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Untitled Article
pfee&tttiott to make Jestos privy to their pious fr&ud ! He played his part so well by merest accident . He delayed coming two days after he had been sent for , and this unaccountable delay must almost have exhausted the patience of the pretended dead , and have disposed him to give up the stratagem ; or he might not have felt persuaded that power would be given him to recall t 6 life the friend whom he loved ; ' and the expected summons , c Lazarus come forth , ' might have been waited for in vain ! Surely he ought to have been admitted to the secret;—it is a
wonder that his simplicity did not ruin all ! One other matter of surprise there is connected with the subject , —very soon dismissed by our author , —that the priests , who are allowed to have entertained the bitterest * jealousy and dislike of Jesus , could neve * expose the fraud . They * possessed , ' he says , ' no means of discovering the fraud , even were they suspicious of it ; their interrogations of the members of the family would be met with solemn asseverations of the reality of Lazanis ' s death—of his
present existence they were enabled to judge for themselves . ' Were the ordinary precursors of a young man ' s death , sickness , and medical attendance , and friendly inquiry , and the ordinary ceremonies of laying out and burying , —were all these omitted or unobserved in this solitary case ? Surely the priests could have found some occasion for discrediting the truth of Lazarus ' s death , if it had not been tolerably notorious . It must have been beyond doubt , or doubt would have been suggested by those who wished to discredit it . The truth seems to be , that they were not
even * suspicious of it ; ' and that , being unable to discredit the fact of the death or the resuscitation , they had no resource but to persecute Jesus and Lazarus conjointly . Of the miracles ascribed to popular and apostolical invention , I shall allude to one only , viz ., the resurrection and ascension of Jesus . With this third class of miracles begins the second part of the author's theory , in which , after having maintained , as the first , a mixture of competency and delusion , he alleges a mixture of fraud with integrity against the Christian apostles and evangelists . * What I contend , ' he says ( p . 118 ) , that
experience allows me to affirm , is this , that St . Matthew and St . John would not hesitate to publish accounts of miracles such as these , though they themselves disbelieved them , if they thought they would contribute to uphold or spread the religion in which they had really a sincere belief / There is at least a . verbal incongruity here , in spite of the author ' s efforts to disclaim it . The Testirrection and ascension of Jesus were , in the words
• of Dr . Chalmers , * not only the evidences , but the distinguishing doctrines t > f the religion ; there is , therefore , in their case , an absolute inconsistency betwixt a conviction of the truth of the cause fcftd the consciousness of the Frauds used it * support of it . Those frauds , if I fl » y so express myself , constituted the very
Untitled Article
% M Orthodoxy % , m Wti&eifof .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1832, page 834, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1826/page/42/
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