He
must believe that those who were thus successful in this extraordinary
conspiracy against men's senses and against common sense, were Galilaean
Jews, such as all history of the period represents them; ignorant,
obscure, illiterate; and, above all, previously bigoted, like all
their countrymen, to the very system, of which, together with all other
religions on the earth, they modestly meditated the abrogation; he must
believe that, appealing to these astounding frauds in the face both of
Jews and Gentiles as an open evidence of the truth of a new revelation,
and demanding on the strength of them that their countrymen should
surrender a religion which they acknowledged to be divine, and that all
other nations should abandon their scarcely less venerable systems
of superstition, they rapidly succeeded in both these very probable
adventures; and in a few years, though without arms, power, wealth,
or science, were to an enormous extent victorious over all prejudice,
philosophy, and persecution; and in three centuries took nearly
undisputed possession, amongst many nations, of the temples of the
ejected deities. He must farther believe that the original performers,
in these prodigious frauds on the world, acted not only without
any assignable motive, but against all assignable motive; that they
maintained this uniform constancy in unprofitable falsehoods, not only
together, but separately, in different countries, before different
tribunals, under all sorts of examinations and cross-examinations, and
in defiance of the gyves, the scourge, the axe, the cross, the stake;
that these whom they persuaded to join their enterprise, persisted like
themselves in the same obstinate belief of the same 'cunningly
devised' frauds; and though they had many accomplices in their singular
conspiracy, had the equally singular fortune to free themselves and
their coadjutors flout all transient weakness towards their cause and
treachery towards one another; and, lastly, that these men, having,
amidst all their ignorance, originality enough to invent the most pure
and sublime system of morality which the world has ever listened to,
had, amidst all their conscious villany, the effrontery to preach it,
and, which is more extraordinary, the inconsistency to practise it!*
____
* So far as we have any knowledge from history, this must have been the
case; and Gibbon fully admits and insists upon it.
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