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But it is thoroughly ridiculous to make mention of the false divinity
of Romulus as any way comparable to that of Christ. Nevertheless,
if Romulus lived about six hundred years before Cicero, in an age
which already was so enlightened that it rejected all impossibilities,
how much more, in an age which certainly was more enlightened, being
six hundred years later, the age of Cicero himself, and of the
emperors Augustus and Tiberius, would the human mind have refused to
listen to or believe in the resurrection of Christ's body and its
ascension into heaven, and have scouted it as an impossibility, had
not the divinity of the truth itself, or the truth of the divinity,
and corroborating miraculous signs, proved that it could happen and had
happened? Through virtue of these testimonies, and notwithstanding
the opposition and terror of so many cruel persecutions, the
resurrection and immortality of the flesh, first in Christ, and
subsequently in all in the new world, was believed, was intrepidly
proclaimed, and was sown over the whole world, to be fertilized richly
with the blood of the martyrs. For the predictions of the prophets
that had preceded the events were read, they were corroborated by
powerful signs, and the truth was seen to be not contradictory to
reason, but only different from customary ideas, so that at length the
world embraced the faith it had furiously persecuted.
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