A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion

Jenyns opens by noting that most defenders of Christianity argue from prophecy, from miracles, or from internal evidence — and that he intends to take the third road alone, leaving the other two to others.

His argument is that the morality of the Gospels is not an improvement on ancient ethics but a reversal of it. The virtues it commands — humility, poverty of spirit, forgiveness of injury, patience under insult, indifference to worldly honor — were not merely absent from the classical moral systems but were regarded there as defects. A religion invented by men, he argues, would have flattered the instincts men actually have.

The book was admired well beyond its length. Paley wrote that he would gladly have transcribed the whole of Jenyns on the morality of the Gospel into his own Evidences, because it agreed with his opinion and because it was impossible to say the same things so well; and it was reported of Patrick Henry that he had been skeptical in early life and was satisfied of the truth of Christianity by reading this treatise.

The American Tract Society edition is free at Archive.org, though that printing notes that a few passages not essential to the argument were omitted. Our edition is a clean, corrected typesetting.

This edition follows the British Library’s copy of the Dublin fourth edition of Soame Jenyns’s A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, printed for W. Wilson and R. Moncrieffe in 1776, the year the book first appeared in London. Nothing is abridged.

THE PRINTING WE DID NOT USE, and why it matters more than usual. The obvious source was the American Tract Society’s edition, which is by far the cleanest scan of this book in existence and the one every modern reader is likely to meet. It is abridged, and it says so, in a line of its own front matter that is easy to read past: “In the present edition a few passages, not essential to the argument, have been omitted.”

We set the Tract Society text beside a complete eighteenth-century one, both put through the same cleaning so that the comparison was fair, and the omission comes to about 850 words. The largest single cut runs to roughly 470 of them, and it is not a digression. It is the passage in which Jenyns distinguishes a revelation from the records of a revelation — supposing, for the sake of argument, that the temptation in the wilderness and the devils in the herd of swine were “stories accommodated to the ignorance and superstitions of the times,” and asking whether that would impeach the religion itself. He goes on to say that the common phrase that the scriptures are the word of God should not be taken to mean that every part of “this voluminous collection of historical, poetical, prophetical, theological, and moral writings” was dictated by immediate divine inspiration, since its authors claim no such infallibility for themselves.

That is a substantive argument, and an 1850 tract society had reasons of its own for dropping it. They were not Jenyns’s reasons. A second, shorter cut removes his comment on Christ’s saying that his disciples are not of the world. We print both, as we print everything else he wrote, because the promise here is the author’s book and not a publisher’s view of it — including where a reader today, or we ourselves, might wish he had put it differently.

WHICH SCAN, WHICH IS A SEPARATE QUESTION FROM WHICH EDITION. The complete text survives only in eighteenth-century printings, and there the difference between one digitisation and another is enormous. A scan made by Google reads every long s as an f — “muft”, “firft”, “fame” — and leaves roughly one word in seven unreadable; on the strength of that one file this title was nearly set aside as unbuildable. The British Library’s scans of the same book record the long s as the letter it is, and leave one suspect word in twenty-seven to thirty-nine. This edition is built from the best of those.

The long s has been folded to s throughout. That is not an edit to the text: ſ and s are one letter in two shapes, set by a rule about where the letter falls in the word, and “ſucceſs” and “success” are the same spelling. Jenyns’s own spelling stands, including the forms his century used and ours does not — “intitled”, “inforced”, “intirely”, “compleat”.

THREE FURTHER PRINTINGS WERE READ AGAINST THIS ONE, word by word: the British Library’s 1798 and 1799, and a second copy of 1776. A hundred and ten readings in this text come from them — seventy-three from the 1798, twenty-five from the 1799, twelve from the second 1776 — and each is recorded with its context in the collation logs kept with the edition.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the author. Page numbers, catchwords, signature marks and the printer’s furniture have been removed; words broken at a line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary or another printing settles the question. The title page of this copy is the most damaged thing in the file — it renders “By Soame Jenyns, Esq.” as “By S OA M E RESENT IS Es C.” — and nothing there is recoverable that the book’s own catalogue entry does not already hold, so the text begins where Jenyns begins.

The book has no chapters. It has an opening statement, three numbered Propositions and a Conclusion longer than any of them, and that is how it is set out here. In every scan we hold, at least one Proposition heading has lost its numeral to the scanner — display capitals are the first thing to go, and the four copies each lose a different one — so the divisions in this edition are taken from the sentences in which Jenyns announces them himself: “VERY little need be said, to establish my first Proposition”, “MY second proposition is not quite so simple”, “My third proposition is this”.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.