of our writings? Does he charge the Christians with imposing false books upon mankind? No. He allows the facts of Christianity, and argues upon our gospels as the admitted works of the apostles and disciples of our Lord.

The testimony of heretics is of almost equal importance. We have seen in our own day what eagerness of contention has been excited by the one single disputed text on the heavenly witnesses, in the fifth chapter of the First Epistle of St. John. For half a century has the church been filled with the vehement controversy. It is quite certain, therefore, that in the bitterness of the Arian heresy, in the fourth century, if any thing solid could have been alleged against the genuineness of our sacred books, it would have been brought forward with avidity. Some passages and some books were, in fact, denied by Marcion and a few wild enthusiasts of earlier days; but after the settlement of the canon, men of all sects and heresies admitted our writings. An Arian, in a conference with St. Austin, says: "If you allege any thing from the divine scriptures, which are common to all, I must hear; but what is not in the scriptures deserves no regard." And at the council of Nice, (A. D. 325,) where three hundred and eighteen bishops, besides innumerable presbyters, deacons, and others, were assembled, on the occasion of the Arian heresy, "The emperor," says Theodoret, "recommended to the bishops to decide all things by the scriptures. It is a pity, he said, that now, when their enemies were subdued, they should differ and be divided among themselves; especially when they had the doctrine of the Holy Ghost in writ

ing."

From such witnesses to the authenticity of the New Testament who can turn away? If this evidence is not deemed satisfactory, it must arise from a want, I do not say of faith, but of common candor of mind. I am aware, indeed, that we cannot put those who are not familiar with ecclesiastical history, in possession of the sort of plenary conviction which fills the mind of the literary and well-informed student, who is acquainted with the names I cite, who knows all the chief events and dates of past times, and has been accustomed to historical researches but then any hearer of good sense and

*Lardner thinks that, as this last circumstance is not mentioned by Eusebius, but rests only on the authority of Theodoret, it had perhaps better not be pressed. Still he raises no objection, except the negative one of wanting the confirmation of Eusebius.

honesty can understand enough of the statement to see the mass of SOLID AND UNDISPUTED FACTS adduced in favor of the Christian scriptures. And his want of habits of historical inquiry holds much more against his receiving the mere cavils of unbelievers, than it does against his practically submitting to this part of the evidences of his faith. I want only a right temper of mind in the hearer, and I leave to his conscientious judgment the determination of the cause. But I proceed to an argument palpable almost to our senses.

V. For the NUMBER AND ANTIQUITY OF OUR MANUSCRIPTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT is an argument for the authenticity of its sacred contents.

The greater part of the apocryphal books are either entirely lost, or are preserved by a single manuscript. Our most authentic and most admired classics, as Herodotus, are known only from ten or fifteen manuscripts; many are come down to us, after lying hid for ages, in one manuscript only. Now the manuscripts of our sacred books abound in every ancient library in every part of Christendom. They amount in the whole to many thousands. About five hundred have been actually examined and compared or collated, with extraordinary care. Many of them run up to the eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth and fourth centuries; the Codex Bezæ, found in the monastery of Irenæus, at Lyon in France, and presented by the reformer, whose name it bears, to the university of Cambridge, is supposed by Dr. Kipling, the editor of the fac-simile of it, to be of the second century. The Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus are supposed to be of the fourth. Now these manuscripts push back our proof to the age next but one or two to that when the last of the apostles died, and join on with the date of the manuscripts compared by Jerome and Eusebius, (A. D. 315-420,) and thus bring us up, as it were, to the very times of the promulgation of the gospel.

Let any one compare the gospels and epistles as extant in our ancient manuscripts, with the passages cited in Jerome, Eusebius, Tertullian, Irenæus, who had the very originals before them, or the immediate transcripts from those originals, and he will find almost the whole of our present canon.*

The prodigious number of these manuscripts, the distant

* This further proves that the sacred books have come down to us uncorrupted. The various readings in different manuscripts do not affect a single doctrine or precept of the Christian revelation.

countries whence they were collected, and this identity of their contents with the quotations in the fathers of different ages, place the New Testament incomparably above all other ancient works in point of evidence of authenticity.

And this leads me to produce a noble passage from Tertullian, who was born about fifty or sixty years after the death of St. John. In the thirty-sixth chapter of his work against heresies, he says,—

"Come now, thou who wilt exercise thy curiosity more profitably in the business of thy salvation, run through the apostolical churches, in which the very chairs of the apostles still preside, in which their authentic letters (some render it, "original"-literæ authenticæ) are recited, sounding forth the voice and representing the countenance of each. Is Achaia near you, you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Thessalonica. If you are near to Italy, you have Rome, from whence also our assertion will be readily confirmed.".

What a striking appeal is this to the actual original Greek of the New Testament books, perhaps to the very autographs of the divine writers-or if the word authenticæ means only, well-attested-yet to the undoubted transcripts of the sacred epistles! When we connect this with the fine expression, that "the very chairs of the apostles still presided," as it were, "in their respective churches," and that their epistles, when recited, "sounded forth the voice and represented the countenance of each apostle;" and when we remember that those churches are appealed to, and those only, to which the sacred letters were addressed, and that the inquirer is sent by Tertullian (in the second century, be it noted) to examine the books for himself;—I say, when we consider all this, and associate it in our minds with the critical revision of ancient manuscripts made by Eusebius and Jerome in the fourth and fifth centuries, and our Codex Bezæ, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Vaticanus, probably of the very same date now existing-I ask whether it does not present the proof of the authenticity of the New Testament before the very eyes, and render it palpable almost to the senses of mankind.

VI. I add that NONE OF THESE EXTERNAL PROOFS OF AUTHENTICITY can be adduced for the apocryphal books of the New Testament; which exhibit, indeed, every internal mark of being unauthentic and spurious. It is no indiscrim

inate admission, therefore, for which we plead. We show that the marks of authenticity are actually wanting in all pretended sacred writings.

1. We have no proof that any of them existed in the first century. 2. They are not quoted by the apostolical fathers. 3. Few or no manuscripts of them exist. 4. They were not read in the churches of Christians. 5. Were not admitted into their volumes. 6. Do not appear in their catalogues. 7. Were not noticed by their adversaries. 8. Were not alleged by different parties as of authority in their controversies. 9. Were not subjects amongst them of commentaries, versions, collations, expositions. 10. Were passed over in silence, or actually rejected during the three first centuries, and reprobated almost universally by Christian writers of succeeding ages. That is, they are not authentic.*

Besides this total want of external evidence of their genuineness, there is the strongest internal evidence in proof of their being spurious. 1. For they propose doctrines and practices contrary to those which are certainly known to be true. 2. They are filled with absurd and frivolous details. 3. They relate as miracles, stories both useless and improbable. 4. They mention things which are later than the time when the individual author lived whose name the book bears. 5. Their style is totally different from that of the genuine books of the New Testament. 6. They assert things in direct contradiction to authentic history, both sacred and profane. 7. They contain studied imitations of passages in the genuine scriptures. 8. They abound with gross falsehoods. That is, they are spurious; and illustrate, by a perfect contrast, the undoubted authenticity of the canonical books.†

But this leads us to another argument.

VII. The STYLE AND MANNER of the books of the New Testament furnish an unanswerable proof of their being genuine.

I observed in the last Lecture, that there was nothing in the style or contents of the New Testament inconsistent with the age and characters of the professed authors; and that the inward traces of genuineness and truth shone brightly throughout the books of it.

We have just been pointing out the marks of spuriousness

* Paley.

T. H. Horne, i. 721.

in the apocryphal books, from their gross defects in these very respects.

A nearer view of the contents of the Christian books will bring out a positive evidence of the most undeniable kind in favor of their authenticity.

For the style of the New Testament agrees with the times of the apostles of our Lord, and with no other. It is Greek; not the pure Greek which the critic, perhaps, would most admire; but Greek intermingled with Hebrew and Syriac idioms. It is a language which no one could write, but a person who had acquired a knowledge of the Greek after an education in a country where Chaldee and Syriac were the vernacular tongues. The destruction of Jerusalem, and the total subversion of the Jewish polity within forty years after our Lord's resurrection, made so entire a change in the language, associations, habits, familiar knowledge, terms of expression of the dispersed Jewish people, that an impostor, at any time posterior to the death of the last of the apostles, would have written in a different style from that of the New Testament. A Greek or Roman Christian would have wanted the peculiar tincture of the Jewish literature prevalent before the fall of Jerusalem. A Jewish convert would have been wanting in the intermixed style and manner of the Hellenistic Jew. The idiomatic character lasted only for a brief period, and then perished. Even in the second century, the language of the Christian writers, in their works now extant, infallibly proves that the New Testament was not produced in that age. A relater of falsehoods could by no stretch of genius have raised up from nothing, and have preserved with undeviating uniformity, the peculiarities and familiar colloquial idioms of a lost language.

This argument is strengthened by considering the minute and circumstantial character of the narratives of the New Testament, and the perpetual allusions to passing events in the epistolary parts of it. All is in detail. You have the names of friends and enemies, the circumstances of time and place, the occasions which introduced, and the consequences that followed each action. You see every thing. You seem to move in the train of our Lord or his apostles. The narrative no sooner changes its scene, than a new set of names, occasions, incidents, personages, facts,-all the most natural imaginable-surround it.

Then there are numerous, and, so to speak, fearless allusions to complicated events, to different branches of families,