their meals, discoursing with them upon the propagation of the gospel, and shewing himself alive by many infallible proofs.

case,

The credibility of evidence in all cases arises from the number, the information, and the veracity of the witnesses. The number of the witnesses in the present if we reckon only the eleven apostles, (and many more might be reckoned), was far greater than has ever been deemed sufficient to establish a fact in a court of justice in the most intricate and weighty causes. Their information upon the general point in question, "that our Lord was "seen alive after his crucifixion," was the most complete that can be imagined :THEY could not be mistaken in his person, who had so long and so constantly attended him. The veracity of a witness is to be measured, not simply by the probity of his disposition and his habits of sincerity, but

by the motives which circumstances may present to him to adhere to the truth, or to deviate from it. No man loves falsehood for its own sake: no man therefore deliberately propagates a lie, but for the sake of some advantage to himself; and the advantage which a man pursues by falsehood, must always be something in the present world: His ease and security, or the advancement of his fortune. For no one who looks forward to a future state, thinks that his interest there may be served by falsehood. It always therefore heightens the credit of a witness, if he is materially a sufferer by the testimony which he gives, when he could not suffer either in fortune, ease, or reputation, by a contrary testimony. The apostles asserted our Lord's ressurrection to their own loss, and at the hazard of their lives. To have denied his resurrection, at least to have disproved it,

which the apostles might easily have done had the thing been a fiction; to have rendered it in any high degree questionable, which any of the apostles might have done, had not the guilt of falsehood and prevarication seemed to them a greater evil than any sufferings which the powers of this world could inflict, had been the certain road to wealth and honours.

To the charms of wealth and honours the

apostles were not insensible. It was evidently the hopes of becoming the first ministers of the first Monarch upon earth which at first attached the sons of Zebedee to their Master's service. The twelve were thrown into a consternation by our Lord's reflection on the inconsistency of the love of riches and the pursuit of heaven; conscious, no doubt, that they were not exempt from the desire of riches although not born to the expectation of them; and

Simon Peter discovered a great anxiety to know what valuable acquisitions he was

to make in our Lord's service, in conside ration of the old crazy boat and tattered nets (his all, he called them) which he had left upon the Galilean lake to follow Christ. Nor were the apostles regardless of suffer ing and danger. Their desertion of our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane shewed them by no means unconcerned about the safety of their own persons. Not therefore to insist on the probity of the apostles, (which appears in many circumstances of the evangelical history), their veracity, by the circumstances in which they were placed, is, I maintain, rendered unquestionable. They persevered in an asseveration which exposed them to the highest indignities and to the cruellest persecution; to the loss of fame, of property, of liberty, and life, when a denial or recantation

might have secured to them the most liberal rewards and the most honourable distinctions which the favour of princes and statesmen could bestow. In every circumstance, therefore, for the numbers, the information, and the veracity of the witnesses, no testimony could surpass in its degree of credibility that which was borne by the apostles to the fact of our Lord's resurrection.

It is a very singular circumstance in this testimony, that it is such as no length of time can diminish. It is founded upon the universal principles of human nature, upon maxims which are the same in all ages, and operate with equal strength in all mankind, under all the varieties of tem

per

and habit of constitution. So long as it shall be contrary to the first principles of the human mind to delight in falsehood for its own sake; so long as it shall be