You, sir, allow that the authority on which this religion rests, would be sufficient to support it, if it were not for the consideration of your three propositions, the first of which, I trust, you will acknowledge stands in its vindication.
Your second proposition may now be noticed.
That part of mankind have believed and still are believing in miracles and revelations which are spurious, we have no interest in denying, but we feel under no obligation to admit this fact as any evidence against Christianity, or of any force to counterbalance the evidences which stand in its favour. What would you think of such kind of reasoning as should contend, that as it is evident that many have been, and still are imposed on by counterfeit money, it justifies serious doubts whether there ever was any true money in the world? Would you not reply, that as the counterfeit is entirely dependent on the true for its imposition, in room of being evidence that there is no true money, it demonstrates that there is?
It being well known, nor ever doubted by the friends or enemies of Christianity, that its founder and his apostles proved the divinity of their missions by miracles alone, it was nothing more than might be rationally expected, that impostors would rise up under those sacred pretensions, with a view to establish themselves. But if this religion of Jesus Christ, had not at first been built upon this foundation, impostors would never have thought of imposing on people with such pretensions. Impostors, therefore, together with all their deceptions, cannot, as I humbly conceive, be admitted as evidence _against_ the genuineness of the gospel, but in _favour_ of it.
As to Mahomet of whom you speak, I have always understood that he made no pretensions to miracles. He pretended to hold correspondence with the angel Gabriel, and to receive revelations from God in this way; but he never attempted to sanction his divinity by miracles; and indeed there was no need of this, for he declared he was commissioned from heaven to propagate his religion by the sword, and to destroy the monuments of idolatry. His kingdom was of this world, therefore did his servants fight; but they did not fight always alone, for he fought at nine battles or sieges in person, and in ten years achieved fifty military enterprizes. He united religion and plunder, by which he allured the vagrant Arabs to his standard. He asserted that the sword was the key of heaven and hell; that a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms are of more account than two months of fasting and prayer. He assured those who should fall in battle, that their sins should be forgiven at the day of judgment, that their wounds would be resplendant as vermillion and odoriferous as myrrh, and that the loss of limbs should be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim. But what you can find in Mahometism which in the least militates against the evidences of Christianity I know not. It is affirmed by writers, that he collected his ideas of God and of morals from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.