says Tacitus, "inflicted upon the christians, punishments exquisitely painful;" multitudes suffered a cruel martyrdom, amidst derision and insults, and among the rest the venerable apostles St. Peter and St. Paul.

Our Lord continues-" And ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake*.” The hatred from which the above recited persecutions sprang, was not provoked on the part of the christians, by a contumacious resistance to established authority, or by any violations of law, but was the unavoidable consequence of their sustaining the name, and imitating the example of their Master. "It was a war,” says Tertullian, " against the very name; to be a christian was of itself crime enough." And to the same effect is that expression of Pliny in his letter to Trajan; "I asked them whether they were christians; if they confessed it, I asked them a second

Mat. xxiv. 9.

and a third time, threatening them with punishment, and those who persevered I commanded to be led away to death.-It is added, "Of all nations." Whatever

animosity or dissentions might subsist between the Gentiles and the Jews on other points, they were at all times ready to unite and to co-operate in the persecution of the humble followers of Him, who came to be a light to the former, and the glory of the latter.

Con

"And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another*." cerning this fact, the following decisive testimony of Tacitus may suffice: speaking of the persecutions of the christians under Nero, to which we have just alluded, he adds, "several were seized, who confessed, and by their discovery a great multitude of others were convicted and barbarously executed."

Matt. xxiv. 10,

E

"And the Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world, for a witness unto all nations, and then shall the end (i. e. of the Jewish dispensation) come*." -Of the fulfilment of this prediction, the Epistles of St. Paul, addressed to the christians at Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Phillippi, Colosse, Thessalonica, and those of Peter, to such as resided in Pontus, Cappadocia, and Bythynia, are monuments now standing; for neither of these Apostles were living when the Jewish war commenced. St. Paul too, in his Epistle to the Romans, informs them that "their faith was spoken of throughout the world" and in that to the Colossians he observes, that the " Gospel had been preached to every creature under hea ven." Clement, who was a fellow-labourer with the Apostle, relates of him that "he taught the whole world righteousness, travelling from the east westward to the borders of the ocean." Eusebius says

*Mat. xxiv. 14.

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that "the Apostles preached the Gospel in all the world, and that some of them passed beyond the bounds of the ocean, and visited the Britannic isles* :" so says Theodoret also.

"It appears," says Bishop Newton, "from the writers of the history of the church, that before the destruction of Jerusalem, the Gospel was not only preached in the Lesser Asia, and Greece, and Italy, the great theatres of action then in the world, but was likewise propagated as far northward as Scythia, as far southward as Ethiopia, as far eastward as Parthia and India, as far westward as Spain and Britain." And Tacitus asserts, that "the christian religion, which arose in Judea, spread over many parts of the world, and

It is admitted that the phrases "all the world," "every creature," &c. are hyperbolical; but then, taken in their connexion, they evidently import the universality of the preaching and spread of the Gospel, previously to the destruction of Jerusalem, which was the point to be proved.

extended to Rome itself, where the professors of it, as early as the time of Nero, amounted to a vast multitude," insomuch that their numbers excited the jealousy of the government.

Thus completely was fulfilled a prediction contrary to every conclusion that could have been grounded on moral probability, and to the accomplishment of which every kind of impediment was incessantly opposed. The reputed son of a mechanic instructs a few simple fishermen in a new religion, destitute of worldly incentives, but full of self-denials, sacrifices, and sufferings, and tells them that in about forty years it should spread over all the world. It spreads accordingly; and, in defiance of the exasperated bigotry of the Jews, and of all the authority, power, and active opposition of the Gentiles, is established, within that period, in all the countries into which it penetrates. Can any one