country to be saved and preserved, if such Churches thus slumber on their watch towers!

The twenty-sixth "Annual Report of the American Baptist Home Mission Society," for the year 1858, states that “twenty of their missionaries have preached in foreign languages, and eighteen of them were natives of foreign lands." But there are no particulars given, to enable us to say how these labors were distributed among the several foreign populations.

We can glance at but one other department in this foreign field of American missions, namely, the Spanish. Here is a department of missionary work for the Churches, toward which we look with more than ordinary interest as Americans and Protestants. We have among us, of foreign birth, speaking the Spanish language, about thirty-thousand, from Spain, South America, the West Indies, and Mexico. Added to these we have annexed in NewMexico between sixty and seventy thousand, giving us a Spanish population, at the present time, of at least one hundred thousand, which can be approached successfully only through the Spanish language. The bulk of this population has come to us with its soil. And the remarks on this subject, in connection with the French, have still greater force when applied to the Mexican. Transferred to us, surrounded by such circumstances as they are surrounded with, it is exceedingly difficult to Americanize and Christianize them. These people come to us deplorably ignorant and debased, having been subjugated for generations and centuries to despotism, civil and ecclesiastical, until they patiently and stupidly crouch beneath their burdens. When annexed to the United States they are released from their political servitude, but the greater tyranny, that of the Romish priesthood, is left in full force, unmolested, nay, encouraged by our government officials.

The process of emancipating, regenerating, and elevating this population to a position of respectable and safe citizenship will be a difficult one. With well directed and diligent labor, generations must pass away before it can be accomplished. Everything is to be done for them, and the American Churches must do it. In our foreign populations, let it be remembered, is the stronghold of Romanism; her position is strong with the immigrants who speak our tongue; it is doubly strong with those who speak a foreign tongue; it is quadrupled in the case of those annexed to us, dwelling still upon their own soil, speaking their own language, surrounded by petrified forms of society, Romanized for centuries, and bringing with them all the established institutions for perpetuating their bondage and blindness.

And every future accession of territory must be of this stamp, and will directly strengthen and establish Romanism in our government. And, as already stated, politicians will never molest Romish superstition; this is the work of the Churches. The addition of Romish territory, in our judgment, is quite as important a consideration to our countrymen, as whether it will be a slave territory. It unquestionably will be slave territory, if Romish territory, and slavery of the worst and most dangerous form to our government. Will our Christians, will our citizens look at this subject?

The work of annexation will go on. It is "manifest destiny." A revolution has commenced that can never stand still or go backward. Acquisitions will not only be made as they have been in the past, they will be accelerated. Every addition of territory increases the attractive power of the magnet, and they will come thicker and faster, while there remains a foot to be added. Provinces are now standing on the threshold of the door of the American Union, about to knock for admission; and revolution is doing its work all through Mexico, preparing other provinces to tread closely in their footsteps. And we can only add ignorance, superstition, and idolatry; heathenism and Romanism.

Now what are the American Churches doing in this field, either to meet the exigencies of the present, or the political certainties of the future? NOTHING! They have been entirely unprepared for the accessions of the past, and are asleep as to the importance of the future. The American government has already far outstripped, with its political ameliorations, the American Churches with their religious instructions. These are now far behind in their territorial work. Our prairies and our plains, our mountain tops and our grassy glens, the long line of our river banks, and our spreading lake shores, are yet many of them moral deserts; many of them are seats of superstition and haunts of heathenism, notwithstanding our hundreds of western missionaries. But in this particular department, in behalf of the Spanish population, we repeat, we are doing nothing, present or prospectively. What Church can point to its missionary, a single missionary, for the thirty thousand foreigners speaking the Spanish language? What Church can point to its missionary among the sixty thousand or seventy thousand Mexicans in our annexed territory! Ah, there is one Church that has a poor little sickly mission in New-Mexico; and another Church, and still another Church, that made feeble efforts to reach that portion of our fellow citizens. But these efforts were so feeble and so soon abandoned, that they served only to excite hopes to be cut off. The Churches should have their missionaries in that country. We need

not large and expensive establishments to dazzle to blindness, but we do need and ought to have a few patient, persevering, wise Christian ministers scattered over the territory of New-Mexico, and along the banks of the Rio Grande, sapping, and mining, and blasting for the overthrow of Romanism and the Americanization of the Mexicans. Where are the Churches making preparations for the future additions from Mexico, from Central America and the West India Islands? Is the American Church ready for her part of the work of our country's world mission? Where are our missionary institutes, an immediate need of the Church, in which our young men can acquire the modern languages to fit them for the vast foreign fields of American missions? The miraculous gift of tongues is almost as necessary to prepare the American Church for her circumstances, as it was for the apostles on the day of Pentecost? And we might almost suppose that the Church was waiting for such a miraculous dispensation.

In obedience to the providence of God, we ought to apply ourselves to the work before us. In view of the signs of the times indicating future enlargement, we ought to lay our plans commensurate with the probabilities of the case, lest God take away our heritage from us. Whatever may be the result of the American government, whether it will hold together or not, under the expansion anticipated, Christianity, pushing its conquest coequal with it, and under it, is designed to fill the whole earth. It is no longer dependent upon civil government. Its conquests hereafter will be maintained May its triumph and establishment in the western world be accomplished by the American Churches!

ART. VIII.-THE OLDEST OPPOSITION TO CHRISTIANITY, AND ITS DEFENSE.

The Evidences of Christianity, as exhibited in the Writings of its Apologists down to Augustine. Hulsean Prize Essay. By W. J. BOLTON, Professor at Cambridge. Reprinted at Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 1854.

THE work of Professor Bolton, though not characterized either by eminent learning or ability, gives a tolerably complete view, more so than any other book in the English language, of the literary conflict of Christianity with its earliest opponents, and the rise of apologetic literature. This conflict is one of the most interesting and instructive chapters in the history of the ante-Nicene and Nicene age. shows that most of the objections of modern infidelity against Christianity have been anticipated by a Celsus, Lucian, Porphyry, FOURTH SERIES, VOL. X.-40

It

and others, in the second and third centuries, and ably and successfully refuted by Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, and other apolo gists of that age. Its faithful exhibition, therefore, is well calculated to destroy confidence in infidelity, and to strengthen faith in the inherent eternal truth of our holy religion.

Without any further reference to Bolton, and pursuing a very different plan, we shall present first the various kinds of attack Inade upon Christianity in the first three centuries, and then trace the origin and principal arguments of apologetic divinity, or the scientific defense of the Christian religion.

I. OPPOSITION TO CHRISTIANITY.

1. JEWISH OPPOSITION.

When Christianity first made its appearance in the world it found as little favor with the representatives of literature and art as with emperors, princes, and statesmen. In this point of view, also, it was not of the world, and was compelled to force its way through the greatest difficulties; yet it proved at last the mother of an intellectual and moral culture far in advance of the Græco-Roman, capable of endless progress, and full of the vigor of perpetual youth.

The hostility of the Jewish Scribes and Pharisees to the Gospel is familiar from the New Testament. Josephus mentions Jesus once in his Archæology, but in terms so favorable as to agree ill with his Jewish position, and thus to be, at least in their present form, open to critical suspicion. The attacks of the later Jews upon Christianity are essentially mere repetitions of those recorded in the Gospels; denial of the Messiahship of Jesus, and horrible vituperation of his confessors. We learn their character best from the Dialogue of Justin with the Jew Trypho. The ȧvridoyis Παπίσκου καὶ Ἰάσωνος, which has been once unjustly attributed to the Jewish Christian, Aristo of Pella, is lost.

2. TACITUS AND PLINY.

The Græco-Roman writers of the first century, and some of the second, as Seneca, the elder Pliny, and even the mild and noble Plutarch, either from ignorance or contempt, never allude to Christianity at all. Tacitus and the younger Pliny, cotemporaries and friends of the Emperor Trajan, are the first to notice it; and they speak of it only incidentally, and with stoical disdain and antipathy, as an "exitiabilis superstitio," "prava et immodica superstitio," "inflexibilis obstinatio." These celebrated, and in their way altogether estimable Roman authors thus, from manifest ignorance, saw in the Christians nothing but superstitious fanatics, and put

them on a level with the hated Jews; Tacitus, in fact, reproaching them also with the "odium generis humani." This will afford some idea of the immense obstacles which the new religion encountered in public opinion, especially in the cultivated circles of the Roman empire. The Christian apologies of the second century also show that the most malicious and gratuitous slanders against the Christians were circulated among the common people, even charges of incest and cannibalism, which may have arisen in part from a misapprehension of the intimate brotherly love of the Christians, and their nightly celebration of the holy supper.

*

3. CELSUS.

The direct assault upon Christianity, by works devoted to the purpose, began about the middle of the second century, and was very ably conducted by a Grecian philosopher, Celsus, otherwise unknown; according to Origen, an Epicurean, and a friend of Lucian.

Celsus, with all his affected or real contempt for the new religion, considered it important enough to be opposed by an extended work, entitled, "A True Discourse," of which Origen has preserved considerable fragments in his refutation. These represent their author as an eclectic philosopher of varied culture, skilled in dialectics, and somewhat read in the writings of the apostles, and even in the Old Testament. He speaks now in the frivolous style of an Epicurean, now in the earnest and dignified tone of a Platonist. At one time he advocates the popular heathen religion, as, for instance, its doctrine of demons; at another time he rises above the polytheistic notions to a pantheistic or skeptical view. He employs all the aids which the culture of his age afforded, all the weapons of learning, common-sense, wit, sarcasm, and dramatic animation of style, to disprove Christianity; and he anticipates most of the arguments and sophisms of the deists and naturalists of later times. Still his book is, on the whole, a very superficial, loose, and lightminded work, and gives striking proof of the inability of the natural reason to understand the Christian truth. It has no savor of humility, no sense of the corruption of human nature and man's need of redemption; and it could, therefore, not in the slightest degree appreciate the glory of the Redeemer and of his work.

Celsus first introduces a Jew, who accuses the mother of Jesus of adultery with a soldier named Panthera,† adduces the denial of

* Οιδιπόδειοι μίξεις, incesti concubitus; and θνεστεία δεῖπνα, Thyesteæ epulm. †Пávonp, panthera, here, and in the Talmud, where Jesus is likewise called 777, is used, like the Latin lupa, as a type of ravenous lust, hence as a symbolical name for μοιχεία.