evidence of the principles upon which it was built.



296 WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON.

or tlie supernatural power by which it was sup-
ported.

The Roman historians, moreover, were not only
culpably incurious concerning the Christians, but
unpardonably ignorant of what concerned either
them or the Jews : I say, unpardonably ignorant,
because the means of information were within their
reach ; the writings of Moses were everywhere to
be had in Greek ; and the works of Josephus were
published before Tacitus wrote his history ; and
yet even Tacitus has fallen into great absurdity
and self-contradiction, in his account of the Jews ;
and though Tertullian's zeal carried him much too
far, when he called him Mendadorum loquadssi-
mus — the most loquacious of liarS' — yet one cannot
help regretting the little pains he took to acquire
proper information upon that subject. He derives
the name of the Jews, by a forced interpolation,
from mount Ida in Crete ; and he represents them
as abhorring all kinds of images in public worship,
and yet accuses them of having placed the image
of an ass in the holy of holies ; and presently after
he tells us, that Pompey, when he profaned the
temple, found the sanctuary entirely empty. Simi-
lar inaccuracies might be noticed in Plutarch, and
other writers who have spoken of the Jews ; and
you 3^ourself have referred to an obscure passage
in Suetonius, as offering a proof how strangely the



WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON. 297

Jews and Christians of Rome were confounded
with each other. Why then should we think it
remarkable, that a few celebrated writers, who
looked upon the Christians as an obscure sect of
the Jews, and upon the Jews as a barbarous and
detested people whose history was not worth tlie
perusal, and who were moreover engaged in the
relation, of the great events which either occasioned
or accompanied the ruin of their eternal empire —
why should we be surprised that men occupied in
such interesting subjects, and influenced by such
inveterate prejudices, should have left us but short
and imperfect descriptions of the Christian system ?
"But how shall we excuse," you say, "the su-
pine inattention of the pagan and philosophic world
to those evidences which were presented by the
hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to
their senses?" "The laws of nature were per-
petually suspended for the benefit of the church ;
but the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside
from the awful spectacle." To their shame be it
spoken, that they did so ; " and pursuing the ordi-
nary occupations of life and study, appeared uncon-
scious of any alterations in the moral or physical
government of the world." To this objection I
answer, in the first place, that we have no reason
to believe that miracles were performed as often
as the philosophers deigned to give their attention



293 WATSON'S E.EPLY TO GIBBON.

to them ; or that, at the period of time you allude
to, the laws of nature were "perpetually" sus-
pended for the benefit of the church. It may be,
that not one of the few heathen writers whose
books have escaped the ravages of time, was ever
present when a miracle was wrought ; but will it
follow, because PMny, or Plutarch, or Galen, or
Seneca, or Suetonius, or Tacitus, had never seen
a miracle, that no miracles were ever performed ?
They, indeed, were learned and observant men ;
and it may be a matter of surprise to us, that mir-
acles so celebrated as the friends of Christianity
suppose the Christian ones to have been, should
never have been mentioned by them, though they
had not seen them. Had an Adrian or a Vespa-
sian been the author of but a thousandth part of
the miracles you have ascribed to the primitive
church, more than one, probably, of these very
historians, philosophers as they were, would have
adorned his history with the narration of them ;
for though they turned aside from the awful spec-
tacle of the miracles of a poor despised apostle, yet
they beheld, with exulting complacency, and have
related, with unsuspecting credulity, the ostenta-
tious tricks of a Roman emperor. It was not for
want of faith in miraculous events that these sages
neglected the Christian miracles, but for want of
candor and impartial examination.



WATSON'S REPLY TO QIBBON. 299

I answer, in the second place, that in the Acts
of the Apostles we have an account of a great
multitude of pagans of every condition of Hfe, who
were so far from being inattentive to the evidences
which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence
to their senses, that they contemplated them with
reverence and wonder ; and forsaking the rehgion
of their ancestors, and all the flattering hopes of
worldly profit, reputation, and tranquillity, adhered
with astonishing resolution to the profession of
Christianity. From the conclusion of the Acts,
till the time in which some of the sages you men-
tion flourished, is a very obscure part of church
history ; yet we are certain that many of the pa-
gan, and we have some reason to beUeve, that
not a few of the philosophic world, during that
period, did not turn aside from the awful spectacle
of miracles, but saw and believed j and that a few
others should be found, who probably had never
seen, and therefore would not believe, is surely no
very extraordinary circumstance. Why should we
not answer to objections such as these with the
boldness of St. Jerome, and bid Celsus and Por-
phyry, and Julian, and their followers, learn the
illustrious characters of the men who founded^
built up, and adorned the Christian church ? Why
should we not tell them, with Arnobius, of the
orators, the grammarians, the rhetoricians, the law-



300 WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON.

yers, the physicians, the philosophers, "who ap-
peared conscious of the alterations in the moral
and physical government of the world ;" and from
that consciousness, forsook the ordinary occupa-
tions of life and study, and attached themselves to
the Christian discipline ?

I answer, in the last place, that the miracles of
Christians were falsely attributed to magic ; and
were, for that reason, thought unworthy the notice
of the writers you have referred to. Suetonius, in
his life of Nero, calls the Christians men of a new
and a magical superstition. I am sensible that
you laugh at those " sagacious commentators" who
translate the original word by magical ; and adopt-
ing the idea of Mosheim, you think it ought to be
rendered mischievous or pernicious : unquestiona-
bly it frequently has that meaning ; with due def-
erence, however, to Mosheim and yourself, I can-
not help being of opinion, that in this place, as
descriptive of the Christian religion, it is rightly
translated magical. The Theodosian Code must
be my excuse for dissenting from such respectable
authority ; and in it I conjecture you will find good
reason for being of my opinion. Nor ought any
friend to Christianity to be astonished or alarmed
at Suetonius applying the word magical to the
Christian religion, for the miracles wrought by
Christ and his apostles principally consisted in



WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON. 30I

alleviating the distresses by curing the obstinate
diseases of human kind ; and the proper meaning
of magic, as understood by the ancients, is a higher
and more holy branch of the art of healing. The
elder Phny lost his life in an eruption of mount
Vesuvius, about forty-seven years after the death
of Christ : some fifteen years before the death of
PHny, the Christians were persecuted at Rome for
a crime of which every person knew them innocent ;
but from the description which Tacitus gives of the
low estimation they were held hi at that time — for
w^hich, however, he assigns no cause, and therefore
we may reasonably conjecture it was the same for
which the Jews were everywhere become so
odious, an opposition to Polytheism — and of the
extreme sufferings they underwent, we cannot be
much surprised that their name is not to be found
in the works of Pliny or of Seneca : the sect itself
must, by Nero's persecution, have been almost
destroyed in Rome ; and it would have been un-
courtly, not to say unsafe, to have noticed an order
of men whose innocence an emperor had deter-
mined to traduce, in order to divert the dangerous
but deserved stream of popular censure from him-
self. Notwithstanding this, there is a passage in
the Natural History of Pliny which, how much so-
ever it may have been overlooked, contains, I think,
a very strong allusion to the Christians, and clearly



302 WATSON'S REPLY TO G-IBBON.

intimates he had heard of their miracles. In speak-
ing concerning the origin of magic, he says there
is also another faction of magic, derived from the
Jews, Moses, and Lotopea, and subsisting at pres-
ent. The word faction does not ill denote the opin-
ion the Eomans entertained of the religious asso-
ciations of the Christians ; and a magical faction
implies their pretensions, at least, to the miraculous
gifts of healing ; and its descending from Moses is
according to the custom of the Romans, by which
they confounded the Christians with the Jews ; and
its being then subsisting seems to have a strong
reference to the rumors Pliny had negligently heard
reported of the Christians.

Submitting each of these answers to your cool
and candid consideration, I proceed to take notice
of another diflBculty in your fifteenth chapter, which
some have thought one of the most important in
your whole book — the silence of profane historians
concerning the preternatural darkness at the cruci-
fixion of Christ. You know, sir, that several learned
men are of opinion, that profane history is not silent
upon this subject : I will neither trouble you with
the testimony of Phlegon, nor with the appeal of
Tertullian to the public registers of the Romans ;
but meeting you upon your own ground, and
granting you every thing you desire, I will en-
deavor, from a fair and candid examination of the



WATSON'S REPLY TO aiBBON. 303

liistoiy of this event, to suggest a doubt, at least
to your mind, whether this was "the greatest phe-
nomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness
since the creation of the globe."

This darkness is mentioned by three of the four
evangelists. St. Matthew thus expresses himself:
"Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over
all the land until the ninth hour ;" St. Mark says,
"And when the sixth hour was come there was
darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour ;"
St. Luke, "And it was about the sixth hour, and
there was darkness over all the earth until the
ninth hour ; and the sun was darkened." The three
evangehsts agree that there was darkness ; and
they agree in the extent of the dari^ness : for it is
the same expression in the original which our
translators have rendered earth in Luke, and land
in the . two other accounts ; and they agree in the
duration of the darkness — it lasted three hours.
Luke adds a particular circumstance, that " the sun
was darkened." I do not know whether this event
be anywhere else mentioned in Scripture, so that
our inquiry can neither be extensive nor difficult.

In philosopliical propriety of speech, darkness
consists in the total absence of light, and admits of
no degrees : however, in the more common accepta-
tion of the word, there are degrees of darkness as
well as of light ; and as the evangehsts have said



304 WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON.

nothing by which the particular degree of darkness
can be determined, we have as much reason to
suppose it was slight, as you have that it was ex-
cessive ; but if it was slight, though it had extended
itself over the surface of the whole globe, the diffi-
culty of its not being recorded by Pliny or Seneca
vanishes at once. Do you not perceire, sir, upon
what a slender foundation this mighty objection is
grounded, when we have only to put you upon
proving that the darkness at the crucifixion was of
so unusual a nature as to have excited the par-
ticular attention of all mankind, or even of those
who were witnesses to it ? But I do not mean to
deal so logically with you ; rather give me leave to
spare you the trouble of your proof, by proving, or
showing the probability at least, of the direct con-
trary. There is a circumstance mentioned by St.
John which seems to indicate that the darkness
was not so excessive as is generally supposed ; for
it is probable that during the continuance of the
darkness, Jesus spoke both to his mother and to
his beloved disciple, whom he saw from the cross :
they were near the cross ; but the soldiers which
surrounded it must have kept them at too great a
distance for Jesus to have seen them and known
them, had the darkness at the crucifixion been ex-
cessive, like the preternatural darkness which God
brought upon the land of Egypt ; for it is not ex-



WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON. 305

pressly said, that during the continuance of that
darkness, "they saw not one another." The ex-
pression in St. Luke, "the sun was darkened,"
tends rather to confirm than to overthrow this rea-
soning. I am sensible this expression is generally
equivalent to another, the sun was eclipsed ; but
the Bible is open to us all, and there can be no
presumption in endeavoring to investigate the
meaning of Scripture for ourselves. Happily for
the present argumentation, the very phrase of the
sun's being darkened occurs, in so many words, in
one other place, and in only one, of the New Tes-
tament ; and from that place you may possibly see
reason to imagine that the darkness might not per-
haps have been so intense as to deserve the par-
ticular notice of the Roman naturalists : " And he
opened the bottomless pit, and there arose a smoke
out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace ; and
the sun was darkened, and the air, by reason of
the smoke of the pit." If we should say that the
sun at the crucifixion was obnubilated and dark-
ened by the intervention of clouds, as it is here
represented to be by the intervention of a smoke
like the smoke of a furnace, I do not see what you
could object to our account ; but such a phenomenon
has surely no right to be esteemed the greatest
that mortal eye has ever beheld. I may be mis-
taken in this interpretation, but I have no design

Infidelity. 20



306 ' WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON.

to misrepresent the fact in order to get rid of a
difficulty : the darkness may have been as intense
as many commentators have supposed it, but
neither they nor you can prove it was so ; and I
am surely under no necessity, upon this occasion,
of granting you, out of deference to any commen-
tator, what you can neither prove nor render prob-
able.

But you still, perhaps, may think that the dark-
ness, by its extent, made up for this deficiency in
point of intenseness. The original word expres-
sive of its extent, is sometimes interpreted by the
whole earth ; more frequently, in the New Testa-
ment, of any little portion of the earth, for we read
of the land of Judah, of the land of Israel, of the
land of Zabulon, and of the land of Nephthalim ;
and it may very properly, I conceive, be translated
in the place in question by region. But why should
all the world take notice of a darkness which ex-
tended itself for a few miles about Jerusalem, and
lasted but three hours? The Italians, especially,
had no reason to remark the event as singular;
since they were accustomed at that time, as they
are at present, to see the neighboring regions so
darkened for days together by the eruptions of
Etna and Vesuvius, that no man could know his
neighbor. We learn from the scripture account,
that an earthquake accompanied this darkness ; and



WATSON'S REPLY TO aiBBON. 307

a dark, clouded sky, I apprehend, very frequently
precedes an earthquake ; but its extent is not great,
nor is its intenseness excessive, nor is the phe-
nomenon itself so unusual as not commonly to pass
unnoticed in ages of science and history. I fear
I may be liable to misrepresentation in this place ;
but I beg it may be observed, that however slight
in degree, or however confined in extent the dark-
ness at the crucifixion may have been, I am of
opinion that the power of God was as supcrnatu-
rally exerted in its production, and in that of the
earthquake which accompanied it, as in the opcnhig
of the graves, and the resurrection of the saints,
which followed the resurrection of Christ.

In another place, you seem not to believe "that
Pontius Pilate informed the emperor of the unjust
sentence of death v,hich he had pronounced against
an innocent person." And the same reason which
made him silent as to the death, ought, one would sup-
pose, to have made him silent as to the miraculous
events which accompanied it ; and if Pilate, in his
dispatches to the emperor, transmitted no account
of the darkness — how great soever you suppose it
to have been — which happened in a distant prov-
ince, I cannot apprehend that the report of it could
have ever gained such credit at Rome as to induce
either Pliny or Seneca to mention it as an authen-
tic fact. I am, etc.



308 WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON.



LETTER YI.

Sir — I mean not to detain you long with my re-
marks upon your sixteenth chapter ; for in a short
Apology for Christianity, it cannot be expected that
I should apologize at length for the indiscretions of
the first Christians. Nor have I any disposition to
reap a malicious pleasure from exaggerating, which
you have had so much good-natured pleasure in
extenuating, the truculent barbarity of their Roman
persecutors.

M. de Yoltaire has embraced every opportunity
of contrasting the persecuting temper of the Chris-
tians with the mild tolerance of the ancient hea-
thens ; and I never read a page of his upon this
subject without thinking Christianity materially, if
not intentionally, obliged to him, for his endeavor
to depress the lofty spirit of religious bigotry. I
may with justice pay the same compliment to you,
and I do it with sincerity ; heartily wishing that, in
the prosecution of your work, you may render
every species of intolerance universally detestable.
There is no reason why you should abate the as-
perity of your invective, since no one can suspect
you of a design to traduce Christianity under the
guise of a zeal against persecution ; or if any one



WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON. 309

should be so simple, he need but open the gospel
to be convinced that such a scheme is too palpably
absurd to have ever entered the head of any sen-
sible and impartial man..

I wish, for the credit of human nature, that I
could find reason to agree with you in what you
have said of the " universal toleration of Polythe-
ism ; of the mild indifference of antiquity ; of the
Roman prhices beholding without concern a thou-
sand forms of religion subsisting in peace under
their gentle sway." But there are some passages
in the Roman history which make me hesitate at
least in this point, and almost induce me to believe
that the Romans were exceedingly jealous of all
foreign religions, whether they were accompanied
with immoral manners or not.

It was the Roman custom, indeed, to invite the
tutelary gods of the nations which they intended
to subdue, to abandon their charge, and to promise
them the same, or even a more august worship, in
the city of Rome ; and their triumphs were graced
as much with the exhibition of their captive gods,
as with the less humane one of their captive kings.
But this custom, though it filled the city with hun-
dreds of gods of every country, denomination, and
quality, cannot be brought as a proof of Roman
toleration ; it may indicate the excess of their van-
ity, the extent of their superstition, or the refine-



310 WATSON'S REPLY TO aiBBON.

ment of their policy ; but it can never show that
the rehgion of individuals, when it differed from
pubhc wisdom, was either connived at as a matter
of indifference, or tolerated as an inalienable right
of human nature.

Upon another occasion, you, sir, have referred to
Llvy as relating the introduction and suppression
of the rites of Bacchus ; and in that ver^'- place we
find him confessing that the prohibiting of all for-
eign religions, and abolishing every mode of sacri-
fice which differed from the Roman mode, was a
business frequently intrusted by their ancestors
to the care of the proper magistrates ; and he gives
this reason for the procedure, that nothing could
contribute more effectually to the ruin of religion
than the sacrificing after an external rite, and not
after the manner instituted by their fathers.

Not thirty years before this event, the Praetor,
in conformity to a decree of the senate, had issued
an edict, that no one should presume to sacrifice in
any public place after a new or foreign manner.
And in a still more early period, the sediles had
been commanded to take care that no gods were
worshipped except the Roman gods ; and that the
Roman gods were worshipped after no manner but
the established manner of the country.

But to come nearer to the times of which you are
writing. In Dion Cassius you may meet with a



WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON. 311

great courtier, one of the interior cabinet, and a
polished statesman, in a set speech upon the most
momentous subject, expressing himself to the em-
peror in a manner agreeable enough to the practice
of antiquity, but utterly inconsistent with the most
remote idea of religious toleration. The speech
alluded to contains, I confess, nothing more than
the advice of an individual ; but it ought to be re-
membered that that individual was Maecenas, that
the advice was given to Augustus, and that the
occasion of giving it was no less important than
settling the form of the Roman government. He
recommends it to Caesar to worship the gods him-
self according to the established form, and to force
all others to do the same, and to hate and to punish
all those who should attempt to introduce foreign
religions ; nay, he bids him, in the same place, have
an eye upon the philosophers also ; so that free
thinking, free speaking at least, upon religious mat-
ters, was not quite so safe under the gentle sway
of the Roman princes as, thank God, it is under the
much more gentle government of our own.

In the Edict of Toleration published by Galerius,
after six years unremitted persecution of the Chris-
tians, we perceive his motive for persecution to
have been the same with that which had influenced
the conduct of the more ancient Romans, an ab-
horrence of all innovations in religion. You have



312 WATSON'S REPLY TO GIBBON.

favored us with the translation of this edict, in
which he says, "We were particularly desirous of
reclaiming into the way of reason and nature," ad
bonas vientes — a good pretence this for a polytheistic
persecutor — "the deluded Christians, who had re-
nounced the rehgion and ceremonies instituted by
their fathers ;" this is the precise language of Livy,
describing a persecution of a foreign religion three
hundred years before : " Turba erat nee sacrificantium
ncc precantium deos patrio more." And the very
expedient of forcing the Christians to deliver up
their religious books, which was practised in this
persecution, and which Mosheim attributes to the
advice of Hierocles, and you to that of the philos-
ophers of those times, seems clear to me, from the
places in Livy before quoted, to have been nothing
but an old piece of state policy, to which the Ro-
mans had recourse as often as they apprehended
their established religion to be in any danger.

In the preamble of the letter of toleration which
the emperor Maximin reluctantly wrote to Sabinus
about a year after the publication of Galerius's
edict, there is a plain avowal of the reasons which
induced Galerius and Diocletian to commence their
persecution : they had seen the temples of the gods
forsaken, and were determined by the severity of
punishment to reclaim men to their worship.

In short, the system recommended by Maecenas,



WATSON'S REPLY TO G-IBBON. 313

of forcing every person to be of the emperor's re-
ligion, and of bating and punishing ever^^ innovator,
contained no new doctrine : it was correspondent
to the practice of the Roman senate in the most
iUustrious times of the repubhc, and seems to have
been generally adopted by the emperors in tlieir
treatment of Christians while they themselves
were pagans, and in their treatment of pagans
after they themselves became Christians ; and if
any one should be willing to derive those laws
against heretics — which are so abhoiTent from the
mild spirit of the gospel, and so reproachful to the