Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/162

138 societies of the Galilæans, afterwards called Christians, remained in obscurity, in the mud of the cities; and it is certain that, when these Christians began to write, they entrusted their books only to those who had been initiated into their mysteries. They were not even given to the catechumens, much less to partisans of the imperial religion. No Roman before the time of Trajan [ 98-117 ] knew that the gospels existed; no Greek or Latin writer has ever quoted the word "gospel"; Plutarch, Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius, who speak of everything, are entirely ignorant of the existence of gospels. This proof, with a hundred others, shows the absurdity of those authors who now hold, or pretend to hold, that the disciples of Jesus died for the truth of these gospels, of which the Romans did not hear a word during two hundred years. The half-Jew, half-Christian Galilæans, separated from the disciples of John, and from the Therapeuts, Essenians, Judaites, Herodians, Sadducees, and Pharisees, recruited their little flock among the lowest of the people, not, indeed, by means of books, but of speech, by catechising the women and girls (Acts xvi., 13 and 14) and children, and passing from town to town; in a word, like all other sects.

Tell me frankly, Romans, what your ancestors would have said if St. Paul, or Simon Barjona, or Matthias, or Matthew, or Luke, had appeared in the Senate and said : "Our God, Jesus, who passed as the son of a carpenter during life, was born in the year 752 from the foundation of Rome, under the governorship of Cyrenius (Luke ii., 2), in a Jewish village called Bethlehem, to which his father