REMARKS BY THE EDITOR.

THIS is that HISTORICAL ARGUMENT which, in our preliminary observations on the claims of Divine Revelation, we said was one of the strongest and clearest that ever has been delivered on any historical question whatever. Dr. Paley draws from it the conclusion that the Religion must be TRUE. The early propagators of Christianity could not be deceivers. "By only not bearing testimony, they might have avoided all their sufferings, and have lived quietly. Would men in such circumstances pretend to have seen what they never saw; assert facts which they had no knowledge of; go about lying to teach virtue; and, though not only convinced of Christ's being an impostor, but having seen the success of his imposture in his crucifix ion, yet persist in carrying it on; and so persist, as to bring upo themselves for nothing, and with a full knowledge of the consequence enmity and hatred, danger and death?" We take for granted that the argument has been read and studied. The subject is surely worth the trouble. And now, It is the reader's business to declare honestly if the argument is good. Let him sit in judgment on it as a juror, and render his verdict according to the facts.

Deism once asserted that the Bible is a lie. Is the Deist answered? Is the Bible a lie? If it is, then what other events in the records of the past can you believe? Can you produce, on any point from the beginning of history to its latest eras, a proof better and stronger? We boldly aver you cannot.

Rationalism, or Naturalism, once asserted that miracles are impossible, and that the signs and wonders of the Bible are mythological legends not more credible than the labors of Hercules, or the metamorphoses of Ovid. The assumption of the former proposition—and we have seen that it is a mere assumption—necessitated the assertion of the latter. The only resource left was to resolve History into fable. Some portions of History were known to be fabulous; therefore, miracles being impossible, the New Testament History must be fabulous; its prodigies must be myths; and Jesus Christ, a pious young Israelite

of Nazareth must be mythologically clothed with the attributes of that Messiah whom the Jews expected. Christ, instead of being the founder of Christianity, must actually be the creature of the church and during the period of the ancient world's highest civilization Jews, whose countrymen crucified Christ as a blasphemer because he claimed to be Messiah and the Son of God, and Gentiles, who scorned his religion as a pernicious superstition, and persecuted his followers to the death, must combine to invest him with divine honors as the Saviour promised to the fathers! Assuredly that was not an age for the invention and adoption of new mythological legends-especially of legends which proclaimed open and irreconcilable war with all existing beliefs; which denounced all gods of the heathen as abomina tions, and depreciated the law of Moses as an imperfect thing. In ancient fabulous times, when history existed only in the shape of ballad and tradition, myths took their rise; but not surely in the Empire of Rome during the height of its glory. Legendary and mythological stories are expressly excluded by Paley as bearing no comparison with the miracles of the Gospel, just because the Gospels were written by contemporaries of Christ, who had most perfect knowledge of all they wrote. Are we to believe, after perusing the foregoing proof, that the New Testament Histories are of the same kind with the history of Bacchus or of Hercules, because forsooth the à priori assumption that miracles are impossible requires us thus to dispose of the Gospels? The actual cannot so far give way to the ideal. We have great respect for the subjective; but the objective is entitled to respect as well, and we cannot allow the former so to lord it over the latter. Perhaps too much reverence is paid to modern wild theories on the subject of religion. They are propounded so gravely, handled with such an air of philosophy, embellished sometimes with so many flowers of rhetoric and graces of sage reflection, that, like children under the guidance of Lemuel Gulliver, we fail to discern the absurdity of dreams that are told with all the soberness of truth. Surely the men must be in earnest, we think; and seriousness alone is deserving of consideration. Not always. Has German criticism convinced any man, other than a Teutonic visionary, that Homer's Iliad is a collection of Ballads, and not a grand whole, the creation of one glorious mind? The best answer to such an hypothesis is that it is nonsense. Had it not been German, no one would have listened to it for an instant. In like manner, the best, and perhaps the only worthy answer to those who coolly drop such an argument as Paley's into oblivion, or slur it over-ignore it—as something worn out and contemptibly ecclesiastical, while they

allege that miracles never happened, and that Jesus is a mythological personage—we say the best reply to such allegations is that, in the face of HISTORY, they are false, and, therefore, worse than nonsense. You may make a myth out of Theseus or Romulus because they lived in fabulous ages, and the story of their lives was committed to writing long after it had been embellished by superstition. But Christ d. not live in a fabulous age. He was born within the limits of the Roman Empire, in a region civilized before Rome was heard of, and during the Augustan Age itself. The memoirs of his life were written by his own associates, in a style as far removed as possible from that of legend or romance; and without doing outrage to common sense, you cannot make a myth of Him. You may as easily make a myth of Washington or Bonaparte.

Again, the Spiritualist ventures to say-indeed, is decidedly of opinion that Christ and the Bible have too long stood in the way of True Religion!—that they are idols—material objective forms ob scuring the absolute and divine. Man, they tell us, possesses a faculty of spiritual intuition, which, of itself, discerns the absolute, holds converse with the divine, and needs neither Christ nor Bible to aid and direct him; in fact, would do much better without Christ and without the Bible. These, like other idols, ought to be cast to the moles and bats, that man may come forth in the glory of his native light-free, beautiful, and good! And all this is alleged as Science, Philosophy, Spiritualism, while the History which Paley has so admirably and conclusively drawn from genuine authentic documents, is confidently set aside as something altogether objective and external! Well, it is objective-it is there; and you the spiritualist—can no more get past it by all your talk about the subjective, than Bishop Berkeley could have got past the great pyramid of Egypt by declaring that there is no matter. There was matter-a whole pyramid of matter; and the Bishop's theory was nonsense. The Spiritualist, we have said, holds to the existence of a faculty that discerns the absolute; and converses with the divine. So, also, does the Christian. He maintains that spiritual things are spiritually discerned. He declares that he is endowed with a power of spiritual apprehension which lays hold on the invisible, and brings him into immediate contact with God. He says that we all have access by one Spirit unto the Father; that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen; and that God's Spirit witnesseth with his own spirit that he is God's child. If the Spiritualist adduces his own consciousness in proof of a spiritual faculty, so also does the Christian; and if the question is to be decided by the number of

witnesses, the myriads of believers, who have lived an I died in faith, do still exceed the adherents of Spiritualism. But while the Spirit ualist and the Christian are thus at one in upholding a faculty of spiritual discernment, it so happens that the revelations of the Spiritualist's faculty are directly and irreconcilably contrary to HISTORY, whereas those of the Christians are entirely coincident with history. The Christian is as profoundly conscious that Christ Jesus is the very and the only SAVIOUR whom he needs, as the Spiritualist can be that Christ Jesus, or the Christian religion, is a myth. In the one case we have the concurrent testimony of consciousness and history; in the other a most hostile antagonism between consciousness and history. This being so, which of the two consciousnesses is likely to be the reality, and which, the delusion. My consciousness agrees with otherwise ascertained facts; your consciousness disagrees with the same. Are you the monomaniac, or Why should there be so much enmity to a Historical faith, and an objective revelation? Is it not that facts are stubborn things, and that, till they are thrown out of the way, the theorist has not a clear field for his extravagance, and cannot rove at large without stumbling over them? In dreams, the objective world is excluded. The moment it returns, on the awakening of the senses, the dreams vanish. In sleep you may fly over an ocean, or walk through a hill; but the dream does not prove that seas and mountains are other than realities holding us to our peace. It is well they do, else chaos would be come again.

I

We positively refuse to give up the Historical Argument. It is too substantial to be overlooked. It can neither be pushed from its place by violence nor avoided by loftiness of look. It may not be exactly so spiritual as some idealistic persons may desire; but in this matter-of-fact existence of ours we think it more rational to deal with realities, even though they should be objective, than to pass our precious time in giving to airy nothing

"A local habitation and a name."

PART II.

OF THE AUXILIARY EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY.

CHAPTER I.

66

ISAIAH. lii; 13. liii. Behold, my servant shall deal prudently; he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. As many were astonished at thee (his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men): so shall he sprinkle many nations; the kings shall shut their mouths at him for that which had not been told them, shall they see; and that which they had not heard, shall they consider. Who hath believed our report? and to which is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were, our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressCons, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity

* See note A, at the end of the Chapter.