Wesley Corpus

62 LETTER. To 5. However, you plunge on: “Since, then, the Christians were not able to bear the expense of copying them,” (whether the Heathens were disposed to buy them or no, is at present out of the question,) “there is great reason to believe, that their apologies, how gravely soever addressed to Emperors and Senates, lay unknown for many years.” (Ibid.) There is no great reason to believe it from anything you have advanced yet. You add: “Especially when the publishing of them was not only expensive, but so criminal also, as to expose them often to danger, and even to capital punishment.” In very deed, Sir, I am sometimes inclined to suspect that you are yourself related to certain ancient Fathers, (notwith standing the learned quotations which adorn your margin,) who used to say, Graecum est: Non potest legi.* You lay me under an almost invincible temptation to think so upon this very occasion. For what could induce you, if you knew what he said, to place at the bottom of this very page a passage from one of those apologists, Justin Martyr, which so clearly confutes your own argument? The words are: “Although death be determined against those who teach, or even confess, the name of Christ, we both embrace and teach it everywhere. And if you also receive these words as enemies, you can do no more than kill us.”t Could danger then, or the fear of “capital punishment,” restrain those Christians from presenting these apologies? No; capital punishment was no terror to them, who daily offered themselves to the flames, till the very heathen butchers themselves were tired with slaughtering them. There can therefore no shadow of doubt remain, with any cool and impartial man, but that these apologies were presented to the most eminent Heathens, to the Magistrates, the Senate, the Emperors. Nor, consequently, is there the least room to doubt of the truth of the facts therein asserted; seeing the apologists constantly desired their enemies “to come and see them with their own eyes;”--a hazard which those “crafty men” would never have run, had not the facts themselves been infallibly certain. This objection then * It is Greek: It cannot be read.-EDIT. + Kaureo Savars opio 6evros kara raw ötöaakovrov, m oxals ouoMo'yevrov To ovoua rs Xpiss, muets wavlaxs kai agraçoueða kal 515aokouev.