Christianity; that its real character and deeply penetrating
influence had been traced with the same philosophical sagacity,
and represented with more sober, as would become its quiet
course, and perhaps less picturesque, but still with lively and
attractive, descriptiveness? He might have thrown aside, with
the same scorn, the mass of ecclesiastical fiction which envelops
the early history of the church, stripped off the legendary
romance, and brought out the facts in their primitive nakedness
and simplicity - if he had but allowed those facts the benefit of
the glowing eloquence which he denied to them alone. He might
have annihilated the whole fabric of post-apostolic miracles, if
he had left uninjured by sarcastic insinuation those of the New
Testament; he might have cashiered, with Dodwell, the whole host
of martyrs, which owe their existence to the prodigal invention
of later days, had he but bestowed fair room, and dwelt with his
ordinary energy on the sufferings of the genuine witnesses to the
truth of Christianity, the Polycarps, or the martyrs of Vienne.
And indeed, if, after all, the view of the early progress of
Christianity be melancholy and humiliating we must beware lest we
charge the whole of this on the infidelity of the historian. It
is idle, it is disingenuous, to deny or to dissemble the early
depravations of Christianity, its gradual but rapid departure
from its primitive simplicity and purity, still more, from its
spirit of universal love. It may be no unsalutary lesson to the
Christian world, that this silent, this unavoidable, perhaps, yet
fatal change shall have been drawn by an impartial, or even an
hostile hand. The Christianity of every age may take warning,
lest by its own narrow views, its want of wisdom, and its want of
charity, it give the same advantage to the future unfriendly
historian, and disparage the cause of true religion.