ABSTRACT
The Christians, including all the variety of sects, including the Greeks of Turkey and Russia, and the colonists and converts in America, will not exceed one hundred and sixty millions. The history of the religion exhibits may vicissitudes and revolutions. Its progress for the three first centuries, during the flourishing period of Rome, was incessant and by very distinct degrees, till Romans, at length, and christians became synonymous terms. The numbers which the christian religion lost by the Mahometan conquests, it gained by the conversion of the Celts of Scotland and Ireland, and of the nations beyond the Rhine and the Baltic. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, christianity has been rapidly progressive. Asia has exhibited a somewhat different scene. Christian Europe, though many parts of it are incultivable, and no part is as well peopled as a wise government would make it, contains at the rate of fifty persons to a square mile.
