Thoughts on religion and philosophy Author:Blaise Pascal Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER. XVI. VARIOUS PROOFS OF JESUS CHRIST. I. If the testimony of the Apostles was undeserving of credit, they must have been either deceived themselves... more » or deceivers. It is difficult to maintain either supposition. As to the first, it was impossible for men in their senses to believe that they beheld a man restored to life whom they had seen expire, and laid in the grave, unless he had really risen from the dead; and as to the hypothesis, that they were impostors, nothing can be more absurd. Only follow it out. Imagine these twelve men meeting together after the death of Jesus Christ, to frame a tale about his resurrection, and on the faith of it, daring the united force of all the religious and civil establishments in the world. The human heart, we know, is prone to levity and change, easily moved by promises of worldly advantage. If by such motives, or by the still more powerful ones of a different class, by the prospect of imprisonment, torture, and death, one of their number had been induced to contradict himself, they and their scheme would have been ruined for ever. Pursue this thought to its legitimate consequences. As long as Jesus Christ was with them, his example might support them. But if after his death he did not appear to them again, what encouragement had they to proceed? II. In reading the Gospels, among many other qualities of the narrative that excite our admiration, one is struck with the total absence of invective against Judas, or Pilate, or any of the enemies of Jesus Christ, or of the persons engaged in putting him to death. Had this reserve of the evangelical historians been only assumed, as well as many other beauties in their compositions, and assumed for the purpose of attracting notice, even supposing they had refrained from alluding t...« less