ABSTRACT
Another important objection of the Age of Reason, to the Gospel Revelation, is on account of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, as related by the Evangelists, which our author asserts “was the necessary counterpart of the story of Christ’s birth. His historians having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again, in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.—The wretched contrivance, with which this latter part is told, exeeeds every thing that went before it.—The resurrection of a dead person from the grave and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different, as to the evidence it admits of to the invisible conception of a child in the womb.—The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and occular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a baloon, or the sun at noon day, to all Jerusalem at least.—A thing which every body is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it, should be equal to all and universal: and as the public visibility of this last related act, was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because the evidence never was given.—Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced, as proxies for the whole world, to say that they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it.”
