The diegesis Author:Robert Taylor 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: liberty with the inscription, compliments the citizens on such a proof of their predisposition to receive the God whom he propounded to them, or any other, as we... more »ll without evidence as with it, and to be converted without putting him to the trouble of a miracle. Acts xvii. 22. The inhabitants of Lystra, upon only hearing of the most equivocal and suspicious case of wonderment that could well be imagined, even that a lame beggar, who might have been hired for the purpose, or probably had never been hired at all, had been cured, or imagined himself cured, by two entire strangers, itinerant Therapeutae, or tramping quack- doctors, without either enquiry or doubt, set up the cry, " That Jupiter and Mercury were coma down from heaven in the shape of these quack- doctors ;" and with all the doctors themselves could do to check the intensity of their devotion, " scarce restrained they the people that they had not done sacrifice."—Acts xiv. 18. CHAPTER IV. THE STATE OF THE JEWS The grand exception to the harmonious universalism of religions, and to that entire prevalence, as far as religion was concerned, of " peace on earth and good will among men," which arose from the practical conviction of a sentiment which had passed into a common proverb, " Deorum Injuri.s:, Dus Cviije," that " The wrongs of the gods were the concerns of the gods," occurred among a melancholy and misanthropic horde of exclusively superstitious barbarians, who, from their own and the best account that we have of them, were colonized from their captivity, by a Babylonian prince, on the sterile soil of Judea, men of Athens, I perceive that ye are exceedingly addicted to the worship of demons..' 3. Archbishop Newcomb's Version "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are somewhat too reli...« less