addresses, for their irregularities and grievous sins. It is plain that he uses the term as exactly equivalent to Christians:-as applying to all who had professed Christianity and been baptized into the Christian Church. And the same may be said of several other terms which are applied by him, and by the other sacred writers, to what we now call Christians. They are often addressed as the Brethren, the Elect, [or chosen] the Called, and the Disciples. But it is very remarkable that amidst all this variety of appellations, they are never once addressed by that of Christians, which has been, for so many ages, their constant designation. Thrice only does the word occur in the New Testament; and never, as applied by Christians to one another. We find it mentioned, in Acts xi., as the title for the first time bestowed on the Disciples at Antioch: evidently, by the Romans, as the name is of Latin formation. Again we find Agrippa saying to Paul, "almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." And lastly, we find the Apostle Peter adverting to it as the designation, among the unbelieving heathen rulers, of a crime for which the Believers suffered per

secution.

He exhorts them to take care that none of them suffer "as a murderer, a thief, or an evil-doer; but if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed."

The title then, was, it appears, perfectly well known in the Apostolic age; and it was not held as a term of reproach among Christians; for they gloried in the name of Christ; but yet they never applied it, as we now do, to one another.

Now this fact, (however it is to be accounted for, or whether we can account for it at all or not), is one from which we may draw an important conclusion as to the antiquity of the books of the New Testament. Suppose these books had been, as some daring speculators have presumed to conjecture, not really composed in the apostolic age, by the persons whose name they bear, but compiled in the second, third, or fourth century, out of traditions afloat in the Church, and then fathered upon the Apostles and Evangelists, by fraud, carelessness, and ignorance :-suppose this had been the case, how certain it is that we should have found in these books the word Christians,

as commonly applied by Christians, to each other, as we know it was in those ages. For the word is thus employed by the writers of those ages, and of all subsequent times, whose works have come down to us, almost as commonly as in the present day. Any compiler, therefore, in those ages, making up a pretended original book out of floating traditions, would have been morally certain to apply the title Christians, whenever he had occasion, just as he and all those around him had been accustomed to do.

We, have here, therefore, a complete refutation of that rash conjecture I have been alluding to. The absence, throughout all the New Testament writings, of the word Christian, as applied by Christians to each other, alone furnishes, even to a plain unlearned reader, a complete proof of the antiquity of those writings.

And the anxiety of infidels to disprove that antiquity shews plainly how they despair of contending, in any other way, against their truth. Such accounts as these books contain of a multitude of wonderful events, could never possibly (if false) have been circulated without detection,

at the very time when those events are described as occurring.

As for the cause why the Apostles did not apply to their converts the title of Christians, even if we should be unable to offer any conjecture as to that, the argument for the antiquity of the New Testament remains (as I have said) untouched. Be the cause what it may, the fact is certain, that shortly after the apostolic age, and from thence downwards, to the present day, all Christian writers have applied the title of Christians, just as we do now; and that it never is so applied in any of twenty-seven books of the New Testament; which, consequently, must have been written in the very days of the Apostles. But I think we may perceive, on attentive examination, what the cause was of this procedure of the Apostles.

The name of Christians came into use (as I have said) first, at Antioch in Syria; where a Church was founded, consisting, in a great measure, of Gentile converts, whose admission into the Gospel covenant had just before been announced to the Apostle Peter. And this it was that seems to have occasioned the name to arise.

In the previous period of the Church,- for about the first seven years, the Disciples being all Jews, the Romans were not likely to think it worth while to give them any other appellation than Jews. They did not trouble themselves about the different religious sects of a people they despised (a). But when they found a large and increasing body of men who consisted of both Jews and Gentiles, it became necessary to distinguish them by some name; and, naturally enough, they called them after their leader, Christ: which, though not his proper name, but his title, the Romans probably mistook for his name. I have already observed that the word Christian is of Latin formation, and must therefore have been coined by the Romans. But the same thing will appear, also, from the impossibility of its having originated with any other class of men. The Christians themselves certainly could not have been its inventors, since, as we have seen, they never used it. And the unbelieving Jews would never have employed a title which condemned themselves, by

(a) See Dr. Ilinds' History of the Rise of Christianity.