Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/160

 142 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, witl] the genuine inspii'ations of heaven. The adoption of* fraud and sopliistry in the defence of revelation, too often reminds us of the injudicious conduct of those poets who load their invulnerable heroes with a useless weight of cumbersome and brittle armour, and of mi- But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of racks, j.|jg pagan and philosophic world, to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disci- ples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, de- mons were expelled, and the laws of nature were fre- quently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any altera- tions in the moral or physical government of the world. General si- Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth *", or at lencecon- ig^gf ^ celebrated province of the Roman empire^, was cerning the _ ^ ^ ' darkness of involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. t e passion, g^gjj jj^jg hiiraculous event, which ought to have ex- cited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history"". It happened during the lifetime of Se- neca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelli- sibyls, would easily have detected the Jewish and christian forgeries, which have been so triumphantly quoted by the fathers from Justin Martyr to Lactantius. When the sibylline verses had performed their appointed task, they, like the system of the millennium, were quietly laid aside. The christian sibyl had unluckily fixed the ruin of Rome for the year 195, A.U.C. 948. '' The fathers, as they are drawn out in battle array by Dom Calmet, (Dissertations sur la Bible, tom. iii. p. 295 — 308.) seem to cover the whole earth with darkness, in which they are followed by most of the moderns. ' Origen ad Matth. c. 27. and a few modern critics, Beza, Le Clerc, Lardner, etc. are desirous of confining it to the land of Judea. "■ The celebrated passage of Phlegon is now wisely abandoned. AVhen TertuUian assures the pagans, that the mention of the prodigy is found in Arcanis (not Archivis) vestris, (see his Apology, c. 21.) he probably ap- peals to the sibylline verses, which relate it exactly in the words of the gospel.