Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/120

98 THE DECLINE AND FALL by a regular increase in stature and wisdom ; and, after a pain- ful agony of mind and body, he expired on the cross. He lived and died for the service of mankind ; but the life and death of Socrates had likewise been devoted to the cause of religion and justice ; and, although the stoic or the hero may disdain the lunnble virtues of Jesus, tlie tears which he shed over his friend and country may be esteemed the purest evidence of his humanity. The miracles of the gospel could not astonish a people who held, with intrepid faith, the more splendid j)rodigies of the Mosaic law. The propliets of ancient days had cured diseases, raised the dead, divided the sea, stopped the sun, and ascended to heaven in a fieiy chariot. And the metaphorical style of the Hebrews might ascribe to a saint and martyr the adoptive title of Son of God. Hi> birth and Yet, in the insufficient creed of the Nazarenes and the f^bionites, a distinction is faintly noticed between the heretics, who confounded the generation of Christ in the common order of nature, and the less guilty schismatics, who revered the virginity of his mother and excluded the aid of an earthly father. The incredulity of the former was countenanced by the visible circumstances of his birth, the legal marriage of his reputed parents, Joseph and Mary, and his lineal claim to the kingdom of David and the inheritance of Judah. But the secret and authentic history has been recorded in several copies of the gospel according to St. Matthew,^ which these sectaries long preserved in the original Hebrew,' as the sole evidence of their faith. The natural suspicions of the husband, conscious of his own chastity, were dispelled by the assurance (in a dream) that his Avife was pregnant of the Holy Ghost ; and, as this distant and domestic prodigy could not fall under the personal observation of the historian, he must have listened to the same ■•The two first chapters of St. Matthew did not exist in the Ebionite copies (Epiphan. Hasres. xxx. 13) ; and the miraculous conception is one of the last articles which Dr. Priestley has curtailed from his scanty creed. ^ It is probable enough that the first of the gospels for the use of the Jewish converts was composed in the Hebrew or Syriac idiom : the fact is attested by a chain of fathers — Papias, Irenaeus, Origan, Jerom, &c. It is devoutly believed by th*" Catholics, and admitted by Casaubon, Grotius, and Isaac Vossius, among the Protestant critics. But this Hebrew gospel of St. Matthew is most unaccountably lost ; and we may accuse the diligence or fidelity of the primitive churches, who have preferred the unauthorised version of some nameless Greek. Erasmus and his followers, who respect our Greek text as the original gospel, deprive themseJves of the evidence which declares it to be the work of an apostle. See .Simon, Hist. Critique, &c. tom. iii. c. 5-9, p. 47-101 and the Prolegomena of Mill and Wetstein to the New Testament.