224 HOR^ PAULINiE. 



in the next ; spending his whole time in the employment 

 Bacrificing to it his pleasures, his ease, his safety ; persisting 

 in this course to old age, unaltered by the experience of per- 

 verseness, mgratitude, prejudice, desertion ; unsubdued by 

 anxiety, want, labor, persecutions ; unwearied by long con- 

 finement, undismayed by the prospect of death. Such was 

 St. Paul. We have his letters in our hands ; we have also 

 a history purporting to be written by one of his fellow-trav- 

 ellers, and appearing, by a comparison with these letters, 

 certainly to have been written by some person well ac- 

 quainted with the transactions of his life. From the letters, 

 as well as from the history, we gather not only the account 

 which we have stated of him, but that he was one out of 

 many who acted and suffered in the same manner ; and that 

 of those who did so, several had been the companions of 

 Christ's ministry, the ocular witnesses, or pretending to be 

 such, of his miracles, and of his resurrection, "VVe moreover 

 find this same person referring in his letters to his super- 

 natural conversion, the particulars and accompanying cir- 

 cumstances of which are related in the history, and which 

 accompanying circumstances, if all or any of them be true, 

 render it impossible to have been a delusion. We also find 

 him positively, and in appropriate terms, asserting that he 

 nimself worked miracles, strictly and properly so called, in 

 support of the mission which he executed ; the history 

 meanwhile recording various passages of his ministry, which 

 come up to the extent of this assertion. The question is, 

 whether falsehood was ever attested by evidence like this. 

 Falsehoods, we know, have found their way into reports, 

 into tradition, into books ; but is an example to be met with, 

 of a man voluntarily undertaking a life of want and pain, of 

 incessant fatigue, of continual peril ; submitting to the loss 

 of his home and country, to stripes and stoning, to tedious im- 

 prisonment, and the constant expectation of a violent death, 

 for the sake of carrying about a story of what was false, and 

 of what, if false, he must have known to be so '^ 



