Joseph Addison’s The Evidences of the Christian Religion is a work of Christian apologetics: a compact, closely reasoned defence of the historical truth of the gospel, written in the early eighteenth century by the essayist and statesman best known for his contributions to the Spectator. The volume summarised here is the 1807 London edition, which pairs Addison’s text with the extensive scholarly notes of Gabriel Seigneux de Correvon, a magistrate and man of letters of Lausanne, translated into English by the Reverend Richard Purdy. Addison’s argument proceeds not by abstract theology but by weighing testimony — pagan, Jewish, and Christian — as a lawyer might weigh evidence, and the nine sections of the treatise build that case in order.
“O magna vis veritatis ! quag contra honnnum ingenia, calliditatem, solertiam, contraque fictas oraniura insidias, facilb se per se ipsam defendat.”
How the Case for the Gospel Is Built
The 1807 London Edition and Its Translator’s Preface
The volume opens with the marks of its own history: a University of California Library stamp recording receipt in September 1885, and the record of digitization by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from Microsoft. The title page presents Addison’s Evidences of the Christian Religion with notes by Gabriel Seigneux de Correvon, Counsellor of Lausanne, now first translated into English by the Rev. Richard Purdy, D.D., of Queen’s College, Oxford, Vicar of Cricklade, Wilts. A Latin tag from Cicero on truth’s power to defend itself stands above the imprint: London, 1807, printed for F. C. & J. Rivington, T. Cadell & W. Davies, and Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme.
Purdy dedicates the book to the Rev. Robert Nares, Archdeacon of Stafford, praising his zeal for Christian doctrine and his steady observance of its precepts, and offering the volume as a token of esteem and gratitude. His preface makes the case for the project: defences of religion are many, but so are attacks, and nothing valuable of the former kind should be allowed to perish. A great name, he suggests, may begin a conversion which further enquiry and divine blessing complete; Addison’s name commands attention for his sagacity, his knowledge, his active genius, and his pure heart. The tract had once circulated widely but loses its hold with time, and Purdy hopes to revive attention by joining Addison in English to his commentator, long celebrated on the Continent. Seigneux de Correvon’s learned notes had swollen Addison’s concise argument to two octavo volumes little known in England; Purdy keeps the new matter separate so that Addison’s brevity and elegance remain readable, while the notes support his reasoning—Addison, he says, is like a general pointing out the plan of war, the notes like his troops carrying the design into effect. Both advocates, he observes, were friends to civil liberty: Addison wrote amid the struggles of two contending parties and took the popular side; Seigneux, in a land where liberty flourished, supported Addison while Voltaire and his associates laboured to undermine religion and civil society, preparing the way for atrocities that later stained Europe. Purdy claims only the credit of a faithful translator; some passages of Seigneux’s notes are omitted with reasons given, the authorities quoted were examined and references sometimes corrected, and a few marginal notes added. Addison’s text was collated with the edition first published from his manuscript by Tickell. Information on Seigneux came from Mr. Planta, Principal Librarian of the British Museum, drawing on a German work and a list of his writings; Archdeacon Nares suggested the work and lent the volumes.
The Life of Seigneux de Correvon
Gabriel de Seigneux sprang from an ancient noble family of the Pays de Vaud. Educated at Lausanne, he studied divinity at Geneva and took the degree of Licentiate of Laws at Basle in 1717. He held municipal offices at Lausanne, entered the senate in 1723, and became Treasurer in 1740. In 1726 he founded a charity school where two hundred orphans were educated; in 1735 he married Julia de Loys and acquired the Lordship of Correvon, whose name he added to his own. His literary exertions were indefatigable: in 1725, with Abr. Rochat, L. Bourquet and others, he set on foot the Bibliotheque Italique, which ran to seventeen volumes. He was elected a member of the British Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1732 and of the Academy of Belles Lettres of Marseilles in 1743. A list of his works follows—odes, idyls, fables, prose tracts—and two dissertations, on the Sibylline Oracles and on the continuance of miraculous powers after the Apostles, are subjoined to the present work in the original.
Preliminary Reflections on the Excellence of Christianity
Seigneux opens with the religion’s excellence of object and its admirable choice of means, worthy of God’s majesty, goodness, and wisdom and of man’s liberty and dignity. Were religion presented under no other aspect, none could withdraw from its influence. But the corrupted heart submits unwillingly and cannot without pain make the sacrifices religion demands; this interested repugnance is the source of excuses for disobedience and of perverse objections that have seduced even the well-inclined. Some say the precepts are too difficult, others that the doctrines cannot be believed—both objections almost always from the same quarter. Most bad Christians and avowed enemies wage war against profound mysterious truths because they cannot explain them as self-evident propositions, striving to render the whole system suspect. Yet the arguments suffice for well-disposed minds. It is no risk to grant that though man is made for truth, not all truths are made for man; understandings differ, and truths are adjusted to comprehension. The same gradation among human intellects presumably exists in the world of spirits; some truths are discerned by God alone—his sublime decrees and things the Angels desire to look into, which shows their knowledge is imperfect. The certainty of a truth does not depend on facility of apprehension; obscurity involving it to one throws a thin veil over another and has no effect on superior faculties. Possibly our faculties are not so much limited as obstructed—like a curtain or mountains bounding the horizon. Mysterious truths of religion are probably of this kind: obscure to us, clear to God and numberless immaterial beings. God could have revealed them fully, but
Defending Addison Against the Charge of Credulity
The editorial notes turn to Addison’s reputation. The note-writer insists his aim is only to show that Addison “asserts nothing to justify” a charge of credulity, warning that feeble evidence or a single bold allegation discredits a writer, gives occasion to accuse him of injustice and insincerity, and lets the ill-designing set such defects above better testimonies, especially in religion. Addison, he holds, deserves no censure: he places the Acts of Pilate among lost proofs, not existing ones, reasoning that many authentic records are lost, and that a heathen Governor of Judea, contemporary with the events, probably wrote an account, traces of which are in history. The author faithfully states the testimonies of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Eusebius. Justin lived near our Lord’s time; his Apology is addressed to the Emperor and all the Senate; he states plain facts and appeals to a public record, addressing a cynical philosopher, a bitter enemy to Christianity, before that very Caesar. Justin’s mistakes—the inscription “Semoni Sanco,” reverence for relics, credulity about the LXX cells—deserve censure but do not deprive him of credit, since Tertullian confirms him, a Roman lawyer acquainted with the Empire’s customs. Pilate must have thought the case worthy of detail: not an ordinary man condemned for a crime, but one whose fate interested all the Jews, and whom Pilate himself saw as extraordinary.
The Silence of the Oracles
The argument turns to the heathen oracles and the claim that they fell silent at the coming of Christ. The church fathers treat this as one of the most striking proofs of Christianity’s divinity. Tertullian, Minutius Felix, Lactantius, Athanasius, Clement of Alexandria, Theodoret, Eusebius, Cyprian—all of Christian antiquity agree that the miraculous silence of the oracles is a powerful argument against idolatry. They would never have dared make the claim unless they were prepared to answer objectors who defended the oracles’ fading credit.
The pagans themselves concede the fact. Lucan complains that Delphi is silent, robbing the age of the gods’ greatest benefit. Statius says the silence will long be lamented with tears. Juvenal says mankind is condemned to ignorance of the future since the Delphic oracles ceased. Strabo goes further, noting that Dodona has failed like the rest.
Plutarch’s testimony carries special weight, since he was deeply learned, a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and materially interested in keeping the oracles’ credit alive. He admits their decline and enquires into the cause in a work full of wit and learning. Against M. de Fontenelle’s view that they fell by natural means—wars and revolutions in Greece—the author asks why Plutarch would need such profound discussions at all. Plutarch instead sought the cause in the mortality of the genii or in the earth’s exhaustion, no longer furnishing the exhalations that inspired the priests with divine frenzy. Cicero had touched on this solution but turned it to ridicule, seeing the absurdity of an exhalation giving supernatural virtue to the soul, or such divine power being exhausted by age like the flavour of wine. Plutarch placed little reliance on it, falling back on the alternative that the genii were mortal, crediting the story of Thammuz.
Porphyry confesses that from the time Jesus Christ began to be worshipped no one received help from the gods, who broke off communication with men. In a book supporting paganism by oracles he says diseases prevail because Æsculapius and the other gods have taken their leave of mankind since Jesus began to be worshipped. Porphyry meant to draw popular hatred on Christians by making Jesus the author of this misfortune, but the effect gives satisfactory evidence of the miraculous cessation, since Æsculapius had revealed remedies in dreams to the sick sleeping in his temple, and the stop to such revelations is imputed to Jesus.
Better evidence still is the confession of the devils themselves, wrested from them by Christians who forced them at the name of Jesus to own they were seducing spirits and to surrender the priests, priestesses and temples they possessed. Tertullian says Christians offered to make trial at the risk of their lives before heathen tribunals; the guardian spirits of the oracles disgraced themselves by humiliating confessions and renounced forever the advantages of their imposture. Lactantius says a man possessed of a devil and a priest of Delphos will both tremble at God’s name; Apollo will leave his false prophet as the devil departs from the possessed, and the priest will be silenced forever. He also tells of a single Christian, unknown to the assembled people at a sacrifice, at whose presence the augurs were at a loss and exclaimed that some profane intruder was in the crowd, upon which a tumult ensued. Cyprian calls on heathens to acknowledge the truth and believe what the very gods confessed, relating that evil spirits adjured by the true God obeyed without hesitation. Athanasius affirms that at Christ’s name devils were put to flight, oracles ceased, and magic lay abashed. Minutius Felix asks pagans to believe the devils’ testimony, since they would not lie to their own dishonour. Arnobius says when Jesus’ name was heard the evil spirits fled and oracles became dumb.
None of this should surprise those persuaded of the Gospel history, who heard the same demons cry to our Lord, “I know thee who thou art, the holy one of God.” The power given to the disciples was, upon his leaving the world, imparted to others of the faithful: “And these signs shall follow them that believe: in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues.” If it was necessary to God’s glory that the devils’ power cease in Judea, it was no less necessary that their impostures stop elsewhere, or the Almighty’s design in calling the gentiles could not be accomplished. Of all miracles wrought to establish Christianity none could be more efficacious; many fathers assert this caused the greatest astonishment to pagans and made the most converts, the most obstinate giving way before the defiances and their astonishing success.
Cicero’s argument is transcribed: “If there be gods, there must be oracles, and the art of learning their will, which is called Divination; there are gods, therefore there are oracles.” With greater probability the reverse follows: “There are no oracles, therefore there are no gods.” The conclusion is just, founded on the truth that a real Deity must have a real mode of revealing his will; gods with no mode but a detected, fallacious one were only imaginary gods.
Learned Converts and the Age That Received Them
Among the vast multitudes who embraced Christianity at its first appearance across the known nations, there must have been many wise and learned men besides those named in the Christian records, who examined the truth of the Saviour’s history before abandoning the religion of their country and forefathers for one that cut them off from worldly allurements and exposed them to everything terrible or disagreeable. Tertullian tells the Roman governors that corporations, councils, armies, tribes, companies, the palace, the senate and courts of judicature were filled with Christians; Arnobius asserts that men of the finest parts and learning—orators, grammarians, rhetoricians, lawyers, physicians, philosophers—despised their former sentiments and rested in the Christian religion. Such men, the author argues, must have thoroughly informed themselves of the history of the Person whose doctrines they embraced; nothing could have made them acknowledge him as God and Saviour but full persuasion of his miracles and the attestations of his divine mission. This was the groundwork of Christianity; if it failed, the whole superstructure sank. The truth of the Saviour’s history as recorded by the Evangelists is everywhere taken for granted by those who from pagan philosophers became Christian authors, who are therefore the strongest collateral testimony. Besides innumerable lost authors, we have names, works or fragments of several pagan philosophers as learned as any unconverted heathen of their age: at Athens, Dionysius, Quadratus, Aristides, Athenagoras; at Alexandria, Dionysius, Clemens, Ammonius, Arnobius and Anatolius, plus Origen, who though his father was a Christian martyr became the most learned philosopher of his age through education at Alexandria.
The editor’s notes press the point that no age was more enlightened than that in which Christ came.
Testing the Miracle of the Thundering Legion
The annotations turn first to the celebrated story of the Thundering Legion, and the editors let two learned voices spar over it. Thomasius, a discriminating critic, dismisses the whole circumstance as fabulous; yet even if it is set aside, enough remains to show God’s visible protection of the early Christians, since the supernatural power of Jesus’s name was plainly invoked in primitive times. Mosheim’s verdict is then offered as the balanced one. He separates the doubtful from the certain: it is certain that a Roman army, hemmed in by the enemy and desperate with thirst in a parched desert, was revived by sudden unexpected rain; certain that heathens and Christians alike judged the event extraordinary and miraculous, the former crediting Jupiter, the latter Christ, in answer to their prayers; beyond doubt that many Christians then served in the legions; and extremely probable that in such distress they implored their God and Saviour. Since Christians of that age read every extraordinary event as a miracle and ascribed to their prayers every uncommon advantage in the empire, their attribution is unsurprising. But the wise hold it an invariable maxim that no event is to be esteemed miraculous which may be rationally attributed to natural causes—and since the shower can be explained within the ordinary course of nature, the conclusion is manifest.
The Duration of Miraculous Power
A note keyed to Addison’s own text takes up the question of how long such helps lasted. When he speaks of cures, of frenzy calmed, of the dead raised, of silence imposed on evil spirits and oracles under the eyes of learned pagans, he does not fix the period to which these powers were limited. They were authorized by God for as long as they were needed to build up the Church and to demonstrate that its founders acted under the Almighty, and they were displayed before countless people of every age, sex, and station, across nations of different tempers and several generations, so that every doubt might be removed. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Origen place the continuance of the power at the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. Irenæus, who lived to A.D. 202, asserts that Christians by grace cast out unclean spirits, that others had revelations and prophecy, that others healed the sick by laying on of hands, and that others raised the dead, who remained among them many years afterwards—all by calling only on the name of the crucified Jesus, not by charms or sorcery. Eusebius relates these things as facts of which no one was ignorant. Objections follow: Eusebius’s credulity; Irenæus’s shift from the present tense for casting out devils to the aorist for raising the dead; the suspicion that his words were copied from Quadratus, who wrote fifty years earlier; Theophilus’s answer in 168 to Autolicus, who demanded to see one man raised; and the silence of Clemens Romanus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and others on this species of miracle. The reply is that Irenæus never claims Christians of his own day raised the dead, only that some who had been raised were still alive; that power may have been confined to the Apostles and first disciples; and that the duration of the miraculous age, whether longer or shorter, does not touch the foundation of Christianity.
Miracles True and Counterfeit
The authority of miracles themselves is then weighed. That Jesus and his disciples performed them is sufficient warrant for their heavenly mission: many witnesses testify, and the greatest talents of the most enlightened ages have bowed to their evidence. What influence short of full conviction, the writer asks, could have procured the universal reception of miracles wrought by a man so meanly born, while those ascribed to three of the greatest emperors could never gain credit even among their own subjects? Augustus was said to cure a cripple—as ridiculous as Suetonius’s tale that the infant emperor commanded the frogs near his home to be silent, and from that day they never croaked. Suetonius also tells how Vespasian was persuaded to touch a blind man’s eyes and a cripple’s leg with his spittle; both patients claimed Serapis had advised them in a dream, and both were cured beyond the emperor’s expectation before the assembled people. Xiphilin adds that the whole affair was a contrivance of the Alexandrians, who hoped by such base flattery to win some favour from the new emperor.
Why Persecution Was Foreseeable
The argument then turns to prophecy and persecution. Nothing less than omniscience, the writer urges, could have foreseen that Christianity would spread so fast that its professors would grow numerous enough to alarm the defenders of the established religion and draw down universal persecution—for moderation toward differing persuasions has never been a common virtue. The Jews’ own conduct proves the point. The Sadducees, arising some two hundred years before the Messiah, denied the immortality of the soul and God’s regard for men’s actions, and Scripture charges them with denying angels, spirits, and the resurrection; yet Josephus records that they were not excluded from office but usually held the highest dignities. Bayle marvels that they were never excommunicated but remained members of the same religious body as other Jews, as Jansenists and Molinists remain within Rome. Who would have supposed that an almost direct atheism would keep every indulgence, while persecution’s savagery turned instead against a religion that only improved mankind, founded on the ancient Jewish worship, preached in simplicity, and attested by splendid miracles? From the Jews an odious and unnatural persecution arose. In the year 140, when neither party held authority in the state, it reached such extremity that Justin Martyr upbraids Trypho with it, noting that chosen men were sent from Jerusalem to proclaim to all the world that Christians were a sect of atheists guilty of every imaginable crime; Tertullian reports the same inveterate malice. Yet while the Jews raged, heathen rulers protected. Gallio, proconsul of Achaia and brother of Seneca, shielded Paul at Corinth; at Ephesus the town-clerk reprimanded the mob; neither Felix nor Festus would condemn him despite the Jews’ entreaties; Julius the centurion treated him humanely on the voyage; and at Rome he dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, preaching with all confidence, no man forbidding him. In Pilate’s efforts to save Jesus from the Jews’ fury, and in the Roman officers’ moderation, we see how little the heathens inclined to persecution—for it was a maxim of Roman government to hold every nation’s religion inviolably sacred. Livy gives an instance from Anagnia, subdued 305 years before Christ: the senate stripped the city of its privileges but respected its sacred rites and protected its priests. Cicero, prosecuting Verres, reprobates above all that he left the Sicilians no god at all, and appeals to the judges to support the religion of their allies, and even were it strange, to avenge its violation with blood.
Testimony, Hostile and Otherwise
The intellectual engine of the book is the appeal to adversaries. Addison’s favourite move is to show that the truth of Christianity is conceded precisely where we would least expect it: in the sneers of Celsus, who admitted Christ’s miracles while slandering his birth; in Tacitus, who records the execution under Pontius Pilate; in Suetonius, who calls the Christians a sect of sorcerers, thereby granting that they did astonishing things; in Porphyry, who complained that the gods had fallen silent since Jesus began to be worshipped. Even the Jews, the most determined opponents, are shown to have acknowledged the crucifixion and the miraculous works. The notes reinforce the point with a striking observation attributed to M. Huber: the Evangelists, men of the lower order among the Jews, could hardly have invented a trial and sentence so exactly conformable to Roman law unless they had eyewitnesses behind them.
This forensic instinct extends to the credibility of the witnesses themselves. Addison and his annotator return again and again to the sheer number and character of those who testified — the twelve Apostles, the seventy disciples, thousands of sensible and watchful persons, many of them hostile — and to the fact that no fraud could have survived so many interested parties. Had the miracles been fictitious, the numerous disaffected Christian sects, the Judaizers and Gnostics and Valentinians, would have exposed them; not one ever did. The argument is cumulative rather than dramatic, and its power lies in the piling up of independent witnesses who agree.
The Silence of the Oracles
One of the book’s most distinctive arguments concerns the cessation of the pagan oracles at the coming of Christ. Addison treats this as a species of public miracle, and the notes supply a rich dossier: the complaints of Lucan, Statius, and Juvenal that Delphi had fallen silent; the testimony of Plutarch, himself a priest of Apollo at Delphi, who admitted the decline and puzzled over its cause; and the confession of Porphyry that since Jesus began to be worshipped no one had received help from the gods. The fathers, from Tertullian to Lactantius and Athanasius, are marshalled to show that the demons were forced to confess and abandon their temples at the name of Jesus. The argument is framed by a neat turn on Cicero: if there are gods, there must be oracles; but there are no oracles, therefore the gods of the pagans were imaginary.
What the Argument Meant
The book belongs to a long campaign of Christian letters against deist and freethinking critics, and its preface makes the stakes explicit. Purdy presents Addison as a friend to civil liberty who wrote amid the struggles of contending parties, and Seigneux as a defender of religion in a land where liberty flourished, standing against Voltaire and his associates who, in Purdy’s view, laboured to undermine both religion and civil society. The annotator, meanwhile, is careful to defend Addison from any charge of credulity, insisting that his aim is only to show Addison asserted nothing that justified the accusation — a reminder that the credibility of a witness was itself a contested matter in these debates. The treatise endures as a specimen of a particular kind of eighteenth-century reasoning: patient, learned, and confident that the historical record, honestly examined, will do the work of proof.
