CHAPTER I

There is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original
witness of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours,
dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the
accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their of
belief of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same
motives, to new rules of conduct.

To support this proposition, two points are necessary to be made out:
first, that the Founder of the institution, his associates and immediate
followers, acted the part which the proposition imputes to them:
secondly, that they did so in attestation of the miraculous history
recorded in our Scriptures, and solely in consequence of their belief of
the truth of this history.

Before we produce any particular testimony to the activity and
sufferings which compose the subject of our first assertion, it will be
proper to consider the degree of probability which the assertion derives
from the nature of the case, that is, by inferences from those parts of
the case which, in point of fact, are on all hands acknowledged.

First, then, the Christian Religion exists, and, therefore, by some
means or other, was established. Now it either owes the principle of its
establishment, i. e. its first publication, to the activity of the