Excerpt from History of Christianity: From Its Promulgation, to Its Legal Establishment in the Roman Empire IN the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; this great truth, familiar to us from childhood, is solemnly proclaimed as the first lesson taught to us by Revelation, and is at the same time the final con elusion to which we are led by our investigations of Natural Religion. Those who have been born and educated in a Christian land, whose fathers have declared to them the wondrous works which God wrought in their days, and in the old time before them, cannot easily comprehend the necessity for the express revelation of a fact which, from constant repe tition, has become as positive to them as the conscious ness of their own existence; they have heard that, in other times, and in distant lands, the knowledge of a Creator has become indistinct and obscure, but they can scarcely comprehend how it should have been so nearly effaced, that Infinite ivisdom, which does nothing in vain, had to announce this forgotten fact through the means of miracles and inspiration. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.