A View of the Evidences of Christianity

Paley sets aside the argument from design he is now better known for and argues entirely from testimony. His case is two propositions: that many who professed to have seen the Christian miracles passed their lives in labours, dangers and sufferings voluntarily undergone in attestation of what they reported; and that no body of witnesses to any other miracle has ever done the same.

The force of it is not that the apostles were honest but that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose. Men do not accept poverty, imprisonment and execution for a story they know they made up. Hume had argued a generation earlier that no testimony can establish a miracle; Paley's reply is that this particular testimony is of a kind Hume's argument never contemplated.

Part II turns to the auxiliary evidences — prophecy, the morality of the Gospel, the candour of writers who record what no forger would invent, and the undesigned coincidences between the letters and the narrative. Part III answers the objections: the discrepancies between the Gospels, the errors imputed to the apostles, and the fact that so much of the world never heard of any of it.

The text is free at Project Gutenberg, transcribed from the London printing of 1851, and that transcription is the source of our edition. It carries no recognition damage, so what our edition adds is the book's structure, its chapter titles restored to their chapters, and readable typography.

This edition of William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity follows the London printing of 1851, as transcribed for Project Gutenberg. The work first appeared in 1794.

THERE IS NO SCAN BEHIND THIS ONE, and that is worth saying because most of our editions are repaired photographs of paper. A transcription is a text someone has typed and proofread from the page, so there is no recognition damage in it at all — no letters the machine guessed at, no page numbers fallen into the middle of a sentence, nothing to collate against a second copy. What we have done here is the other half of the work: found the divisions the printer marked, restored the chapter titles to the chapters they belong to, and set the whole of it in our own typography.

WHAT LOOKS LIKE A MISTAKE AND IS NOT. The first nine chapters of Part I have no titles of their own, and each of them opens by restating the same proposition word for word. That is how Paley built the book, and he says so: “The first of these propositions, as it forms the argument, will stand at the head of the following nine chapters.” The proposition is the heading. We have left it exactly where he put it.

Two further chapters, one in Part I and one in Part II, carry no title in the printing either, and they are given here as they are printed, by number alone.

The text is Paley’s and the spelling is his century’s — “connexion”, “shewn”, “compleat” where they occur. We have not modernised them.

WHAT IS NOT HERE. The transcription carries Project Gutenberg’s licence at both ends, several thousand words of modern legal English which is not part of the book; it has been removed, as has the publisher’s table of contents, which numbers the pages of a printing this reader does not have. The book’s own three-part structure is kept and is the table of contents here.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.