dead, to attempt some juggling tricks in imitation of them. And when these artful pretenders had maintained their ground through the first three centuries, the leading Clergy of the fourth understood their interest too well to part with the old plea of miraculous gifts.” (Page 92.) Round assertions indeed! But surely, Sir, you do not think that reasonable men will take these for proofs You are here advancing a charge of the blackest nature. But where are your vouchers? Where are the witnesses to support it? Hitherto you have not been able to produce one, through a course of three hundred years; unless you bring in those Heathen, of whose senseless, shameless prejudices you have yourself given so clear an account. But you designed to produce your witnesses in the “Free Inquiry,” a year or two after the “Introductory Discourse” was published. So you condemn them first, and try them afterwards: You will pass sentence now, and hear the evidence by and by A genuine specimen of that “impartial regard to truth,” which you profess upon all occasions. 13. Another instance of this is in your marginal note: “The primitive Christians were perpetually reproached for their gross credulity.” They were; but by whom? Why, by Jews and Heathens. Accordingly, the two witnesses you produce here are Celsus the Jew, and Julian the apostate. But lest this should not suffice, you make them confess the charge: “The Fathers,” your words are, “defend them selves by saying, that they did no more than the philosophers had always done: That Pythagoras's precepts were incul cated with an ipse divit, and they found the same method useful with the vulgar.” (Page 93.) And is this their whole defence? Do the very men to whom you refer, Origen and Arnobius, in the very tracts to which you refer, give no other answer than this argument ad hominem?