I would most earnestly entreat the reader to believe my solemn assurances, that by nothing that I have said, or shall be under the necessity of saying, do I think, or mean to intimate the slightest disparagement to the moral character of one, whose purity of morals, and good intentions, deserve any thing else but reproach.

That he was an enthusiast, I do not doubt, that he was a wilful impostor I never will believe.

And I protest before God, that from the apprehensions above-mentioned alone, I would have confined the contents of this volume to myself, did I not feel compelled to justify myself for having quitted a profession: and did I not, above all, think it my duty, to make a well meant attempt, which I hope will be seconded, to vindicate the unbelief of an unfortunate nation, who, on that account, have for almost eighteen hundred years, been made the victim of rancorous prejudice, the most infernal cruelties, and the most atrocious wickedness.

If the Christian religion be, in truth, not well founded, surely it is the duty of every honest and every humane, man, to endeavour to dispel an illusion, which certainly has been, notwithstanding any thing that can be said to the contrary, the bona fide, and real cause of unspeakable misery, and of repeated, and remorseless plunderings, and massacres, to an unhappy people; the journal of whose sufferings, on account of it, forms the blackest page in the history of the human race, and the most detestable one in the history of human superstition .-- E.
* Jerome, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, says, that "The Church of Christ was not gathered from the Academy, or the Lyceum, but from the lowest of the people." [Vili Plebecula.] And Coecilius, in Minutius Felix, says, that the Christian assemblies were made up "de ultima faece collectis, imperitioribus, et mulieribus credulis sexus suae facilitate labentibus," i.e.

"that they consisted of the lowest of the mob, simple and unlearned, men, and credulous women." The president of a province is introduced, by Prudentius as thus addressing a martyr:--"Tu qui Doctor, ait, seris novellum Commenti genus, ut Leves Puellae, Lucos destituunt, Jovem relinquant; Damnes, si sapias, ANILE DOGMA." The Christian Fathers confess, and glory in it, that the greater part of their congregations consisted of women and children, slaves, beggars, and vagabonds.
The Jewish Christians were, as appears evidently from the New Testament, exceedingly poor, and therefore there is frequent mention made of contributions for "the poor Saints at Jerusalem." From thence it was that the Jewish Christians got the name of Ebionites, i.e.Poor.