THE GENUINENESS OF THE CHRISTIAN DOCUMENTS, or proof that the books of the Old and New Testaments were written at the age to which they are assigned and by the men or class of men to whom they are ascribed.

Our present discussion comprises the first part, and only the first part, of the doctrine of the Canon (κανών, a measuring-reed; hence, a rule, a standard). It is important to observe that the determination of the Canon, or list of the books of sacred Scripture, is not the work of the church as an organized body. We do not receive these books upon the authority of Fathers or Councils. We receive them, only as the Fathers and Councils received them, because we have evidence that they are the writings of the men, or class of men, whose names they bear, and that they are also credible and inspired. If the previous epistle alluded to in 1 Cor. 5:9 should be discovered and be universally judged authentic, it could be placed with Paul’s other letters and could form part of the Canon, even though it has been lost for 1800 years. Bruce, Apologetics, 321—“Abstractly the Canon is an open question. It can never be anything else on the principles of Protestantism which forbid us to accept the decisions of church councils, whether ancient or modern, as final. But practically the question of the Canon is closed.” The Westminster Confession says that the authority of the word of God “does not rest upon historic evidence; it does not rest upon the authority of Councils; it does not rest upon the consent of the past or the excellence of the matter; but it rests upon the Spirit of God bearing witness to our hearts concerning its divine authority.” Clarke, Christian Theology, 24—“The value of the Scriptures to us does not depend upon our knowing who wrote them. In the O. T. half its pages are of uncertain authorship. New dates mean new authorship. Criticism is a duty, for dates of authorship give means of interpretation. The Scriptures have power because God is in them, and because they describe the entrance of God into the life of man.” Saintine, Picciola, 782—“Has not a feeble reed provided man with his first arrow, his first pen, his first instrument of music?” Hugh Macmillan: “The idea of stringed instruments was first derived from the twang of the well strung bow, as the archer shot his arrows; the lyre and the harp which discourse the sweetest music of peace were invented by those who first heard this inspiring sound in the excitement of battle. And so there is no music so delightful amid the jarring discord of the world, turning everything to music and harmonizing earth and heaven, as when the heart rises out of the gloom of anger and revenge, and converts its bow into a harp, and sings to it the Lord’s song of infinite forgiveness.” George Adam Smith, Mod. Criticism and Preaching of O. T., 5—“The church has never renounced her liberty to revise the Canon. The liberty at the beginning cannot be more than the liberty thereafter. The Holy Spirit has not forsaken the leaders of the church. Apostolic writers nowhere define the limits of the Canon, any more than Jesus did. Indeed, they employed extra-canonical writings. Christ and the apostles nowhere bound the church to believe all the teachings of the O. T. Christ discriminates, and forbids the literal interpretation of its contents. Many of the apostolic interpretations challenge our sense of truth. Much of their exegesis was temporary and false. Their judgment was that much in the O. T. was rudimentary. This opens the question of development in revelation, and justifies the attempt to fix the historic order. The N. T. criticism of the O. T. gives the liberty of criticism, and the need, and the obligation of it. O. T. criticism is not, like Baur’s of the N. T., the result of a priori Hegelian reasoning. From the time of Samuel we have real history. The prophets do not appeal to miracles. There is more gospel in the book of Jonah, when it is treated as a parable. The O. T. is a gradual ethical revelation of God. Few realize that the church of Christ has a higher warrant for her Canon of the O. T. than she has for her Canon of the N. T. The O. T. was the result of criticism in the widest sense of that word. But what the church thus once achieved, the church may at any time revise.” We reserve to a point somewhat later the proof of the credibility and the inspiration of the Scriptures. We now show their genuineness, as we would show the genuineness of other religious books, like the Koran, or of secular documents, like Cicero’s Orations against Catiline. Genuineness, in the sense in which we use the term, does not necessarily imply authenticity (i. e., truthfulness and authority); see Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Authenticity. Documents may be genuine which are written in whole or in part by persons other than they whose names they bear, provided these persons belong to the same class. The Epistle to the Hebrews, though not written by Paul, is genuine, because it proceeds from one of the apostolic class. The addition of Deut. 34, after Moses’ death, does not invalidate the genuineness of the Pentateuch; nor would the theory of a later Isaiah, even if it were established, disprove the genuineness of that prophecy; provided, in both cases, that the additions were made by men of the prophetic class. On the general subject of the genuineness of the Scripture documents, see Alexander, McIlvaine, Chalmers, Dodge, and Peabody, on the Evidences of Christianity; also Archibald, The Bible Verified.

1. Genuineness of the Books of the New Testament.

We do not need to adduce proof of the existence of the books of the New Testament as far back as the third century, for we possess manuscripts of them which are at least fourteen hundred years old, and, since the third century, references to them have been inwoven into all history and literature. We begin our proof, therefore, by showing that these documents not only existed, but were generally accepted as genuine, before the close of the second century.

Origen was born as early as 186 A. D.; yet Tregelles tells us that Origen’s works contain citations embracing two-thirds of the New Testament. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 12—“The early years of Christianity were in some respects like the early years of our lives.... Those early years are the most important in our education. We learn then, we hardly know how, through effort and struggle and innocent mistakes, to use our eyes and ears, to measure distance and direction, by a process which ascends by unconscious steps to the certainty which we feel in our maturity.... It was in some such unconscious way that the Christian thought of the early centuries gradually acquired the form which we find when it emerges as it were into the developed manhood of the fourth century.”

A. All the books of the New Testament, with the single exception of 2 Peter, were not only received as genuine, but were used in more or less collected form, in the latter half of the second century. These collections of writings, so slowly transcribed and distributed, imply the long continued previous existence of the separate books, and forbid us to fix their origin later than the first half of the second century.

(a) Tertullian (160-230) appeals to the “New Testament” as made up of the “Gospels” and “Apostles.” He vouches for the genuineness of the four gospels, the Acts, 1 Peter, 1 John, thirteen epistles of Paul, and the Apocalypse; in short, to twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of our Canon.

Sanday, Bampton Lectures for 1893, is confident that the first three gospels took their present shape before the destruction of Jerusalem. Yet he thinks the first and third gospels of composite origin, and probably the second. Not later than 125 A. D. the four gospels of our Canon had gained a recognized and exceptional authority. Andover Professors, Divinity of Jesus Christ, 40—“The oldest of our gospels was written about the year 70. The earlier one, now lost, a great part of which is preserved in Luke and Matthew, was probably written a few years earlier.”

(b) The Muratorian Canon in the West and the Peshito Version in the East (having a common date of about 160) in their catalogues of the New Testament writings mutually complement each other’s slight deficiencies, and together witness to the fact that at that time every book of our present New Testament, with the exception of 2 Peter, was received as genuine.

Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 50—“The fragment on the Canon, discovered by Muratori in 1738, was probably written about 170 A. D., in Greek. It begins with the last words of a sentence which must have referred to the Gospel of Mark, and proceeds to speak of the Third Gospel as written by Luke the physician, who did not see the Lord, and then of the Fourth Gospel as written by John, a disciple of the Lord, at the request of his fellow disciples and his elders.” Bacon, N. T. Introduction, 50, gives the Muratorian Canon in full; 30—“Theophilus of Antioch (181-190) is the first to cite a gospel by name, quoting John 1:1 as from ‘John, one of those who were vessels of the Spirit.’ ” On the Muratorian Canon, see Tregelles, Muratorian Canon. On the Peshito Version, see Schaff, Introd. to Rev. Gk.-Eng. N. T., xxxvii; Smith’s Bible Dict., pp. 3388, 3389.

(c) The Canon of Marcion (140), though rejecting all the gospels but that of Luke, and all the epistles but ten of Paul’s, shows, nevertheless, that at that early day “apostolic writings were regarded as a complete original rule of doctrine.” Even Marcion, moreover, does not deny the genuineness of those writings which for doctrinal reasons he rejects.

Marcion, the Gnostic, was the enemy of all Judaism, and regarded the God of the O. T. as a restricted divinity, entirely different from the God of the N. T. Marcion was “ipso Paulo paulinior”—“plus loyal que le roi.” He held that Christianity was something entirely new, and that it stood in opposition to all that went before it. His Canon consisted of two parts: the “Gospel” (Luke, with its text curtailed by omission of the Hebraistic elements) and the Apostolicon (the epistles of Paul). The epistle to Diognetus by an unknown author, and the epistle of Barnabas, shared the view of Marcion. The name of the Deity was changed from Jehovah to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If Marcion’s view had prevailed, the Old Testament would have been lost to the Christian Church. God’s revelation would have been deprived of its proof from prophecy. Development from the past, and divine conduct of Jewish history, would have been denied. But without the Old Testament, as H. W. Beecher maintained, the New Testament would lack background; our chief source of knowledge with regard to God’s natural attributes of power, wisdom, and truth would be removed: the love and mercy revealed in the New Testament would seem characteristics of a weak being, who could not enforce law or inspire respect. A tree has as much breadth below ground as there is above; so the O. T. roots of God’s revelation are as extensive and necessary as are its N. T. trunk and branches and leaves. See Allen, Religious Progress, 81; Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, and art.: Canon, in Smith’s Bible Dictionary. Also Reuss, History of Canon; Mitchell, Critical Handbook, part I.

B. The Christian and Apostolic Fathers who lived in the first half of the second century not only quote from these books and allude to them, but testify that they were written by the apostles themselves. We are therefore compelled to refer their origin still further back, namely, to the first century, when the apostles lived.

(a) Irenæus (120-200) mentions and quotes the four gospels by name, and among them the gospel according to John: “Afterwards John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned upon his breast, he likewise published a gospel, while he dwelt in Ephesus in Asia.” And Irenæus was the disciple and friend of Polycarp (80-166), who was himself a personal acquaintance of the Apostle John. The testimony of Irenæus is virtually the evidence of Polycarp, the contemporary and friend of the Apostle, that each of the gospels was written by the person whose name it bears.

To this testimony it is objected that Irenæus says there are four gospels because there are four quarters of the world and four living creatures in the cherubim. But we reply that Irenæus is here stating, not his own reason for accepting four and only four gospels, but what he conceives to be God’s reason for ordaining that there should be four. We are not warranted in supposing that he accepted the four gospels on any other ground than that of testimony that they were the productions of apostolic men. Chrysostom, in a similar manner, compares the four gospels to a chariot and four: When the King of Glory rides forth in it, he shall receive the triumphal acclamations of all peoples. So Jerome: God rides upon the cherubim, and since there are four cherubim, there must be four gospels. All this however is an early attempt at the philosophy of religion, and not an attempt to demonstrate historical fact. L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 319-367, presents the radical view of the authorship of the fourth gospel. He holds that John the apostle died A. D. 70, or soon after, and that Irenæus confounded the two Johns whom Papias so clearly distinguished—John the Apostle and John the Elder. With Harnack, Paine supposes the gospel to have been written by John the Elder, a contemporary of Papias. But we reply that the testimony of Irenæus implies a long continued previous tradition. R. W. Dale, Living Christ and Four Gospels, 145—“Religious veneration such as that with which Irenæus regarded these books is of slow growth. They must have held a great place in the Church as far back as the memory of living men extended.” See Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 2:695.

(b) Justin Martyr (died 148) speaks of “memoirs (ἀπομνημονεύματα) of Jesus Christ,” and his quotations, though sometimes made from memory, are evidently cited from our gospels.

To this testimony it is objected: (1) That Justin Martyr uses the term “memoirs” instead of “gospels.” We reply that he elsewhere uses the term “gospels” and identifies the “memoirs” with them: Apol., 1:66—“The apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called gospels,” i. e., not memoirs, but gospels, was the proper title of his written records. In writing his Apology to the heathen Emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Antoninus, he chooses the term “memoirs”, or “memorabilia”, which Xenophon had used as the title of his account of Socrates, simply in order that he may avoid ecclesiastical expressions unfamiliar to his readers and may commend his writing to lovers of classical literature. Notice that Matthew must be added to John, to justify Justin’s repeated statement that there were “memoirs” of our Lord “written by apostles,” and that Mark and Luke must be added to justify his further statement that these memoirs were compiled by “his apostles and those who followed them.” Analogous to Justin’s use of the word “memoirs” is his use of the term “Sunday”, instead of Sabbath: Apol. 1:67—“On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.” Here is the use of our gospels in public worship, as of equal authority with the O. T. Scriptures; in fact, Justin constantly quotes the words and acts of Jesus’ life from a written source, using the word γέγραπται. See Morison, Com. on Mat., ix; Hemphill, Literature of Second Century, 234. To Justin’s testimony it is objected: (2) That in quoting the words spoken from heaven at the Savior’s baptism, he makes them to be: “My son, this day have I begotten thee,” so quoting Psalm 2:7, and showing that he was ignorant of our present gospel, Mat. 3:17. We reply that this was probably a slip of the memory, quite natural in a day when the gospels existed only in the cumbrous form of manuscript rolls. Justin also refers to the Pentateuch for two facts which it does not contain; but we should not argue from this that he did not possess our present Pentateuch. The plays of Terence are quoted by Cicero and Horace, and we require neither more nor earlier witnesses to their genuineness,—yet Cicero and Horace wrote a hundred years after Terence. It is unfair to refuse similar evidence to the gospels. Justin had a way of combining into one the sayings of the different evangelists—a hint which Tatian, his pupil, probably followed out in composing his Diatessaron. On Justin Martyr’s testimony, see Ezra Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 49, note. B. W. Bacon, Introd. to N. T., speaks of Justin as “writing circa 155 A. D.”

(c) Papias (80-164), whom Irenæus calls a “hearer of John,” testifies that Matthew “wrote in the Hebrew dialect the sacred oracles (τὰ λόγια),” and that “Mark, the interpreter of Peter, wrote after Peter, (ὕστερον Πέτρῳ) [or under Peter’s direction], an unsystematic account (οὐ τάξει)” of the same events and discourses.

To this testimony it is objected: (1) That Papias could not have had our gospel of Matthew, for the reason that this is Greek. We reply, either with Bleek, that Papias erroneously supposed a Hebrew translation of Matthew, which he possessed, to be the original; or with Weiss, that the original Matthew was in Hebrew, while our present Matthew is an enlarged version of the same. Palestine, like modern Wales, was bilingual; Matthew, like James, might write both Hebrew and Greek. While B. W. Bacon gives to the writing of Papias a date so late as 145-160 A. D., Lightfoot gives that of 130 A. D. At this latter date Papias could easily remember stories told him so far back as 80 A. D., by men who were youths at the time when our Lord lived, died, rose and ascended. The work of Papias had for its title Λογίων κυριακῶν ἐξήγησις—“Exposition of Oracles relating to the Lord” = Commentaries on the Gospels. Two of these gospels were Matthew and Mark. The view of Weiss mentioned above has been criticized upon the ground that the quotations from the O. T. in Jesus’ discourses in Matthew are all taken from the Septuagint and not from the Hebrew. Westcott answers this criticism by suggesting that, in translating his Hebrew gospel into Greek, Matthew substituted for his own oral version of Christ’s discourses the version of these already existing in the oral common gospel. There was a common oral basis of true teaching, the “deposit”—τὴν παραθήκην—committed to Timothy (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:12, 14), the same story told many times and getting to be told in the same way. The narratives of Matthew, Mark and Luke are independent versions of this apostolic testimony. First came belief; secondly, oral teaching; thirdly, written gospels. That the original gospel was in Aramaic seems probable from the fact that the Oriental name for “tares,” zawān, (Mat. 13:25) has been transliterated into Greek, ζιζάνια. Morison, Com. on Mat., thinks that Matthew originally wrote in Hebrew a collection of Sayings of Jesus Christ, which the Nazarenes and Ebionites added to, partly from tradition, and partly from translating his full gospel, till the result was the so-called Gospel of the Hebrews; but that Matthew wrote his own gospel in Greek after he had written the Sayings in Hebrew. Professor W. A. Stevens thinks that Papias probably alluded to the original autograph which Matthew wrote in Aramaic, but which he afterwards enlarged and translated into Greek. See Hemphill, Literature of the Second Century, 267. To the testimony of Papias it is also objected: (2) That Mark is the most systematic of all evangelists, presenting events as a true annalist, in chronological order. We reply that while, so far as chronological order is concerned, Mark is systematic, so far as logical order is concerned he is the most unsystematic of the evangelists, showing little of the power of historical grouping which is so discernible in Matthew. Matthew aimed to portray a life, rather than to record a chronology. He groups Jesus’ teachings in chapters 5, 6, and 7; his miracles in chapters 8 and 9; his directions to the apostles in chapter 10; chapters 11 and 12 describe the growing opposition; chapter 13 meets this opposition with his parables; the remainder of the gospel describes our Lord’s preparation for his death, his progress to Jerusalem, the consummation of his work in the Cross and in the resurrection. Here is true system, a philosophical arrangement of material, compared with which the method of Mark is eminently unsystematic. Mark is a Froissart, while Matthew has the spirit of J. R. Green. See Bleek, Introd. to N. T., 1:108, 126; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:27-39.

(d) The Apostolic Fathers,—Clement of Rome (died 101), Ignatius of Antioch (martyred 115), and Polycarp (80-166),—companions and friends of the apostles, have left us in their writings over one hundred quotations from or allusions to the New Testament writings, and among these every book, except four minor epistles (2 Peter, Jude, 2 and 3 John) is represented.

Although these are single testimonies, we must remember that they are the testimonies of the chief men of the churches of their day, and that they express the opinion of the churches themselves. “Like banners of a hidden army, or peaks of a distant mountain range, they represent and are sustained by compact, continuous bodies below.” In an article by P. W. Calkins, McClintock and Strong’s Encyclopædia, 1:315-317, quotations from the Apostolic Fathers in great numbers are put side by side with the New Testament passages from which they quote or to which they allude. An examination of these quotations and allusions convinces us that these Fathers were in possession of all the principal books of our New Testament. See Ante-Nicene Library of T. and T. Clark; Thayer, in Boston Lectures for 1871:324; Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 11—“Ignatius says to Polycarp: ‘The times call for thee, as the winds call for the pilot.’ So do the times call for reverent, fearless scholarship in the church.” Such scholarship, we are persuaded, has already demonstrated the genuineness of the N. T. documents.

(e) In the synoptic gospels, the omission of all mention of the fulfilment of Christ’s prophecies with regard to the destruction of Jerusalem is evidence that these gospels were written before the occurrence of that event. In the Acts of the Apostles, universally attributed to Luke, we have an allusion to “the former treatise”, or the gospel by the same author, which must, therefore, have been written before the end of Paul’s first imprisonment at Rome, and probably with the help and sanction of that apostle.

Acts 1:1—“The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach.” If the Acts was written A. D. 63, two years after Paul’s arrival at Rome, then “the former treatise,” the gospel according to Luke, can hardly be dated later than 60; and since the destruction of Jerusalem took place in 70, Matthew and Mark must have published their gospels at least as early as the year 68, when multitudes of men were still living who had been eye-witnesses of the events of Jesus’ life. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 180—“At any considerably later date [than the capture of Jerusalem] the apparent conjunction of the fall of the city and the temple with the Parousia would have been avoided or explained.... Matthew, in its present form, appeared after the beginning of the mortal struggle of the Romans with the Jews, or between 65 and 70. Mark’s gospel was still earlier. The language of the passages relative to the Parousia, in Luke, is consistent with the supposition that he wrote after the fall of Jerusalem, but not with the supposition that it was long after.” See Norton, Genuineness of the Gospels; Alford, Greek Testament, Prolegomena, 30, 31, 36, 45-47.

C. It is to be presumed that this acceptance of the New Testament documents as genuine, on the part of the Fathers of the churches, was for good and sufficient reasons, both internal and external, and this presumption is corroborated by the following considerations:

(a) There is evidence that the early churches took every care to assure themselves of the genuineness of these writings before they accepted them.

Evidences of care are the following:—Paul, in 2 Thess. 2:2, urged the churches to use care, “to the end that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled, either by spirit, or by word, or by epistle as from us”; 1 Cor. 5:9—“I wrote unto you in my epistle to have no company with fornicators”; Col. 4:16—“when this epistle hath been read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and that ye also read the epistle from Laodicea.” Melito (169), Bishop of Sardis, who wrote a treatise on the Revelation of John, went as far as Palestine to ascertain on the spot the facts relating to the Canon of the O. T., and as a result of his investigations excluded the Apocrypha. Ryle, Canon of O. T., 203—“Melito, the Bishop of Sardis, sent to a friend a list of the O. T. Scriptures which he professed to have obtained from accurate inquiry, while traveling in the East, in Syria. Its contents agree with those of the Hebrew Canon, save in the omission of Esther.” Serapion, Bishop of Antioch (191-213, Abbot), says: “We receive Peter and other apostles as Christ, but as skilful men we reject those writings which are falsely ascribed to them.” Geo. H. Ferris, Baptist Congress, 1899:94—“Serapion, after permitting the reading of the Gospel of Peter in public services, finally decided against it, not because he thought there could be no fifth gospel, but because he thought it was not written by Peter.” Tertullian (160-230) gives an example of the deposition of a presbyter in Asia Minor for publishing a pretended work of Paul; see Tertullian, De Baptismo, referred to by Godet on John, Introduction; Lardner, Works, 2:304, 305; McIlvaine, Evidences, 92.

(b) The style of the New Testament writings, and their complete correspondence with all we know of the lands and times in which they profess to have been written, affords convincing proof that they belong to the apostolic age.

Notice the mingling of Latin and Greek, as in σπεκουλάτωρ (Mark 6:27) and κεντυρίων (Mark 15:39); of Greek and Aramæan, as in πρασιαὶ πρασιαί (Mark 6:40) and βδέλυγμα τῆς ἐρημώσεως (Mat. 24:15); this could hardly have occurred after the first century. Compare the anachronisms of style and description in Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond,” which, in spite of the author’s special studies and his determination to exclude all words and phrases that had originated in his own century, was marred by historical errors that Macaulay in his most remiss moments would hardly have made. James Russell Lowell told Thackeray that “different to” was not a century old. “Hang it, no!” replied Thackeray. In view of this failure, on the part of an author of great literary skill, to construct a story purporting to be written a century before his time and that could stand the test of historical criticism, we may well regard the success of our gospels in standing such tests as a practical demonstration that they were written in, and not after, the apostolic age. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 27-37; Blunt, Scriptural Coincidences, 244-354.

(c) The genuineness of the fourth gospel is confirmed by the fact that Tatian (155-170), the Assyrian, a disciple of Justin, repeatedly quoted it without naming the author, and composed a Harmony of our four gospels which he named the Diatessaron; while Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from it.

The sceptical work entitled “Supernatural Religion” said in 1874; “No one seems to have seen Tatian’s Harmony, probably for the very simple reason that there was no such work”; and “There is no evidence whatever connecting Tatian’s Gospel with those of our Canon.” In 1876, however, there was published in a Latin form in Venice the Commentary of Ephraem Syrus on Tatian, and the commencement of it was: “In the beginning was the Word”_ (John 1:1). In 1888, the Diatessaron itself was published in Rome in the form of an Arabic translation made in the eleventh century from the Syriac. J. Rendel Harris, in Contemp. Rev., 1893:800 sq., says that the recovery of Tatian’s Diatessaron has indefinitely postponed the literary funeral of St. John. Advanced critics, he intimates, are so called, because they run ahead of the facts they discuss. The gospels must have been well established in the Christian church when Tatian undertook to combine them. Mrs. A. S. Lewis, in S. S. Times, Jan. 23, 1904—“The gospels were translated into Syriac before A. D. 160. It follows that the Greek document from which they were translated was older still, and since the one includes the gospel of St. John, so did the other.” Hemphill, Literature of the Second Century, 183-231, gives the birth of Tatian about 120, and the date of his Diatessaron as 172 A. D. The difference in style between the Revelation and the gospel of John is due to the fact that the Revelation was written during John’s exile in Patmos, under Nero, in 67 or 68, soon after John had left Palestine and had taken up his residence at Ephesus. He had hitherto spoken Aramæan, and Greek was comparatively unfamiliar to him. The gospel was written thirty years after, probably about 97, when Greek had become to him like a mother tongue. See Lightfoot on Galatians, 343, 347; per contra, see Milligan, Revelation of St. John. Phrases and ideas which indicate a common authorship of the Revelation and the gospel are the following: “the Lamb of God,” “the Word of God,” “the True” as an epithet applied to Christ, “the Jews” as enemies of God, “manna,” “him whom they pierced”; see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 1:4, 5. In the fourth gospel we have ἀμνός, in Apoc. ἀρνίον, perhaps better to distinguish “the Lamb” from the diminutive τὸ θηρίον, “the beast.” Common to both Gospel and Rev. are ποιεῖν, “to do” [the truth]; περιπατεῖν, of moral conduct; ἀληθινός, “genuine”; διψᾷν, πεινᾷν, of the higher wants of the soul; σκηνοῦν ἐν, ποιμαίνειν, ὁδηγεῖν; also “overcome,” “testimony,” “Bridegroom,” “Shepherd,” “Water of life.” In the Revelation there are grammatical solecisms: nominative for genitive, 1:4—ἀπὸ ὁ ὤν; nominative for accusative, 7:9—εἶδον ... ὄχλος πολύς; accusative for nominative, 20:2—τὸν δράκοντα ὁ ὄφις. Similarly we have in Rom. 12:5—τὸ δὲ καθ᾽ εἶς instead of τὸ δὲ καθ᾽ ἕνα, where κατὰ has lost its regimen—a frequent solecism in later Greek writers; see Godet on John, 1:269, 270. Emerson reminded Jones Very that the Holy Ghost surely writes good grammar. The Apocalypse seems to show that Emerson was wrong. The author of the fourth gospel speaks of John in the third person, “and scorned to blot it with a name.” But so does Cæsar speak of himself in his Commentaries. Harnack regards both the fourth gospel and the Revelation as the work of John the Presbyter or Elder, the former written not later than about 110 A. D.; the latter from 93 to 96, but being a revision of one or more underlying Jewish apocalypses. Vischer has expounded this view of the Revelation; and Porter holds substantially the same, in his article on the Book of Revelation in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 4:239-266. “It is the obvious advantage of the Vischer-Harnack hypothesis that it places the original work under Nero and its revised and Christianized edition under Domitian.” (Sanday, Inspiration, 371, 372, nevertheless dismisses this hypothesis as raising worse difficulties than it removes. He dates the Apocalypse between the death of Nero and the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.) Martineau, Seat of Authority, 227, presents the moral objections to the apostolic authorship, and regards the Revelation, from chapter 4:1 to 22:5, as a purely Jewish document of the date 66-70, supplemented and revised by a Christian, and issued not earlier than 136: “How strange that we should ever have thought it possible for a personal attendant upon the ministry of Jesus to write or edit a book mixing up fierce Messianic conflicts, in which, with the sword, the gory garment, the blasting flame, the rod of iron, as his emblems, he leads the war-march, and treads the winepress of the wrath of God until the deluge of blood rises to the horses’ bits, with the speculative Christology of the second century, without a memory of his life, a feature of his look, a word from his voice, or a glance back at the hillsides of Galilee, the courts of Jerusalem, the road to Bethany, on which his image must be forever seen!” The force of this statement, however, is greatly broken if we consider that the apostle John, in his earlier days, was one of the “Boanerges, which is, Sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17)_, but became in his later years the apostle of love: 1 John 4:7—“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God.” The likeness of the fourth gospel to the epistle, which latter was undoubtedly the work of John the apostle, indicates the same authorship for the gospel. Thayer remarks that “the discovery of the gospel according to Peter sweeps away half a century of discussion. Brief as is the recovered fragment, it attests indubitably all four of our canonical books.” Riddle, in Popular Com., 1:25—“If a forger wrote the fourth gospel, then Beelzebub has been casting out devils for these eighteen hundred years.” On the genuineness of the fourth gospel, see Bleek, Introd. to N. T., 1:250; Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 33, also Beginnings of Christianity, 320-362, and Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief, 245-309; Sanday, Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, Gospels in the Second Century, and Criticism of the Fourth Gospel; Ezra Abbott, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80-87; Row, Bampton Lectures on Christian Evidences, 249-287; British Quarterly, Oct. 1872:216; Godet, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 25; Westcott, in Bib. Com. on John’s Gospel, Introd., xxviii-xxxii; Watkins, Bampton Lectures for 1890; W. L. Ferguson, in Bib. Sac., 1896:1-27.

(d) The epistle to the Hebrews appears to have been accepted during the first century after it was written (so Clement of Borne, Justin Martyr, and the Peshito Version witness). Then for two centuries, especially in the Roman and North African churches, and probably because its internal characteristics were inconsistent with the tradition of a Pauline authorship, its genuineness was doubted (so Tertullian, Cyprian, Irenæus, Muratorian Canon). At the end of the fourth century, Jerome examined the evidence and decided in its favor; Augustine did the same; the third Council of Carthage formally recognized it (397); from that time the Latin churches united with the East in receiving it, and thus the doubt was finally and forever removed.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew, “a learned man” and “mighty in the Scriptures”_ (Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul’s method of quoting the O. T.: “it is written” (Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)_ with that of the Hebrews: “he saith”_ (8:5, 13), “he hath said” (4:4)_. Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way. Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna: “The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer’s conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen: “God only knows who wrote it.” Harnack however remarks: “The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.” See articles on Hebrews, in Smith’s and in Hastings’ Bible Dictionaries.

(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.

Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette’s first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton’s Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter’s martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of the res gestæ.” See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith’s Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon. It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of “your apostles”_ (3:2), just as Jude 17 speaks of “the apostles,” as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with “Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,” and Jude, “brother of James” (verse 1)_ was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.” Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle, “and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.” He also says: “John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.” He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted. Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks: “If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.” Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond a non liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter “is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.” Chase, in Hastings’ Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that “the first piece of certain evidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord’s promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.” Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.

(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.

The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation: “It is not a Biblical book,” and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved. G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are ‘statutes of limitations’ which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.” Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.” Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as ‘traditores,’ traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction between canonical and non-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.” Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.

D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.

Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but of a priori speculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ’s life or doctrine.

In Germany, half a century ago, “a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”_ (Ps. 74:5, A. V.)_, just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church’s One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.” Matthew Arnold: “Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—and miracles do not happen.” This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.

1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).

According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.

This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word “myths” so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of “pious frauds” in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had “not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.” The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says: “We know with certainty what Jesus was not, and what he has not done, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.” “No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.” He calls the resurrection of Christ “ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.” “If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;” see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from the saga or legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while the saga is a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, the saga has in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?” It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus’ trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that “somehow she never could get interested” in Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss’s own view of what Jesus was. If Luther’s dictum is true that “the heart is the best theologian,” Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss’s mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe’s profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.” Pfleiderer, Strauss’s Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.” See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.

We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that

(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.

(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.

Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that “Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.” Arnold of Rugby: “The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!” Pilate’s sceptical inquiry, “What is truth?”_ (John 18:38)_, better represented the age. “The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.” The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist, Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?” and our Lord’s answer, Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,” show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yet John 10:41—“John indeed did no sign” shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.

(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.

The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world “for our sakes”; other peoples, though they “also come from Adam,” to the Eternal “are nothing, but be like unto spittle.” The whole multitude of them are only, before him, “like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask” (C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ’s kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in its spirituality and its universality (Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand, it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).

(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.

(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.

(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.

(d) Witness Thomas’s doubting, and Paul’s shipwrecks and scourgings. Cf. 2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες = “we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.” See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord’s Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss’s New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith’s Bible Dict., 2:954-958.

2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).

This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church. “These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”

Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says: “The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus’ time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion, and the particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows: “Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.” Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory: “His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.” The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack: “The possible picture it sketched was not the real, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.” See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur’s position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke’s transl. of Hase’s Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.

We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that

(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.

The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hidden animus in the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of “Jack and Jill.”

(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.

Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul’s (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor’s Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another’s complement rather than contradiction.” Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.

(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.

The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius’s fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome’s belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.” Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.” Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.” We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy: “Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare’s doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?” On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.

(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.

“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.” Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name ‘Jesus Christ.’ ”

(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.

Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive “Æons.” How did the Gnostics, without “peep or mutter,” come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur “He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.” But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, on Hebrews 1:2—“The word æon was used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote: ‘The Word became flesh’_ (John 1:14)_.” A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.

(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus’ life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.

Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.” Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul’s companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157 sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

3d. The Romance-theory of Renan (1823-1892).

This theory admits a basis of truth in the gospels and holds that they all belong to the century following Jesus’ death. “According to” Matthew, Mark, etc., however, means only that Matthew, Mark, etc., wrote these gospels in substance. Renan claims that the facts of Jesus’ life were so sublimated by enthusiasm, and so overlaid with pious fraud, that the gospels in their present form cannot be accepted as genuine,—in short, the gospels are to be regarded as historical romances which have only a foundation in fact.

The animus of this theory is plainly shown in Renan’s Life of Jesus, preface to 13th ed.—“If miracles and the inspiration of certain books are realities, my method is detestable. If miracles and the inspiration of books are beliefs without reality, my method is a good one. But the question of the supernatural is decided for us with perfect certainty by the single consideration that there is no room for believing in a thing of which the world offers no experimental trace.” “On the whole,” says Renan, “I admit as authentic the four canonical gospels. All, in my opinion, date from the first century, and the authors are, generally speaking, those to whom they are attributed.” He regards Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., and Rom., as “indisputable and undisputed.” He speaks of them as “being texts of an absolute authenticity, of complete sincerity, and without legends” (Les Apôtres, xxix; Les Évangiles, xi). Yet he denies to Jesus “sincerity with himself”; attributes to him “innocent artifice” and the toleration of pious fraud, as for example in the case of the stories of Lazarus and of his own resurrection. “To conceive the good is not sufficient: it must be made to succeed; to accomplish this, less pure paths must be followed.... Not by any fault of his own, his conscience lost somewhat of its original purity,—his mission overwhelmed him.... Did he regret his too lofty nature, and, victim of his own greatness, mourn that he had not remained a simple artizan?” So Renan “pictures Christ’s later life as a misery and a lie, yet he requests us to bow before this sinner and before his superior, Sakya-Mouni, as demigods” (see Nicoll, The Church’s One Foundation, 62, 63). Of the highly wrought imagination of Mary Magdalene, he says: “O divine power of love! sacred moments, in which the passion of one whose senses were deceived gives us a resuscitated God!” See Renan, Life of Jesus, 21.

To this Romance-theory of Renan, we object that

(a) It involves an arbitrary and partial treatment of the Christian documents. The claim that one writer not only borrowed from others, but interpolated ad libitum, is contradicted by the essential agreement of the manuscripts as quoted by the Fathers, and as now extant.

Renan, according to Mair, Christian Evidences, 153, dates Matthew at 84 A. D.; Mark at 76; Luke at 94; John at 125. These dates mark a considerable retreat from the advanced positions taken by Baur. Mair, in his chapter on Recent Reverses in Negative Criticism, attributes this result to the late discoveries with regard to the Epistle of Barnabas, Hippolytus’s Refutation of all Heresies, the Clementine Homilies, and Tatian’s Diatessaron: “According to Baur and his immediate followers, we have less than one quarter of the N. T. belonging to the first century. According to Hilgenfeld, the present head of the Baur school, we have somewhat less than three quarters belonging to the first century, while substantially the same thing may be said with regard to Holzmann. According to Renan, we have distinctly more than three quarters of the N. T. falling within the first century, and therefore within the apostolic age. This surely indicates a very decided and extraordinary retreat since the time of Baur’s grand assault, that is, within the last fifty years.” We may add that the concession of authorship within the apostolic age renders nugatory Renan’s hypothesis that the N. T. documents have been so enlarged by pious fraud that they cannot be accepted as trustworthy accounts of such events as miracles. The oral tradition itself had attained so fixed a form that the many manuscripts used by the Fathers were in substantial agreement in respect to these very events, and oral tradition in the East hands down without serious alteration much longer narratives than those of our gospels. The Pundita Ramabai can repeat after the lapse of twenty years portions of the Hindu sacred books exceeding in amount the whole contents of our Old Testament. Many cultivated men in Athens knew by heart all the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. Memory and reverence alike kept the gospel narratives free from the corruption which Renan supposes.

(b) It attributes to Christ and to the apostles an alternate fervor of romantic enthusiasm and a false pretense of miraculous power which are utterly irreconcilable with the manifest sobriety and holiness of their lives and teachings. If Jesus did not work miracles, he was an impostor.

On Ernest Renan, His Life and the Life of Jesus, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 332-363, especially 356—“Renan attributes the origin of Christianity to the predominance in Palestine of a constitutional susceptibility to mystic excitements. Christ is to him the incarnation of sympathy and tears, a being of tender impulses and passionate ardors, whose native genius it was to play upon the hearts of men. Truth or falsehood made little difference to him; anything that would comfort the poor, or touch the finer feelings of humanity, he availed himself of; ecstasies, visions, melting moods, these were the secrets of his power. Religion was a beneficent superstition, a sweet delusion—excellent as a balm and solace for the ignorant crowd, who never could be philosophers if they tried. And so the gospel river, as one has said, is traced back to a fountain of weeping men and women whose brains had oozed out at their eyes, and the perfection of spirituality is made to be a sort of maudlin monasticism.... How different from the strong and holy love of Christ, which would save men only by bringing them to the truth, and which claims men’s imitation only because, without love for God and for the soul, a man is without truth. How inexplicable from this view the fact that a pure Christianity has everywhere quickened the intellect of the nations, and that every revival of it, as at the Reformation, has been followed by mighty forward leaps of civilization. Was Paul a man carried away by mystic dreams and irrational enthusiasms? Let the keen dialectic skill of his epistles and his profound grasp of the great matters of revelation answer. Has the Christian church been a company of puling sentimentalists? Let the heroic deaths for the truth suffered by the martyrs witness. Nay, he must have a low idea of his kind, and a yet lower idea of the God who made them, who can believe that the noblest spirits of the race have risen to greatness by abnegating will and reason, and have gained influence over all ages by resigning themselves to semi-idiocy.”

(c) It fails to account for the power and progress of the gospel, as a system directly opposed to men’s natural tastes and prepossessions—a system which substitutes truth for romance and law for impulse.

A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 358—“And if the later triumphs of Christianity are inexplicable upon the theory of Renan, how can we explain its founding? The sweet swain of Galilee, beloved by women for his beauty, fascinating the unlettered crowd by his gentle speech and his poetic ideals, giving comfort to the sorrowing and hope to the poor, credited with supernatural power which at first he thinks it not worth while to deny and finally gratifies the multitude by pretending to exercise, roused by opposition to polemics and invective until the delightful young rabbi becomes a gloomy giant, an intractable fanatic, a fierce revolutionist, whose denunciation of the powers that be brings him to the Cross,—what is there in him to account for the moral wonder which we call Christianity and the beginnings of its empire in the world? Neither delicious pastorals like those of Jesus’ first period, nor apocalyptic fevers like those of his second period, according to Renan’s gospel, furnish any rational explanation of that mighty movement which has swept through the earth and has revolutionized the faith of mankind.” Berdoe, Browning, 47—“If Christ were not God, his life at that stage of the world’s history could by no possibility have had the vitalizing force and love-compelling power that Renan’s pages everywhere disclose. Renan has strengthened faith in Christ’s deity while laboring to destroy it.” Renan, in discussing Christ’s appearance to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the inward from the outward, thus precisely reversing the conclusion of Baur. A sudden storm, a flash of lightning, a sudden attack of ophthalmic fever, Paul took as an appearance from heaven. But we reply that so keen an observer and reasoner could not have been thus deceived. Nothing could have made him the apostle to the Gentiles but a sight of the glorified Christ and the accompanying revelation of the holiness of God, his own sin, the sacrifice of the Son of God, its universal efficacy, the obligation laid upon him to proclaim it to the ends of the earth. For reviews of Renan, see Hutton, Essays, 261-281, and Contemp. Thought and Thinkers, 1:227-234; H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 401-441; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt, 425-447; Pressensé, in Theol. Eclectic, 1:199; Uhlhorn, Mod. Representations of Life of Jesus, 1-33; Bib. Sac, 22:207; 23:353, 529; Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 16, and 4: no. 21; E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 43-48; A. H. Strong, Sermon before Baptist World Congress, 1905.

4th. The Development-theory of Harnack (born 1851).

This holds Christianity to be a historical development from germs which were devoid of both dogma and miracle. Jesus was a teacher of ethics, and the original gospel is most clearly represented by the Sermon on the Mount. Greek influence, and especially that of the Alexandrian philosophy, added to this gospel a theological and supernatural element, and so changed Christianity from a life into a doctrine.

Harnack dates Matthew at 70-75; Mark at 65-70; Luke at 78-93; the fourth gospel at 80-110. He regards both the fourth gospel and the book of Revelation as the works, not of John the Apostle, but of John the Presbyter. He separates the prologue of the fourth gospel from the gospel itself, and considers the prologue as a preface added after its original composition in order to enable the Hellenistic reader to understand it. “The gospel itself,” says Harnack, “contains no Logos-idea; it did not develop out of a Logos-idea, such as flourished at Alexandria; it only connects itself with such an idea. The gospel itself is based upon the historic Christ; he is the subject of all its statements. This historical trait can in no way be dissolved by any kind of speculation. The memory of what was actually historical was still too powerful to admit at this point any Gnostic influences. The Logos-idea of the prologue is the Logos of Alexandrine Judaism, the Logos of Philo, and it is derived ultimately from the ’Son of man’ in the book of Daniel.... The fourth gospel, which does not proceed from the Apostle John and does not so claim, cannot be used as a historical source in the ordinary sense of that word.... The author has managed with sovereign freedom; has transposed occurrences and has put them in a light that is foreign to them; has of his own accord composed the discourses, and has illustrated lofty thoughts by inventing situations for them. Difficult as it is to recognize, an actual tradition in his work is not wholly lacking. For the history of Jesus, however, it can hardly anywhere be taken into account; only little can be taken from it, and that with caution.... On the other hand it is a source of the first rank for the answer of the question what living views of the person of Jesus, what light and what warmth, the gospel has brought into being.” See Harnack’s article in Zeitschrift für Theol. u. Kirche, 2:189-231, and his Wesen des Christenthums, 13. Kaftan also, who belongs to the same Ritschlian school with Harnack, tells us in his Truth of the Christian Religion, 1:97, that as the result of the Logos-speculation, “the centre of gravity, instead of being placed in the historical Christ who founded the kingdom of God, is placed in the Christ who as eternal Logos of God was the mediator in the creation of the world.” This view is elaborated by Hatch in his Hibbert Lectures for 1888, on the Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church.

We object to the Development-theory of Harnack, that

(a) The Sermon on the Mount is not the sum of the gospel, nor its original form. Mark is the most original of the gospels, yet Mark omits the Sermon on the Mount, and Mark is preëminently the gospel of the miracle-worker.

(b) All four gospels lay the emphasis, not on Jesus’ life and ethical teaching, but on his death and resurrection. Matthew implies Christ’s deity when it asserts his absolute knowledge of the Father (11:27), his universal judgeship (25:32), his supreme authority (28:18), and his omnipresence (28:20), while the phrase “Son of man” implies that he is also “Son of God.”

Mat. 11:27—“All things have been delivered unto me of my Father: and no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him”; 25:32—“and before him shall be gathered all the nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats”; 28:18—“All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth”; 28:20—“lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” These sayings of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel show that the conception of Christ’s greatness was not peculiar to John: “I am” transcends time; “with you” transcends space. Jesus speaks “sub specie eternitatis”; his utterance is equivalent to that of John 8:58—“Before Abraham was born, I am,” and to that of Hebrews 13:8—“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever.” He is, as Paul declares in Eph. 1:23, one “that filleth all in all,” that is, who is omnipresent. A. H. Strong, Philos. and Religion, 206—The phrase “Son of man” intimates that Christ was more than man: “Suppose I were to go about proclaiming myself ‘Son of man.’ Who does not see that it would be mere impertinence, unless I claimed to be something more. ‘Son of Man? But what of that? Cannot every human being call himself the same?’ When one takes the title ‘Son of man’ for his characteristic designation, as Jesus did, he implies that there is something strange in his being Son of man; that this is not his original condition and dignity; that it is condescension on his part to be Son of man. In short, when Christ calls himself Son of man, it implies that he has come from a higher level of being to inhabit this low earth of ours. And so, when we are asked ‘What think ye of the Christ? whose son is he?’ we must answer, not simply, He is Son of man, but also, He is Son of God.” On Son of man, see Driver; on Son of God, see Sanday; both in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. Sanday: “The Son is so called primarily as incarnate. But that which is the essence of the Incarnation must needs be also larger than the Incarnation. It must needs have its roots in the eternity of Godhead.” Gore, Incarnation, 65, 73—“Christ, the final Judge, of the synoptics, is not dissociable from the divine, eternal Being, of the fourth gospel.”

(c) The preëxistence and atonement of Christ cannot be regarded as accretions upon the original gospel, since these find expression in Paul who wrote before any of our evangelists, and in his epistles anticipated the Logos-doctrine of John.

(d) We may grant that Greek influence, through the Alexandrian philosophy, helped the New Testament writers to discern what was already present in the life and work and teaching of Jesus; but, like the microscope which discovers but does not create, it added nothing to the substance of the faith.

Gore, Incarnation, 62—“The divinity, incarnation, resurrection of Christ were not an accretion upon the original belief of the apostles and their first disciples, for these are all recognized as uncontroverted matters of faith in the four great epistles of Paul, written at a date when the greater part of those who had seen the risen Christ were still alive.” The Alexandrian philosophy was not the source of apostolic doctrine, but only the form in which that doctrine was cast, the light thrown upon it which brought out its meaning. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 146—“When we come to John’s gospel, therefore, we find in it the mere unfolding of truth that for substance had been in the world for at least sixty years.... If the Platonizing philosophy of Alexandria assisted in this genuine development of Christian doctrine, then the Alexandrian philosophy was a providential help to inspiration. The microscope does not invent; it only discovers. Paul and John did not add to the truth of Christ; their philosophical equipment was only a microscope which brought into clear view the truth that was there already.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:126—“The metaphysical conception of the Logos, as immanent in the world and ordering it according to law, was filled with religious and moral contents. In Jesus the cosmical principle of nature became a religious principle of salvation.” See Kilpatrick’s article on Philosophy, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary. Kilpatrick holds that Harnack ignores the self-consciousness of Jesus; does not fairly interpret the Acts in its mention of the early worship of Jesus by the church before Greek philosophy had influenced it; refers to the intellectual peculiarities of the N. T. writers conceptions which Paul insists are simply the faith of all Christian people as such; forgets that the Christian idea of union with God secured through the atoning and reconciling work of a personal Redeemer utterly transcended Greek thought, and furnished the solution of the problem after which Greek philosophy was vainly groping.

(e) Though Mark says nothing of the virgin-birth because his story is limited to what the apostles had witnessed of Jesus’ deeds, Matthew apparently gives us Joseph’s story and Luke gives Mary’s story—both stories naturally published only after Jesus’ resurrection.

(f) The larger understanding of doctrine after Jesus’ death was itself predicted by our Lord (John 16:12). The Holy Spirit was to bring his teachings to remembrance, and to guide into all the truth (16:13), and the apostles were to continue the work of teaching which he had begun (Acts 1:1).

John 16:12, 13—“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth”; Acts 1:1—“The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began to do and to teach.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 146—“That the beloved disciple, after a half century of meditation upon what he had seen and heard of God manifest in the flesh, should have penetrated more deeply into the meaning of that wonderful revelation is not only not surprising,—it is precisely what Jesus himself foretold. Our Lord had many things to say to his disciples, but then they could not bear them. He promised that the Holy Spirit should bring to their remembrance both himself and his words, and should lead them into all the truth. And this is the whole secret of what are called accretions to original Christianity. So far as they are contained in Scripture, they are inspired discoveries and unfoldings, not mere speculations and inventions. They are not additions, but elucidations, not vain imaginings, but correct interpretations.... When the later theology, then, throws out the supernatural and dogmatic, as coming not from Jesus but from Paul’s epistles and from the fourth gospel, our claim is that Paul and John are only inspired and authoritative interpreters of Jesus, seeing themselves and making us see the fulness of the Godhead that dwelt in him.” While Harnack, in our judgment, errs in his view that Paul contributed to the gospel elements which it did not originally possess, he shows us very clearly many of the elements in that gospel which he was the first to recognize. In his Wesen des Christenthums, 111, he tells us that a few years ago a celebrated Protestant theologian declared that Paul, with his Rabbinical theology, was the destroyer of the Christian religion. Others have regarded him as the founder of that religion. But the majority have seen in him the apostle who best understood his Lord and did most to continue his work. Paul, as Harnack maintains, first comprehended the gospel definitely: (1) as an accomplished redemption and a present salvation—the crucified and risen Christ as giving access to God and righteousness and peace therewith; (2) as something new, which does away with the religion of the law; (3) as meant for all, and therefore for Gentiles also, indeed, as superseding Judaism; (4) as expressed in terms which are not simply Greek but also human,—Paul made the gospel comprehensible to the world. Islam, rising in Arabia, is an Arabian religion still. Buddhism remains an Indian religion. Christianity is at home in all lands. Paul put new life into the Roman empire, and inaugurated the Christian culture of the West. He turned a local into a universal religion. His influence however, according to Harnack, tended to the undue exaltation of organization and dogma and O. T. inspiration—points in which, in our judgment, Paul took sober middle ground and saved Christian truth for the world.

2. Genuineness of the Books of the Old Testament.

Since nearly one half of the Old Testament is of anonymous authorship and certain of its books may be attributed to definite historic characters only by way of convenient classification or of literary personification, we here mean by genuineness honesty of purpose and freedom from anything counterfeit or intentionally deceptive so far as respects the age or the authorship of the documents.

We show the genuineness of the Old Testament books:

(a) From the witness of the New Testament, in which all but six books of the Old Testament are either quoted or alluded to as genuine.

The N. T. shows coincidences of language with the O. T. Apocryphal books, but it contains only one direct quotation from them; while, with the exception of Judges, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah, every book in the Hebrew canon is used either for illustration or proof. The single Apocryphal quotation is found in Jude 14 and is in all probability taken from the book of Enoch. Although Volkmar puts the date of this book at 132 A. D., and although some critics hold that Jude quoted only the same primitive tradition of which the author of the book of Enoch afterwards made use, the weight of modern scholarship inclines to the opinion that the book itself was written as early as 170-70 B. C., and that Jude quoted from it; see Hastings’ Bible Dictionary: Book of Enoch; Sanday, Bampton Lect. on Inspiration, 95. “If Paul could quote from Gentile poets (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12), it is hard to understand why Jude could not cite a work which was certainly in high standing among the faithful”; see Schodde, Book of Enoch, 41, with the Introd. by Ezra Abbot. While Jude 14 gives us the only direct and express quotation from an Apocryphal book, Jude 6 and 9 contain allusions to the Book of Enoch and to the Assumption of Moses; see Charles, Assumption of Moses, 62. In Hebrews 1:3, we have words taken from Wisdom 7:26; and Hebrews 11:34-38 is a reminiscence of 1 Maccabees.

(b) From the testimony of Jewish authorities, ancient and modern, who declare the same books to be sacred, and only the same books, that are now comprised in our Old Testament Scriptures.

Josephus enumerates twenty-two of these books “which are justly accredited” (omit θεῖα—Niese, and Hastings’ Dict., 3:607). Our present Hebrew Bible makes twenty-four, by separating Ruth from Judges, and Lamentations from Jeremiah. See Josephus, Against Apion, 1:8; Smith’s Bible Dictionary, article on the Canon, 1:359, 360. Philo (born 20 B. C.) never quotes an Apocryphal book, although he does quote from nearly all the books of the O. T.; see Ryle, Philo and Holy Scripture. George Adam Smith, Modern Criticism and Preaching, 7—“The theory which ascribed the Canon of the O. T. to a single decision of the Jewish church in the days of its inspiration is not a theory supported by facts. The growth of the O. T. Canon was very gradual. Virtually it began in 621 B. C., with the acceptance by all Judah of Deuteronomy, and the adoption of the whole Law, or first five books of the O. T., under Nehemiah in 445 B. C. Then came the prophets before 200 B. C., and the Hagiographa from a century to two centuries later. The strict definition of the last division was not complete by the time of Christ. Christ seems to testify to the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms; yet neither Christ nor his apostles make any quotation from Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Canticles, or Ecclesiastes, the last of which books were not yet recognized by all the Jewish schools. But while Christ is the chief authority for the O. T., he was also its first critic. He rejected some parts of the Law and was indifferent to many others. He enlarged the sixth and seventh commandments, and reversed the eye for an eye, and the permission of divorce; touched the leper, and reckoned all foods lawful; broke away from literal observance of the Sabbath-day; left no commands about sacrifice, temple-worship, circumcision, but, by institution of the New Covenant, abrogated these sacraments of the Old. The apostles appealed to extra-canonical writings.” Gladden, Seven Puzzling Bible Books, 68-96—“Doubts were entertained in our Lord’s day as to the canonicity of several parts of the O. T., especially Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Esther.”

(c) From the testimony of the Septuagint translation, dating from the first half of the third century, or from 280 to 180 B. C.

MSS. of the Septuagint contain, indeed, the O. T. Apocrypha, but the writers of the latter do not recognize their own work as on a level with the canonical Scriptures, which they regard as distinct from all other books (Ecclesiasticus, prologue, and 48:24; also 24:23-27; 1 Mac. 12:9; 2 Mac. 6:23; 1 Esd. 1:28; 6:1; Baruch 2:21). So both ancient and modern Jews. See Bissell, in Lange’s Commentary on the Apocrypha, Introduction, 44. In the prologue to the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, we read of “the Law and the Prophets and the rest of the books,” which shows that as early as 130 B. C., the probable date of Ecclesiasticus, a threefold division of the Jewish sacred books was recognized. That the author, however, did not conceive of these books as constituting a completed canon seems evident from his assertion in this connection that his grandfather Jesus also wrote. 1 Mac. 12:9 (80-90 B. C.) speaks of “the sacred books which are now in our hands.” Hastings, Bible Dictionary, 3:611—“The O. T. was the result of a gradual process which began with the sanction of the Hexateuch by Ezra and Nehemiah, and practically closed with the decisions of the Council of Jamnia”—Jamnia is the ancient Jabneh, 7 miles south by west of Tiberias, where met a council of rabbins at some time between 90 to 118 A. D. This Council decided in favor of Canticles and Ecclesiastes, and closed the O. T. Canon. The Greek version of the Pentateuch which forms a part of the Septuagint is said by Josephus to have been made in the reign and by the order of Ptolemy Philadelphus, King of Egypt, about 270 or 280 B. C. “The legend is that it was made by seventy-two persons in seventy-two days. It is supposed, however, by modern critics that this version of the several books is the work not only of different hands but of separate times. It is probable that at first only the Pentateuch was translated, and the remaining books gradually; but the translation is believed to have been completed by the second century B. C.” (Century Dictionary, in voce). It therefore furnishes an important witness to the genuineness of our O. T. documents. Driver, Introd. to O. T. Lit., xxxi—“For the opinion, often met with in modern books, that the Canon of the O. T. was closed by Ezra, or in Ezra’s time, there is no foundation in antiquity whatever.... All that can reasonably be treated as historical in the accounts of Ezra’s literary labors is limited to the Law.”

(d) From indications that soon after the exile, and so early as the times of Ezra and Nehemiah (500-450 B. C.), the Pentateuch together with the book of Joshua was not only in existence but was regarded as authoritative.

2 Mac, 2:13-15 intimates that Nehemiah founded a library, and there is a tradition that a “Great Synagogue” was gathered in his time to determine the Canon. But Hastings’ Dictionary, 4:644, asserts that “the Great Synagogue was originally a meeting, and not an institution. It met once for all, and all that is told about it, except what we read in Nehemiah, is pure fable of the later Jews.” In like manner no dependence is to be placed upon the tradition that Ezra miraculously restored the ancient Scriptures that had been lost during the exile. Clement of Alexandria says: “Since the Scriptures perished in the Captivity of Nebuchadnezzar, Esdras (the Greek form of Ezra) the Levite, the priest, in the time of Artaxerxes, King of the Persians, having become inspired in the exercise of prophecy, restored again the whole of the ancient Scriptures.” But the work now divided into 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, mentions Darius Codomannus (Neh. 12:22), whose date is 336 B. C. The utmost the tradition proves is that about 300 B. C. the Pentateuch was in some sense attributed to Moses; see Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 35; Bib. Sac., 1863:381, 660, 799; Smith, Bible Dict., art.: Pentateuch; Theological Eclectic, 6:215; Bissell, Hist. Origin of the Bible, 398-403. On the Men of the Great Synagogue, see Wright, Ecclesiastes, 5-12, 475-477.

(e) From the testimony of the Samaritan Pentateuch, dating from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (500-450 B. C.).

The Samaritans had been brought by the king of Assyria from “Babylon, and from Cuthah and from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim”_ (2 K. 17:6, 24, 26), to take the place of the people of Israel whom the king had carried away captive to his own land. The colonists had brought their heathen gods with them, and the incursions of wild beasts which the intermission of tillage occasioned gave rise to the belief that the God of Israel was against them. One of the captive Jewish priests was therefore sent to teach them “the law of the god of the land” and he “taught them how they should fear Jehovah” (2 K. 17:27, 28)_. The result was that they adopted the Jewish ritual, but combined the worship of Jehovah with that of their graven images (verse 33). When the Jews returned from Babylon and began to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, the Samaritans offered their aid, but this aid was indignantly refused (Ezra 4 and Nehemiah 4). Hostility arose between Jews and Samaritans—a hostility which continued not only to the time of Christ (John 4:9), but even to the present day. Since the Samaritan Pentateuch substantially coincides with the Hebrew Pentateuch, it furnishes us with a definite past date at which it certainly existed in nearly its present form. It witnesses to the existence of our Pentateuch in essentially its present form as far back as the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Green, Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, 44, 45—“After being repulsed by the Jews, the Samaritans, to substantiate their claim of being sprung from ancient Israel, eagerly accepted the Pentateuch which was brought them by a renegade priest.” W. Robertson Smith, in Encyc. Brit., 21:244—“The priestly law, which is throughout based on the practice of the priests of Jerusalem before the captivity, was reduced to form after the exile, and was first published by Ezra as the law of the rebuilt temple of Zion. The Samaritans must therefore have derived their Pentateuch from the Jews after Ezra’s reforms, i. e., after 444 B. C. Before that time Samaritanism cannot have existed in a form at all similar to that which we know; but there must have been a community ready to accept the Pentateuch.” See Smith’s Bible Dictionary, art.: Samaritan Pentateuch; Hastings, Bible Dictionary, art.: Samaria; Stanley Leathes, Structure of the O. T., 1-41.

(f) From the finding of “the book of the law” in the temple, in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, or in 621 B. C.

2 K. 22:8—“And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Jehovah.” 23:2—“The book of the covenant” was read before the people by the king and proclaimed to be the law of the land. Curtis, in Hastings’ Bible Dict., 3:596—“The earliest written law or book of divine instruction of whose introduction or enactment an authentic account is given, was Deuteronomy or its main portion, represented as found in the temple in the 18th year of king Josiah (B. C. 621) and proclaimed by the king as the law of the land. From that time forward Israel had a written law which the pious believer was commanded to ponder day and night (Joshua 1:8; Ps. 1:2); and thus the Torah, as sacred literature, formally commenced in Israel. This law aimed at a right application of Mosaic principles.” Ryle, in Hastings’ Bible Dict., 1:602—“The law of Deuteronomy represents an expansion and development of the ancient code contained in Exodus 20-23, and precedes the final formulation of the priestly ritual, which only received its ultimate form in the last period of revising the structure of the Pentateuch.” Andrew Harper, on Deuteronomy, in Expositor’s Bible: “Deuteronomy does not claim to have been written by Moses. He is spoken of in the third person in the introduction and historical framework, while the speeches of Moses are in the first person. In portions where the author speaks for himself, the phrase ’beyond Jordan’ means east of Jordan; in the speeches of Moses the phrase ‘beyond Jordan’ means west of Jordan; and the only exception is Deut. 3:8, which cannot originally have been part of the speech of Moses. But the style of both parts is the same, and if the 3rd person parts are by a later author, the 1st person parts are by a later author also. Both differ from other speeches of Moses in the Pentateuch. Can the author be a contemporary writer who gives Moses’ words, as John gave the words of Jesus? No, for Deuteronomy covers only the book of the Covenant, Exodus 20-23. It uses JE but not P, with which JE is interwoven. But JE appears in Joshua and contributes to it an account of Joshua’s death. JE speaks of kings in Israel (Gen. 36:31-39). Deuteronomy plainly belongs to the early centuries of the Kingdom, or to the middle of it.” Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 43-49—“The Deuteronomic law was so short that Shaphan could read it aloud before the king (2 K. 22:10) and the king could read ‘the whole of it’ before the people (23:2); compare the reading of the Pentateuch for a whole week (Neh. 8:2-18). It was in the form of a covenant; it was distinguished by curses; it was an expansion and modification, fully within the legitimate province of the prophet, of a Torah of Moses codified from the traditional form of at least a century before. Such a Torah existed, was attributed to Moses, and is now incorporated as ‘the book of the covenant’ in Exodus 20 to 24. The year 620 is therefore the terminus a quo of Deuteronomy. The date of the priestly code is 444 B. C.” Sanday, Bampton Lectures for 1893, grants “(1) the presence in the Pentateuch of a considerable element which in its present shape is held by many to be not earlier than the captivity; (2) the composition of the book of Deuteronomy, not long, or at least not very long, before its promulgation by king Josiah in the year 621, which thus becomes a pivot-date in the history of Hebrew literature.”

(g) From references in the prophets Hosea (B. C. 743-737) and Amos (759-745) to a course of divine teaching and revelation extending far back of their day.

Hosea 8:12—“I wrote for him the ten thousand things of my law”; here is asserted the existence prior to the time of the prophet, not only of a law, but of a written law. All critics admit the book of Hosea to be a genuine production of the prophet, dating from the eighth century B. C.; see Green, in Presb. Rev., 1886:585-608. Amos 2:4—“they have rejected the law of Jehovah, and have not kept his statutes”; here is proof that, more than a century before the finding of Deuteronomy in the temple, Israel was acquainted with God’s law. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 26, 27—“The lofty plane reached by the prophets was not reached at a single bound.... There must have been a tap-root extending far down into the earth.” Kurtz remarks that “the later books of the O. T. would be a tree without roots, if the composition of the Pentateuch were transferred to a later period of Hebrew history.” If we substitute for the word “Pentateuch” the words “Book of the covenant,” we may assent to this dictum of Kurtz. There is sufficient evidence that, before the times of Hosea and Amos, Israel possessed a written law—the law embraced in Exodus 20-24—but the Pentateuch as we now have it, including Leviticus, seems to date no further back than the time of Jeremiah, 445 B. C. The Levitical law however was only the codification of statutes and customs whose origin lay far back in the past and which were believed to be only the natural expansion of the principles of Mosaic legislation. Leathes, Structure of O. T., 54—“Zeal for the restoration of the temple after the exile implied that it had long before been the centre of the national polity, that there had been a ritual and a law before the exile.” Present Day Tracts, 3:52—Levitical institutions could not have been first established by David. It is inconceivable that he “could have taken a whole tribe, and no trace remain of so revolutionary a measure as the dispossessing them of their property to make them ministers of religion.” James Robertson, Early History of Israel: “The varied literature of 850-750 B. C. implies the existence of reading and writing for some time before. Amos and Hosea hold, for the period succeeding Moses, the same scheme of history which modern critics pronounce late and unhistorical. The eighth century B. C. was a time of broad historic day, when Israel had a definite account to give of itself and of its history. The critics appeal to the prophets, but they reject the prophets when these tell us that other teachers taught the same truth before them, and when they declare that their nation had been taught a better religion and had declined from it, in other words, that there had been law long before their day. The kings did not give law. The priests presupposed it. There must have been a formal system of law much earlier than the critics admit, and also an earlier reference in their worship to the great events which made them a separate people.” And Dillman goes yet further back and declares that the entire work of Moses presupposes “a preparatory stage of higher religion in Abraham.”

(h) From the repeated assertions of Scripture that Moses himself wrote a law for his people, confirmed as these are by evidence of literary and legislative activity in other nations far antedating his time.

Ex. 24:4—“And Moses wrote all the words of Jehovah”; 34:27—“And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel”; Num. 33:2—“And Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by the commandment of Jehovah”; Deut. 31:9—“And Moses wrote this law, and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi, that bare the ark of the covenant of Jehovah, and unto all the elders of Israel”; 22—“So Moses wrote this song the same day, and taught it the children of Israel”; 24-26—“And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, that bare the ark of the covenant of Jehovah, saying, Take this book of the law, and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of Jehovah your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee.” The law here mentioned may possibly be only “the book of the covenant”_ (Ex. 20-24), and the speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy may have been orally handed down. But the fact that Moses was “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22)_, together with the fact that the art of writing was known in Egypt for many hundred years before his time, make it more probable that a larger portion of the Pentateuch was of his own composition. Kenyon, in Hastings’ Dict., art.: Writing, dates the Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, the first recorded literary composition in Egypt, at 3580-3536 B. C., and asserts the free use of writing among the Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia as early as 4000 B. C. The statutes of Hammurabi king of Babylon compare for extent with those of Leviticus, yet they date back to the time of Abraham, 2200 B. C.,—indeed Hammurabi is now regarded by many as the Amraphel of Gen. 14:1. Yet these statutes antedate Moses by 700 years. It is interesting to observe that Hammurabi professes to have received his statutes directly from the Sun-god of Sippar, his capital city. See translation by Winckler, in Der alte Orient, 97; Johns, The Oldest Code of Laws; Kelso, in Princeton Theol. Rev., July, 1905:399-412—Facts “authenticate the traditional date of the Book of the Covenant, overthrow the formula Prophets and Law, restore the old order Law and Prophets, and put into historical perspective the tradition that Moses was the author of the Sinaitic legislation.”

As the controversy with regard to the genuineness of the Old Testament books has turned of late upon the claims of the Higher Criticism in general, and upon the claims of the Pentateuch in particular, we subjoin separate notes upon these subjects.

The Higher Criticism in general. Higher Criticism does not mean criticism in any invidious sense, any more than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was an unfavorable or destructive examination. It is merely a dispassionate investigation of the authorship, date and purpose of Scripture books, in the light of their composition, style and internal characteristics. As the Lower Criticism is a text-critique, the Higher Criticism is a structure-critique. A bright Frenchman described a literary critic as one who rips open the doll to get at the sawdust there is in it. This can be done with a sceptical and hostile spirit, and there can be little doubt that some of the higher critics of the Old Testament have begun their studies with prepossessions against the supernatural, which have vitiated all their conclusions. These presuppositions are often unconscious, but none the less influential. When Bishop Colenso examined the Pentateuch and Joshua, he disclaimed any intention of assailing the miraculous narratives as such; as if he had said: “My dear little fish, you need not fear me; I do not wish to catch you; I only intend to drain the pond in which you live.” To many scholars the waters at present seem very low in the Hexateuch and indeed throughout the whole Old Testament. Shakespeare made over and incorporated many old Chronicles of Plutarch and Holinshed, and many Italian tales and early tragedies of other writers; but Pericles and Titus Andronicus still pass current under the name of Shakespeare. We speak even now of “Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar,” although of its twenty-seven editions the last fourteen have been published since his death, and more of it has been written by other editors than Gesenius ever wrote himself. We speak of “Webster’s Dictionary,” though there are in the “Unabridged” thousands of words and definitions that Webster never saw. Francis Brown: “A modern writer masters older records and writes a wholly new book. Not so with eastern historians. The latest comer, as Renan says, ‘absorbs his predecessors without assimilating them, so that the most recent has in its belly the fragments of the previous works in a raw state.’ The Diatessaron of Tatian is a parallel to the composite structure of the O. T. books. One passage yields the following: Mat. 21:12a; John 2:14a; Mat. 21:12b; John 2:14b, 15; Mat. 21:12c, 13; John 2:16; Mark 11:16; John 2:17-22; all succeeding each other without a break.” Gore, Lux Mundi, 353—“There is nothing materially untruthful, though there is something uncritical, in attributing the whole legislation to Moses acting under the divine command. It would be only of a piece with the attribution of the collection of Psalms to David, and of Proverbs to Solomon.” The opponents of the Higher Criticism have much to say in reply. Sayce, Early History of the Hebrews, holds that the early chapters of Genesis were copied from Babylonian sources, but he insists upon a Mosaic or pre-Mosaic date for the copying. Hilprecht however declares that the monotheistic faith of Israel could never have proceeded “from the Babylonian mountain of gods—that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s bones.” Bissell, Genesis Printed in Colors, Introd., iv—“It is improbable that so many documentary histories existed so early, or if existing that the compiler should have attempted to combine them. Strange that the earlier should be J and should use the word ‘Jehovah,’ while the later P should use the word ‘Elohim,’ when ‘Jehovah’ would have far better suited the Priests’ Code.... xiii—The Babylonian tablets contain in a continuous narrative the more prominent facts of both the alleged Elohistic and Jehovistic sections of Genesis, and present them mainly in the Biblical order. Several hundred years before Moses what the critics call two were already one. It is absurd to say that the unity was due to a redactor at the period of the exile, 444 B. C. He who believes that God revealed himself to primitive man as one God, will see in the Akkadian story a polytheistic corruption of the original monotheistic account.” We must not estimate the antiquity of a pair of boots by the last patch which the cobbler has added; nor must we estimate the antiquity of a Scripture book by the glosses and explanations added by later editors. As the London Spectator remarks on the Homeric problem: “It is as impossible that a first-rate poem or work of art should be produced without a great master-mind which first conceives the whole, as that a fine living bull should be developed out of beef-sausages.” As we shall proceed to show, however, these utterances overestimate the unity of the Pentateuch and ignore some striking evidences of its gradual growth and composite structure. The Authorship of the Pentateuch in particular. Recent critics, especially Kuenen and Robertson Smith, have maintained that the Pentateuch is Mosaic only in the sense of being a gradually growing body of traditional law, which was codified as late as the time of Ezekiel, and, as the development of the spirit and teachings of the great law-giver, was called by a legal fiction after the name of Moses and was attributed to him. The actual order of composition is therefore: (1) Book of the Covenant (Exodus 20-23); (2) Deuteronomy; (3) Leviticus. Among the reasons assigned for this view are the facts (a) that Deuteronomy ends with an account of Moses’ death, and therefore could not have been written by Moses; (b) that in Leviticus Levites are mere servants to the priests, while in Deuteronomy the priests are officiating Levites, or, in other words, all the Levites are priests; (c) that the books of Judges and of 1 Samuel, with their record of sacrifices offered in many places, give no evidence that either Samuel or the nation of Israel had any knowledge of a law confining worship to a local sanctuary. See Kuenen, Prophets and Prophecy in Israel; Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels, Band 1; and art.: Israel, in Encyc. Brit., 13:398, 399, 415; W. Robertson Smith, O. T. in Jewish Church, 306, 386, and Prophets of Israel; Hastings, Bible Dict., arts.: Deuteronomy, Hexateuch, and Canon of the O. T. It has been urged in reply, (1) that Moses may have written, not autographically, but through a scribe (perhaps Joshua), and that this scribe may have completed the history in Deuteronomy with the account of Moses’ death; (2) that Ezra or subsequent prophets may have subjected the whole Pentateuch to recension, and may have added explanatory notes; (3) that documents of previous ages may have been incorporated, in course of its composition by Moses, or subsequently by his successors; (4) that the apparent lack of distinction between the different classes of Levites in Deuteronomy may be explained by the fact that, while Leviticus was written with exact detail for the priests, Deuteronomy is the record of a brief general and oral summary of the law, addressed to the people at large and therefore naturally mentioning the clergy as a whole; (5) that the silence of the book of Judges as to the Mosaic ritual may be explained by the design of the book to describe only general history, and by the probability that at the tabernacle a ritual was observed of which the people in general were ignorant. Sacrifices in other places only accompanied special divine manifestations which made the recipient temporarily a priest. Even if it were proved that the law with regard to a central sanctuary was not observed, it would not show that the law did not exist, any more than violation of the second commandment by Solomon proves his ignorance of the decalogue, or the mediæval neglect of the N. T. by the Roman church proves that the N. T. did not then exist. We cannot argue that “where there was transgression, there was no law” (Watts, New Apologetic, 83, and The Newer Criticism). In the light of recent research, however, we cannot regard these replies as satisfactory. Woods, in his article on the Hexateuch, Hastings’ Dictionary, 2:365, presents a moderate statement of the results of the higher criticism which commends itself to us as more trustworthy. He calls it a theory of stratification, and holds that “certain more or less independent documents, dealing largely with the same series of events, were composed at different periods, or, at any rate, under different auspices, and were afterwards combined, so that our present Hexateuch, which means our Pentateuch with the addition of Joshua, contains these several different literary strata.... The main grounds for accepting this hypothesis of stratification are (1) that the various literary pieces, with very few exceptions, will be found on examination to arrange themselves by common characteristics into comparatively few groups; (2) that an original consecution of narrative may be frequently traced between what in their present form are isolated fragments. “This will be better understood by the following illustration. Let us suppose a problem of this kind: Given a patchwork quilt, explain the character of the original pieces out of which the bits of stuff composing the quilt were cut. First, we notice that, however well the colors may blend, however nice and complete the whole may look, many of the adjoining pieces do not agree in material, texture, pattern, color, or the like. Ergo, they have been made up out of very different pieces of stuff.... But suppose we further discover that many of the bits, though now separated, are like one another in material, texture, etc., we may conjecture that these have been cut out of one piece. But we shall prove this beyond reasonable doubt if we find that several bits when unpicked fit together, so that the pattern of one is continued in the other; and, moreover, that if all of like character are sorted out, they form, say, four groups, each of which was evidently once a single piece of stuff, though parts of each are found missing, because, no doubt, they have not been required to make the whole. But we make the analogy of the Hexateuch even closer, if we further suppose that in certain parts of the quilt the bits belonging to, say, two of these groups are so combined as to form a subsidiary pattern within the larger pattern of the whole quilt, and had evidently been sewed together before being connected with other parts of the quilt; and we may make it even closer still, if we suppose that, besides the more important bits of stuff, smaller embellishments, borderings, and the like, had been added so as to improve the general effect of the whole.” The author of this article goes on to point out three main portions of the Hexateuch which essentially differ from each other. There are three distinct codes: the Covenant code (C—Ex. 20:22 to 23:33, and 24:3-8), the Deuteronomic code (D), and the Priestly code (P). These codes have peculiar relations to the narrative portions of the Hexateuch. In Genesis, for example, “the greater part of the book is divided into groups of longer or shorter pieces, generally paragraphs or chapters, distinguished respectively by the almost exclusive use of Elohim or Jehovah as the name of God.” Let us call these portions J and E. But we find such close affinities between C and JE, that we may regard them as substantially one. “We shall find that the larger part of the narratives, as distinct from the laws, of Exodus and Numbers belong to JE; whereas, with special exceptions, the legal portions belong to P. In the last chapters of Deuteronomy and in the whole of Joshua we find elements of JE. In the latter book we also find elements which connect it with D. “It should be observed that not only do we find here and there separate pieces in the Hexateuch, shown by their characters to belong to these three sources, JE, D, and P, but the pieces will often be found connected together by an obvious continuity of subject when pieced together, like the bits of patchwork in the illustration with which we started. For example, if we read continuously Gen. 11:27-33; 12:4b, 5; 13:6a, 11b, 12a; 16:1a, 3, 15, 16; 17; 19:29; 21:1a, 2b-5; 23; 25:7-11a—passages mainly, on other grounds, attributed to P, we get an almost continuous and complete, though very concise, account of Abraham’s life.” We may concede the substantial correctness of the view thus propounded. It simply shows God’s actual method in making up the record of his revelation. We may add that any scholar who grants that Moses did not himself write the account of his own death and burial in the last chapter of Deuteronomy, or who recognizes two differing accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, has already begun an analysis of the Pentateuch and has accepted the essential principles of the higher criticism. In addition to the literature already referred to mention may also be made of Driver’s Introd. to O. T., 118-150, and Deuteronomy, Introd.; W. R. Harper, in Hebraica, Oct.-Dec. 1888, and W. H. Green’s reply in Hebraica. Jan.-Apr. 1889; also Green, The Unity of the Book of Genesis, Moses and the Prophets, Hebrew Feasts, and Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch; with articles by Green in Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882 and Oct. 1886; Howard Osgood, in Essays on Pentateuchal Criticism, and in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1888, and July, 1893; Watts, The Newer Criticism, and New Apologetic, 83; Presb. Rev., arts. by H. P. Smith, April, 1882, and by F. L. Patton, 1883:341-410; Bib. Sac., April, 1882:291-344, and by G. F. Wright, July, 1898:515-525; Brit. Quar., July, 1881:123; Jan. 1884:138-143; Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 373-385; Stebbins, A Study in the Pentateuch; Bissell, Historic Origin of the Bible, 277-342, and The Pentateuch, its Authorship and Structure; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 180-216, and The Veracity of the Hexateuch; Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, 58; Payne-Smith, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 15; Edersheim, Prophecy and History; Kurtz, Hist. Old Covenant, 1:46; Perowne, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. and Feb. 1888; Chambers, Moses and his Recent Critics; Terry, Moses and the Prophets; Davis, Dictionary of the Bible, art.: Pentateuch; Willis J. Beecher, The Prophets and the Promise; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 326-329.

We shall attempt to prove this only of the writers of the gospels; for if they are credible witnesses, the credibility of the Old Testament, to which they bore testimony, follows as a matter of course.

1. They are capable or competent witnesses,—that is, they possessed actual knowledge with regard to the facts they professed to relate. (a) They had opportunities of observation and inquiry. (b) They were men of sobriety and discernment, and could not have been themselves deceived. (c) Their circumstances were such as to impress deeply upon their minds the events of which they were witnesses.

2. They are honest witnesses. This is evident when we consider that: (a) Their testimony imperiled all their worldly interests. (b) The moral elevation of their writings, and their manifest reverence for truth and constant inculcation of it, show that they were not wilful deceivers, but good men. (c) There are minor indications of the honesty of these writers in the circumstantiality of their story, in the absence of any expectation that their narratives would be questioned, in their freedom from all disposition to screen themselves or the apostles from censure.

Lessing says that Homer never calls Helen beautiful, but he gives the reader an impression of her surpassing loveliness by portraying the effect produced by her presence. So the evangelists do not describe Jesus’ appearance or character, but lead us to conceive the cause that could produce such effects. Gore, Incarnation, 77—“Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod, Judas, are not abused,—they are photographed. The sin of a Judas and a Peter is told with equal simplicity. Such fairness, wherever you find it, belongs to a trustworthy witness.”

3. The writings of the evangelists mutually support each other. We argue their credibility upon the ground of their number and of the consistency of their testimony. While there is enough of discrepancy to show that there has been no collusion between them, there is concurrence enough to make the falsehood of them all infinitely improbable. Four points under this head deserve mention: (a) The evangelists are independent witnesses. This is sufficiently shown by the futility of the attempts to prove that any one of them has abridged or transcribed another. (b) The discrepancies between them are none of them irreconcilable with the truth of the recorded facts, but only present those facts in new lights or with additional detail. (c) That these witnesses were friends of Christ does not lessen the value of their united testimony, since they followed Christ only because they were convinced that these facts were true. (d) While one witness to the facts of Christianity might establish its truth, the combined evidence of four witnesses gives us a warrant for faith in the facts of the gospel such as we possess for no other facts in ancient history whatsoever. The same rule which would refuse belief in the events recorded in the gospels “would throw doubt on any event in history.”

No man does or can write his own signature twice precisely alike. When two signatures, therefore, purporting to be written by the same person, are precisely alike, it is safe to conclude that one of them is a forgery. Compare the combined testimony of the evangelists with the combined testimony of our five senses. “Let us assume,” says Dr. C. E. Rider, “that the chances of deception are as one to ten when we use our eyes alone, one to twenty when we use our ears alone, and one to forty when we use our sense of touch alone; what are the chances of mistake when we use all these senses simultaneously? The true result is obtained by multiplying these proportions together. This gives one to eight thousand.”

4. The conformity of the gospel testimony with experience. We have already shown that, granting the fact of sin and the need of an attested revelation from God, miracles can furnish no presumption against the testimony of those who record such a revelation, but, as essentially belonging to such a revelation, miracles may be proved by the same kind and degree of evidence as is required in proof of any other extraordinary facts. We may assert, then, that in the New Testament histories there is no record of facts contrary to experience, but only a record of facts not witnessed in ordinary experience—of facts, therefore, in which we may believe, if the evidence in other respects is sufficient.

5. Coincidence of this testimony with collateral facts and circumstances. Under this head we may refer to (a) the numberless correspondences between the narratives of the evangelists and contemporary history; (b) the failure of every attempt thus far to show that the sacred history is contradicted by any single fact derived from other trustworthy sources; (c) the infinite improbability that this minute and complete harmony should ever have been secured in fictitious narratives.

6. Conclusion from the argument for the credibility of the writers of the gospels. These writers having been proved to be credible witnesses, their narratives, including the accounts of the miracles and prophecies of Christ and his apostles, must be accepted as true. But God would not work miracles or reveal the future to attest the claims of false teachers. Christ and his apostles must, therefore, have been what they claimed to be, teachers sent from God, and their doctrine must be what they claimed it to be, a revelation from God to men.

On the whole subject, see Ebrard, Wissensch. Kritik der evang. Geschichte; Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, 30, 31; Starkie on Evidence, 734; Whately, Historic Doubts as to Napoleon Buonaparte; Haley, Examination of Alleged Discrepancies; Smith’s Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul; Paley, Horse Paulinæ; Birks, in Strivings for the Faith, 37-72—“Discrepancies are like the slight diversities of the different pictures of the stereoscope.” Renan calls the land of Palestine a fifth gospel. Weiss contrasts the Apocryphal Gospels, where there is no historical setting and all is in the air, with the evangelists, where time and place are always stated. No modern apologist has stated the argument for the credibility of the New Testament with greater clearness and force than Paley,—Evidences, chapters 8 and 10—“No historical fact is more certain than that the original propagators of the gospel voluntarily subjected themselves to lives of fatigue, danger, and suffering, in the prosecution of their undertaking. The nature of the undertaking, the character of the persons employed in it, the opposition of their tenets to the fixed expectations of the country in which they at first advanced them, their undissembled condemnation of the religion of all other countries, their total want of power, authority, or force, render it in the highest degree probable that this must have been the case. “The probability is increased by what we know of the fate of the Founder of the institution, who was put to death for his attempt, and by what we also know of the cruel treatment of the converts to the institution within thirty years after its commencement—both which points are attested by heathen writers, and, being once admitted, leave it very incredible that the primitive emissaries of the religion who exercised their ministry first amongst the people who had destroyed their Master, and afterwards amongst those who persecuted their converts, should themselves escape with impunity or pursue their purpose in ease and safety. “This probability, thus sustained by foreign testimony, is advanced, I think, to historical certainty by the evidence of our own books, by the accounts of a writer who was the companion of the persons whose sufferings he relates, by the letters of the persons themselves, by predictions of persecutions, ascribed to the Founder of the religion, which predictions would not have been inserted in this history, much less, studiously dwelt upon, if they had not accorded with the event, and which, even if falsely ascribed to him, could only have been so ascribed because the event suggested them; lastly, by incessant exhortations to fortitude and patience, and by an earnestness, repetition and urgency upon the subject which were unlikely to have appeared, if there had not been, at the time, some extraordinary call for the exercise of such virtues. It is also made out, I think, with sufficient evidence, that both the teachers and converts of the religion, in consequence of their new profession, took up a new course of life and conduct. “The next great question is, what they did this for. It was for a miraculous story of some kind, since for the proof that Jesus of Nazareth ought to be received as the Messiah, or as a messenger for God, they neither had nor could have anything but miracles to stand upon.... If this be so, the religion must be true. These men could not be deceivers. By only not bearing testimony, they might have avoided all these sufferings and 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 crucifixion, yet persist in carrying it on, and so persist as to bring upon themselves, for nothing, and with a full knowledge of the consequences, enmity and hatred, danger and death?” Those who maintain this, moreover, require us to believe that the Scripture writers were “villains for no end but to teach honesty, and martyrs without the least prospect of honor or advantage.” Imposture must have a motive. The self-devotion of the apostles is the strongest evidence of their truth, for even Hume declares that “we cannot make use of a more convincing argument in proof of honesty than to prove that the actions ascribed to any persons are contrary to the course of nature, and that no human motives, in such circumstances, could ever induce them to such conduct.”

1. Scripture teaching in general.

A. The Bible is the work of one mind.

(a) In spite of its variety of authorship and the vast separation of its writers from one another in point of time, there is a unity of subject, spirit, and aim throughout the whole.

We here begin a new department of Christian evidences. We have thus far only adduced external evidence. We now turn our attention to internal evidence. The relation of external to internal evidence seems to be suggested in Christ’s two questions in Mark 8:27, 29—“Who do men say that I am?... who say ye that I am?” The unity in variety displayed in Scripture is one of the chief internal evidences. This unity is indicated in our word “Bible,” in the singular number. Yet the original word was “Biblia,” a plural number. The world has come to see a unity in what were once scattered fragments: the many “Biblia” have become one “Bible.” In one sense R. W. Emerson’s contention is true: “The Bible is not a book,—it is a literature.” But we may also say, and with equal truth: “The Bible is not simply a collection of books,—it is a book.” The Bible is made up of sixty-six books, by forty writers, of all ranks,—shepherds, fishermen, priests, warriors, statesmen, kings,—composing their works at intervals through a period of seventeen centuries. Evidently no collusion between them is possible. Scepticism tends ever to ascribe to the Scriptures greater variety of authorship and date, but all this only increases the wonder of the Bible’s unity. If unity in a half dozen writers is remarkable, in forty it is astounding. “The many diverse instruments of this orchestra play one perfect tune: hence we feel that they are led by one master and composer.” Yet it takes the same Spirit who inspired the Bible to teach its unity. The union is not an external or superficial one, but one that is internal and spiritual.

(b) Not one moral or religious utterance of all these writers has been contradicted or superseded by the utterances of those who have come later, but all together constitute a consistent system.

Here we must distinguish between the external form and the moral and religious substance. Jesus declares in _Mat. 5:21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, _“Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time ... but I say unto you,” and then he seems at first sight to abrogate certain original commands. But he also declares in this connection, Mat. 5:17, 18—“Think not I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished.” Christ’s new commandments only bring out the inner meaning of the old. He fulfils them not in their literal form but in their essential spirit. So the New Testament completes the revelation of the Old Testament and makes the Bible a perfect unity. In this unity the Bible stands alone. Hindu, Persian, and Chinese religious books contain no consistent system of faith. There is progress in revelation from the earlier to the later books of the Bible, but this is not progress through successive steps of falsehood; it is rather progress from a less to a more clear and full unfolding of the truth. The whole truth lay germinally in the protevangelium uttered to our first parents (Gen. 3:15—the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head).

(c) Each of these writings, whether early or late, has represented moral and religious ideas greatly in advance of the age in which it has appeared, and these ideas still lead the world.

All our ideas of progress, with all the forward-looking spirit of modern Christendom, are due to Scripture. The classic nations had no such ideas and no such spirit, except as they caught them from the Hebrews. Virgil’s prophecy, in his fourth Eclogue, of a coming virgin and of the reign of Saturn and of the return of the golden age, was only the echo of the Sibylline books and of the hope of a Redeemer with which the Jews had leavened the whole Roman world; see A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 94-96.

(d) It is impossible to account for this unity without supposing such a supernatural suggestion and control that the Bible, while in its various parts written by human agents, is yet equally the work of a superhuman intelligence.

We may contrast with the harmony between the different Scripture writers the contradictions and refutations which follow merely human philosophies—e. g., the Hegelian idealism and the Spencerian materialism. Hegel is “a name to swear at, as well as to swear by.” Dr. Stirling, in his Secret of Hegel, “kept all the secret to himself, if he ever knew it.” A certain Frenchman once asked Hegel if he could not gather up and express his philosophy in one sentence for him. “No,” Hegel replied, “at least not in French.” If Talleyrand’s maxim be true that whatever is not intelligible is not French, Hegel’s answer was a correct one. Hegel said of his disciples: “There is only one man living who understands me, and he does not.” Goeschel, Gabler, Daub, Marheinecke, Erdmann, are Hegel’s right wing, or orthodox representatives and followers in theology; see Sterrett, Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. Hegel is followed by Alexander and Bradley in England, but is opposed by Seth and Schiller. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 279-300, gives a valuable estimate of his position and influence: Hegel is all thought and no will. Prayer has no effect on God,—it is a purely psychological phenomenon. There is no free-will, and man’s sin as much as man’s holiness is a manifestation of the Eternal. Evolution is a fact, but it is only fatalistic evolution. Hegel notwithstanding did great service by substituting knowledge of reality for the oppressive Kantian relativity, and by banishing the old notion of matter as a mysterious substance wholly unlike and incompatible with the properties of mind. He did great service also by showing that the interactions of matter and mind are explicable only by the presence of the Absolute Whole in every part, though he erred greatly by carrying that idea of the unity of God and man beyond its proper limits, and by denying that God has given to the will of man any power to put itself into antagonism to His Will. Hegel did great service by showing that we cannot know even the part without knowing the whole, but he erred in teaching, as T. H. Green did, that the relations constitute the reality of the thing. He deprives both physical and psychical existences of that degree of selfhood or independent reality which is essential to both science and religion. We want real force, and not the mere idea of force; real will, and not mere thought.

B. This one mind that made the Bible is the same mind that made the soul, for the Bible is divinely adapted to the soul,

(a) It shows complete acquaintance with the soul.

The Bible addresses all parts of man’s nature. There are Law and Epistles for man’s reason; Psalms and Gospels for his affections; Prophets and Revelations for his imagination. Hence the popularity of the Scriptures. Their variety holds men. The Bible has become interwoven into modern life. Law, literature, art, all show its moulding influence.

(b) It judges the soul—contradicting its passions, revealing its guilt, and humbling its pride.

No product of mere human nature could thus look down upon human nature and condemn it. The Bible speaks to us from a higher level. The Samaritan woman’s words apply to the whole compass of divine revelation; it tells us all things that ever we did (John 4:29). The Brahmin declared that Romans 1, with its description of heathen vices, must have been forged after the missionaries came to India.

(c) It meets the deepest needs of the soul—by solutions of its problems, disclosures of God’s character, presentations of the way of pardon, consolations and promises for life and death.

Neither Socrates nor Seneca sets forth the nature, origin and consequences of sin as committed against the holiness of God, nor do they point out the way of pardon and renewal. The Bible teaches us what nature cannot, viz.: God’s creatorship, the origin of evil, the method of restoration, the certainty of a future state, and the principle of rewards and punishments there.

(d) Yet it is silent upon many questions for which writings of merely human origin seek first to provide solutions.

Compare the account of Christ’s infancy in the gospels with the fables of the Apocryphal New Testament; compare the scant utterances of Scripture with regard to the future state with Mohammed’s and Swedenborg’s revelations of Paradise. See Alexander McLaren’s sermon on The Silence of Scripture, in his book entitled: Christ in the Heart, 131-141.

(e) There are infinite depths and inexhaustible reaches of meaning in Scripture, which difference it from all other books, and which compel us to believe that its author must be divine.

Sir Walter Scott, on his death bed: “Bring me the Book!” “What book?” said Lockhart, his son-in-law. “There is but one book!” said the dying man. Réville concludes an Essay in the Revue des deux Mondes (1864): “One day the question was started, in an assembly, what book a man condemned to lifelong imprisonment, and to whom but one book would be permitted, had better take into his cell with him. The company consisted of Catholics, Protestants, philosophers and even materialists, but all agreed that their choice would fall only on the Bible.” On the whole subject, see Garbett, God’s Word Written, 3-56; Luthardt, Saving Truths, 210; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of Bible, 155-181; W. L. Alexander, Connection and Harmony of O. T. and N. T.; Stanley Leathes, Structure of the O. T.; Bernard, Progress of Doctrine in the N. T.; Rainy, Delivery and Development of Doctrine; Titcomb, in Strivings for the Faith; Immer, Hermeneutics, 91; Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 23; 5: no. 28; 6: no. 31; Lee on Inspiration, 26-32.

2. Moral System of the New Testament.

The perfection of this system is generally conceded. All will admit that it greatly surpasses any other system known among men. Among its distinguishing characteristics may be mentioned:

(a) Its comprehensiveness,—including all human duties in its code, even the most generally misunderstood and neglected, while it permits no vice whatsoever.

Buddhism regards family life as sinful. Suicide was commended by many ancient philosophers. Among the Spartans to steal was praiseworthy,—only to be caught stealing was criminal. Classic times despised humility. Thomas Paine said that Christianity cultivated “the spirit of a spaniel,” and John Stuart Mill asserted that Christ ignored duty to the state. Yet Peter urges Christians to add to their faith manliness, courage, heroism (2 Pet. 1:5—“in your faith supply virtue”), and Paul declares the state to be God’s ordinance (Rom. 13:1—“Let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God; and the powers that be are ordained of God”). Patriotic defence of a nation’s unity and freedom has always found its chief incitement and ground in these injunctions of Scripture. E. G. Robinson: “Christian ethics do not contain a particle of chaff,—all is pure wheat.”

(b) Its spirituality,—accepting no merely external conformity to right precepts, but judging all action by the thoughts and motives from which it springs.

The superficiality of heathen morals is well illustrated by the treatment of the corpse of a priest in Siam: the body is covered with gold leaf, and then is left to rot and shine. Heathenism divorces religion from ethics. External and ceremonial observances take the place of purity of heart. The Sermon on the Mount on the other hand pronounces blessing only upon inward states of the soul. Ps. 51:6—“Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom”; Micah 6:8—“what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

(c) Its simplicity,—inculcating principles rather than imposing rules; reducing these principles to an organic system; and connecting this system with religion by summing up all human duty in the one command of love to God and man.

Christianity presents no extensive code of rules, like that of the Pharisees or of the Jesuits. Such codes break down of their own weight. The laws of the State of New York alone constitute a library of themselves, which only the trained lawyer can master. It is said that Mohammedanism has recorded sixty-five thousand special instances in which the reader is directed to do right. It is the merit of Jesus’ system that all its requisitions are reduced to unity. Mark 12:29-31—“Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. The second is this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 2:384-814, calls attention to the inner unity of Jesus’ teaching. The doctrine that God is a loving Father is applied with unswerving consistency. Jesus confirmed whatever was true in the O. T., and he set aside the unworthy. He taught not so much about God, as about the kingdom of God, and about the ideal fellowship between God and men. Morality was the necessary and natural expression of religion. In Christ teaching and life were perfectly blended. He was the representative of the religion which he taught.

(d) Its practicality,—exemplifying its precepts in the life of Jesus Christ; and, while it declares man’s depravity and inability in his own strength to keep the law, furnishing motives to obedience, and the divine aid of the Holy Spirit to make this obedience possible.

Revelation has two sides: Moral law, and provision for fulfilling the moral law that has been broken. Heathen systems can incite to temporary reformations, and they can terrify with fears of retribution. But only God’s regenerating grace can make the tree good, in such a way that its fruit will be good also (Mat. 12:33). There is a difference between touching the pendulum of the clock and winding it up,—the former may set it temporarily swinging, but only the latter secures its regular and permanent motion. The moral system of the N. T. is not simply law,—it is also grace: John 1:17—“the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Dr. William Ashmore’s tract represents a Chinaman in a pit. Confucius looks into the pit and says: “If you had done as I told you, you would never have gotten in.” Buddha looks into the pit and says: “If you were up here I would show you what to do.” So both Confucius and Buddha pass on. But Jesus leaps down into the pit and helps the poor Chinaman out. At the Parliament of Religions in Chicago there were many ideals of life propounded, but no religion except Christianity attempted to show that there was any power given to realize these ideals. When Joseph Cook challenged the priests of the ancient religions to answer Lady Macbeth’s question: “How cleanse this red right hand?” the priests were dumb. But Christianity declares that “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin”_ (1 John 1:7)_. E. G. Robinson: Christianity differs from all other religions in being (1) a historical religion; (2) in turning abstract law into a person to be loved; (3) in furnishing a demonstration of God’s love in Christ; (4) in providing atonement for sin and forgiveness for the sinner; (5) in giving a power to fulfil the law and sanctify the life. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 249—“Christianity, by making the moral law the expression of a holy Will, brought that law out of its impersonal abstraction, and assured its ultimate triumph. Moral principles may be what they were before, but moral practice is forever different. Even the earth itself has another look, now that it has heaven above it.” Frances Power Cobbe, Life, 92—“The achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a new, still less of a systematic, morality; but the introduction of a new spirit into morality; as Christ himself said, a leaven into the lump.”

We may justly argue that a moral system so pure and perfect, since it surpasses all human powers of invention and runs counter to men’s natural tastes and passions, must have had a supernatural, and if a supernatural, then a divine, origin.

Heathen systems of morality are in general defective, in that they furnish for man’s moral action no sufficient example, rule, motive, or end. They cannot do this, for the reason that they practically identify God with nature, and know of no clear revelation of his holy will. Man is left to the law of his own being, and since he is not conceived of as wholly responsible and free, the lower impulses are allowed sway as well as the higher, and selfishness is not regarded as sin. As heathendom does not recognize man’s depravity, so it does not recognize his dependence upon divine grace, and its virtue is self-righteousness. Heathenism is man’s vain effort to lift himself to God; Christianity is God’s coming down to man to save him; see Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 11, 12. Martineau, 1:15, 16, calls attention to the difference between the physiological ethics of heathendom and the psychological ethics of Christianity. Physiological ethics begins with nature; and, finding in nature the uniform rule of necessity and the operation of cause and effect, it comes at last to man and applies the same rule to him, thus extinguishing all faith in personality, freedom, responsibility, sin and guilt. Psychological ethics, on the contrary, wisely begins with what we know best, with man; and finding in him free-will and a moral purpose, it proceeds outward to nature and interprets nature as the manifestation of the mind and will of God. “Psychological ethics are altogether peculiar to Christendom.... Other systems begin outside and regard the soul as a homogeneous part of the universe, applying to the soul the principle of necessity that prevails outside of it.... In the Christian religion, on the other hand, the interest, the mystery of the world are concentrated in human nature.... The sense of sin—a sentiment that left no trace in Athens—involves a consciousness of personal alienation from the Supreme Goodness; the aspiration after holiness directs itself to a union of affection and will with the source of all Perfection; the agency for transforming men from their old estrangement to new reconciliation is a Person, in whom the divine and human historically blend; and the sanctifying Spirit by which they are sustained at the height of their purer life is a living link of communion between their minds and the Soul of souls.... So Nature, to the Christian consciousness, sank into the accidental and the neutral.” Measuring ourselves by human standards, we nourish pride; measuring ourselves by divine standards, we nourish humility. Heathen nations, identifying God with nature or with man, are unprogressive. The flat architecture of the Parthenon, with its lines parallel to the earth, is the type of heathen religion; the aspiring arches of the Gothic cathedral symbolize Christianity. Sterrett, Studies in Hegel, 33, says that Hegel characterized the Chinese religion as that of Measure, or temperate conduct; Brahmanism as that of Phantasy, or inebriate dream-life; Buddhism as that of Self-involvement; that of Egypt as the imbruted religion of Enigma, symbolized by the Sphynx; that of Greece, as the religion of Beauty; the Jewish as that of Sublimity; and Christianity as the Absolute religion, the fully revealed religion of truth and freedom. In all this Hegel entirely fails to grasp the elements of Will, Holiness, Love, Life, which characterize Judaism and Christianity, and distinguish them from all other religions. R. H. Hutton: “Judaism taught us that Nature must be interpreted by our knowledge of God, not God by our knowledge of Nature.” Lyman Abbott: “Christianity is not a new life, but a new power; not a summons to a new life, but an offer of new life; not a reënactment of the old law, but a power of God unto salvation; not love to God and man, but Christ’s message that God loves us, and will help us to the life of love.” Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 5, 6—“Christianity postulates an opening of the heart of the eternal God to the heart of man coming to meet him. Heathendom shows us the heart of man blunderingly grasping the hem of God’s garment, and mistaking Nature, his majestic raiment, for himself. Only in the Bible does man press beyond God’s external manifestations to God himself.” See Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:37-173; Porter, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 19, pp. 33-64: Blackie, Four Phases of Morals; Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures, second series); J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:280-317; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith; Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 134, and Seekers after God, 181, 182, 320; Curtis on Inspiration, 288. For denial of the all-comprehensive character of Christian Morality, see John Stuart Mill, on Liberty; per contra, see Review of Mill, in Theol. Eclectic, 6:508-512; Row, in Strivings for the Faith, pub. by Christian Evidence Society, 181-220; also, Bampton Lectures, 1877:130-176; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 28-38, 174.

In contrast with the Christian system of morality the defects of heathen systems are so marked and fundamental, that they constitute a strong corroborative evidence of the divine origin of the Scripture revelation. We therefore append certain facts and references with regard to particular heathen systems.

1. Confucianism. Confucius (Kung-fu-tse), B. C. 551-478, contemporary with Pythagoras and Buddha. Socrates was born ten years after Confucius died. Mencius (371-278) was a disciple of Confucius. Matheson, in Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures), 73-108, claims that Confucianism was “an attempt to substitute a morality for theology.” Legge, however, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 18, shows that this is a mistake. Confucius simply left religion where he found it. God, or Heaven, is worshiped in China, but only by the Emperor. Chinese religion is apparently a survival of the worship of the patriarchal family. The father of the family was its only head and priest. In China, though the family widened into the tribe, and the tribe into the nation, the father still retained his sole authority, and, as the father of his people, the Emperor alone officially offered sacrifice to God. Between God and the people the gulf has so widened that the people may be said to have no practical knowledge of God or communication with him. Dr. W. A. P. Martin: “Confucianism has degenerated into a pantheistic medley, and renders worship to an impersonal ‘anima mundi,’ under the leading forms of visible nature.” Dr. William Ashmore, private letter: “The common people of China have: (1) Ancestor-worship, and the worship of deified heroes: (2) Geomancy, or belief in the controlling power of the elements of nature; but back of these, and antedating them, is (3) the worship of Heaven and Earth, or Father and Mother, a very ancient dualism; this belongs to the common people also, though once a year the Emperor, as a sort of high-priest of his people, offers sacrifice on the altar of Heaven; in this he acts alone. ‘Joss’ is not a Chinese word at all. It is the corrupted form of the Portuguese word ‘Deos.’ The word ‘pidgin’ is similarly an attempt to say ‘business’ (big-i-ness or bidgin). ‘Joss-pidgin’ therefore means simply ‘divine service,’ or service offered to Heaven and Earth, or to spirits of any kind, good or bad. There are many gods, a Queen of Heaven, King of Hades, God of War, god of literature, gods of the hills, valleys, streams, a goddess of small-pox, of child-bearing, and all the various trades have their gods. The most lofty expression the Chinese have is ‘Heaven,’ or ‘Supreme Heaven,’ or ‘Azure Heaven.’ This is the surviving indication that in the most remote times they had knowledge of one supreme, intelligent and personal Power who ruled over all.” Mr. Yugoro Chiba has shown that the Chinese classics permit sacrifice by all the people. But it still remains true that sacrifice to “Supreme Heaven” is practically confined to the Emperor, who like the Jewish high-priest offers for his people once a year. Confucius did nothing to put morality upon a religious basis. In practice, the relations between man and man are the only relations considered. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, sincerity, are enjoined, but not a word is said with regard to man’s relations to God. Love to God is not only not commanded—it is not thought of as possible. Though man’s being is theoretically an ordinance of God, man is practically a law to himself. The first commandment of Confucius is that of filial piety. But this includes worship of dead ancestors, and is so exaggerated as to bury from sight the related duties of husband to wife and of parent to child. Confucius made it the duty of a son to slay his father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly retaliatory penalty for bloodshed; see J. A. Farrer, Primitive Manners and Customs, 80. He treated invisible and superior beings with respect, but held them at a distance. He recognized the “Heaven” of tradition; but, instead of adding to our knowledge of it, he stifled inquiry. Dr. Legge: “I have been reading Chinese books for more than forty years, and any general requirement to love God, or the mention of any one as actually loving him, has yet to come for the first time under my eye.” Ezra Abbot asserts that Confucius gave the golden rule in positive as well as negative form; see Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 222. This however seems to be denied by Dr. Legge, Religions of China, 1-58. Wu Ting Fang, former Chinese minister to Washington, assents to the statement that Confucius gave the golden rule only in its negative form, and he says this difference is the difference between a passive and an aggressive civilization, which last is therefore dominant. The golden rule, as Confucius gives it, is: “Do not unto others that which you would not they should do unto you.” Compare with this, Isocrates: “Be to your parents what you would have your children be to you.... Do not to others the things which make you angry when others do them to you”; Herodotus: “What I punish in another man, I will myself, as far as I can, refrain from”; Aristotle: “We should behave toward our friends as we should wish them to behave toward us”; Tobit, 4:15—“What thou hatest, do to no one”; Philo: “What one hates to endure, let him not do”; Seneca bids us “give as we wish to receive”; Rabbi Hillel: “Whatsoever is hateful to you, do not to another; this is the whole law, and all the rest is explanation.” Broadus, in Am. Com. on Matthew, 161—“The sayings of Confucius, Isocrates, and the three Jewish teachers, are merely negative; that of Seneca is confined to giving, and that of Aristotle to the treatment of friends. Christ lays down a rule for positive action, and that toward all men.” He teaches that I am bound to do to others all that they could rightly desire me to do to them. The golden rule therefore requires a supplement, to show what others can rightly desire, namely, God’s glory first, and their good as second and incidental thereto. Christianity furnishes this divine and perfect standard; Confucianism is defective in that it has no standard higher than human convention. While Confucianism excludes polytheism, idolatry, and deification of vice, it is a shallow and tantalizing system, because it does not recognize the hereditary corruption of human nature, or furnish any remedy for moral evil except the “doctrines of the sages.” “The heart of man,” it says, “is naturally perfectly upright and correct.” Sin is simply “a disease, to be cured by self-discipline; a debt, to be canceled by meritorious acts; an ignorance, to be removed by study and contemplation.” See Bib. Sac., 1883:292, 293; N. Englander, 1883:565; Marcus Dods, in Erasmus and other Essays, 239. 2. THE INDIAN SYSTEMS. Brahmanism, as expressed in the Vedas, dates back to 1000-1500 B. C. As Caird (in Faiths of the World, St. Giles Lectures, lecture 1) has shown, it originated in the contemplation of the power in nature apart from the moral Personality that works in and through nature. Indeed we may say that all heathenism is man’s choice of a non-moral in place of a moral God. Brahmanism is a system of pantheism, “a false or illegitimate consecration of the finite.” All things are a manifestation of Brahma. Hence evil is deified as well as good. And many thousand gods are worshiped as partial representations of the living principle which moves through all. “How many gods have the Hindus?” asked Dr. Duff of his class. Henry Drummond thought there were about twenty-five. “Twenty-five?” responded the indignant professor; “twenty-five millions of millions!” While the early Vedas present a comparatively pure nature-worship, later Brahmanism becomes a worship of the vicious and the vile, of the unnatural and the cruel. Juggernaut and the suttee did not belong to original Hindu religion. Bruce, Apologetics, 15—“Pantheism in theory always means polytheism in practice.” The early Vedas are hopeful in spirit; later Brahmanism is a religion of disappointment. Caste is fixed and consecrated as a manifestation of God. Originally intended to express, in its four divisions of priest, soldier, agriculturist, slave, the different degrees of unworldliness and divine indwelling, it becomes an iron fetter to prevent all aspiration and progress. Indian religion sought to exalt receptivity, the unity of existence, and rest from self-determination and its struggles. Hence it ascribed to its gods the same character as nature-forces. God was the common source of good and of evil. Its ethics is an ethics of moral indifference. Its charity is a charity for sin, and the temperance it desires is a temperance that will let the intemperate alone. Mozoomdar, for example, is ready to welcome everything in Christianity but its reproof of sin and its demand for righteousness. Brahmanism degrades woman, but it deifies the cow. Buddhism, beginning with Buddha, 600 B. C., “recalls the mind to its elevation above the finite,” from which Brahmanism had fallen away. Buddha was in certain respects a reformer. He protested against caste, and proclaimed that truth and morality are for all. Hence Buddhism, through its possession of this one grain of truth, appealed to the human heart, and became, next to Christianity, the greatest missionary religion. Notice then, first, its universalism. But notice also that this is a false universalism, for it ignores individualism and leads to universal stagnation and slavery. While Christianity is a religion of history, of will, of optimism, Buddhism is a religion of illusion, of quietism, of pessimism; see Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 107-109. In characterizing Buddhism as a missionary religion, we must notice, secondly, its element of altruism. But this altruism is one which destroys the self, instead of preserving it. The future Buddha, out of compassion for a famished tiger, permits the tiger to devour him. “Incarnated as a hare, he jumps into the fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar,—having previously shaken himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should perish with him”; see William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 283. Buddha would deliver man, not by philosophy, nor by asceticism, but by self-renunciation. All isolation and personality are sin, the guilt of which rests, however, not on man, but on existence in general. While Brahmanism is pantheistic, Buddhism is atheistic in its spirit. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:285—“The Brahmanic Akosmism, that had explained the world as mere seeming, led to the Buddhistic Atheism.” Finiteness and separateness are evil, and the only way to purity and rest is by ceasing to exist. This is essential pessimism. The highest morality is to endure that which must be, and to escape from reality and from personal existence as soon as possible. Hence the doctrine of Nirvana. Rhys Davids, in his Hibbert Lectures, claims that early Buddhism meant by Nirvana, not annihilation, but the extinction of the self-life, and that this was attainable during man’s present mortal existence. But the term Nirvana now means, to the great mass of those who use it, the loss of all personality and consciousness, and absorption into the general life of the universe. Originally the term denoted only freedom from individual desire, and those who had entered into Nirvana might again come out of it; see Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 238. But even in its original form, Nirvana was sought only from a selfish motive. Self-renunciation and absorption in the whole was not the enthusiasm of benevolence,—it was the refuge of despair. It is a religion without god or sacrifice. Instead of communion with a personal God, Buddhism has in prospect only an extinction of personality, as reward for untold ages of lonely self-conquest, extending through many transmigrations. Of Buddha it has been truly said “That all the all he had for needy man Was nothing, and his best of being was But not to be.” Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 296—“He by his own act dying all the time, In ceaseless effort utterly to cease, Will willing not to will, desire desiring To be desire no more, until at last The fugitive go free, emancipate But by becoming naught.” Of Christ Bruce well says: “What a contrast this Healer of disease and Preacher of pardon to the worst, to Buddha, with his religion of despair!” Buddhism is also fatalistic. It inculcates submission and compassion—merely negative virtues. But it knows nothing of manly freedom, or of active love—the positive virtues of Christianity. It leads men to spare others, but not to help them. Its morality revolves around self, not around God. It has in it no organizing principle, for it recognizes no God, no inspiration, no soul, no salvation, no personal immortality. Buddhism would save men only by inducing them to flee from existence. To the Hindu, family life involves sin. The perfect man must forsake wife and children. All gratification of natural appetites and passions is evil. Salvation is not from sin, but from desire, and from this men can be saved only by escaping from life itself. Christianity buries sin, but saves the man; Buddha would save the man by killing him. Christianity symbolizes the convert’s entrance upon a new life by raising him from the baptismal waters; the baptism of Buddhism should be immersion without emersion. The fundamental idea of Brahmanism, extinction of personality, remains the same in Buddhism; the only difference being that the result is secured by active atonement in the former, by passive contemplation in the latter. Virtue, and the knowledge that everything earthly is a vanishing spark of the original light, delivers man from existence and from misery. Prof. G. H. Palmer, of Harvard, in The Outlook, June 19, 1897—“Buddhism is unlike Christianity in that it abolishes misery by abolishing desire; denies personality instead of asserting it; has many gods, but no one God who is living and conscious; makes a shortening of existence rather than a lengthening of it to be the reward of righteousness. Buddhism makes no provision for family, church, state, science, or art. It gives us a religion that is little, when we want one that is large.” Dr. E. Benjamin Andrews: “Schopenhauer and Spencer are merely teachers of Buddhism. They regard the central source of all as unknowable force, instead of regarding it as a Spirit, living and holy. This takes away all impulse to scientific investigation. We need to start from a Person, and not from a thing.” For comparison of the sage of India, Sakya Muni, more commonly called Buddha (properly “the Buddha” = the enlightened; but who, in spite of Edwin Arnold’s “Light of Asia,” is represented as not pure from carnal pleasures before he began his work), with Jesus Christ, see Bib. Sac., July, 1882:458-498; W. C. Wilkinson, Edwin Arnold, Poetizer and Paganizer; Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World. Buddhism and Christianity are compared in Presb. Rev., July, 1883:505-548; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:47-54; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 33. See also Oldenberg, Buddha; Lillie, Popular Life of Buddha; Beal, Catena of Buddhist Scriptures, 153—“Buddhism declares itself ignorant of any mode of personal existence compatible with the idea of spiritual perfection, and so far it is ignorant of God”; 157—“The earliest idea of Nirvana seems to have included in it no more than the enjoyment of a state of rest consequent on the extinction of all causes of sorrow.” The impossibility of satisfying the human heart with a system of atheism is shown by the fact that the Buddha himself has been apotheosized to furnish an object of worship. Thus Buddhism has reverted to Brahmanism. Monier Williams: “Mohammed has as much claim to be ‘the Light of Asia’ as Buddha has. What light from Buddha? Not about the heart’s depravity, or the origin of sin, or the goodness, justice, holiness, fatherhood of God, or the remedy for sin, but only the ridding self from suffering by ridding self from life—a doctrine of merit, of self-trust, of pessimism, and annihilation of personality.” Christ, himself personal, loving and holy, shows that God is a person of holiness and love. Robert Browning: “He that created love, shall not he love?” Only because Jesus is God, have we a gospel for the world. The claim that Buddha is “the Light of Asia” reminds one of the man who declared the moon to be of greater value than the sun, because it gives light in the darkness when it is needed, while the sun gives light in the daytime when it is not needed. 3. THE GREEK SYSTEMS. Pythagoras (584-504) based morality upon the principle of numbers. “Moral good was identified with unity; evil with multiplicity; virtue was harmony of the soul and its likeness to God. The aim of life was to make it represent the beautiful order of the Universe. The whole practical tendency of Pythagoreanism was ascetic, and included a strict self-control and an earnest culture.” Here already we seem to see the defect of Greek morality in confounding the good with the beautiful, and in making morality a mere self-development. Matheson, Messages of the Old Religions: Greece reveals the intensity of the hour, the value of the present life, the beauty of the world that now is. Its religion is the religion of beautiful humanity. It anticipates the new heaven and the new earth. Rome on the other hand stood for union, incorporation, a universal kingdom. But its religion deified only the Emperor, not all humanity. It was the religion, not of love, but of power, and it identified the church with the state. Socrates (469-400) made knowledge to be virtue. Morality consisted in subordinating irrational desires to rational knowledge. Although here we rise above a subjectively determined good as the goal of moral effort, we have no proper sense of sin. Knowledge, and not love, is the motive. If men know the right, they will do the right. This is a great overvaluing of knowledge. With Socrates, teaching is a sort of midwifery—not depositing information in the mind, but drawing out the contents of our own inner consciousness. Lewis Morris describes it as the life-work of Socrates to “doubt our doubts away.” Socrates holds it right to injure one’s enemies. He shows proud self-praise in his dying address. He warns against pederasty, yet compromises with it. He does not insist upon the same purity of family life which Homer describes in Ulysses and Penelope. Charles Kingsley, in Alton Locke, remarks that the spirit of the Greek tragedy was ’man mastered by circumstance’; that of modern tragedy is “man mastering circumstance.” But the Greek tragedians, while showing man thus mastered, do still represent him as inwardly free, as in the case of Prometheus, and this sense of human freedom and responsibility appears to some extent in Socrates. Plato (430-348) held that morality is pleasure in the good, as the truly beautiful, and that knowledge produces virtue. The good is likeness to God,—here we have glimpses of an extra-human goal and model. The body, like all matter, being inherently evil, is a hindrance to the soul,—here we have a glimpse of hereditary depravity. But Plato “reduced moral evil to the category of natural evil.” He failed to recognize God as creator and master of matter; failed to recognize man’s depravity as due to his own apostasy from God; failed to found morality on the divine will rather than on man’s own consciousness. He knew nothing of a common humanity, and regarded virtue as only for the few. As there was no common sin, so there was no common redemption. Plato thought to reach God by intellect alone, when only conscience and heart could lead to him. He believed in a freedom of the soul in a preëxistent state where a choice was made between good and evil, but he believed that, after that antemundane decision had been made, the fates determined men’s acts and lives irreversibly. Reason drives two horses, appetite and emotion, but their course has been predetermined. Man acts as reason prompts. All sin is ignorance. There is nothing in this life but determinism. Martineau, Types, 13, 48, 49, 78, 88—Plato in general has no proper notion of responsibility; he reduces moral evil to the category of natural evil. His Ideas with one exception are not causes. Cause is mind, and mind is the Good. The Good is the apex and crown of Ideas. The Good is the highest Idea, and this highest Idea is a Cause. Plato has a feeble conception of personality, whether in God or in man. Yet God is a person in whatever sense man is a person, and man’s personality is reflective self-consciousness. Will in God or man is not so clear. The Right is dissolved into the Good. Plato advocated infanticide and the killing off of the old and the helpless. Aristotle (384-322) leaves out of view even the element of God-likeness and antemundane evil which Plato so dimly recognized, and makes morality the fruit of mere rational self-consciousness. He grants evil proclivities, but he refuses to call them immoral. He advocates a certain freedom of will, and he recognizes inborn tendencies which war against this freedom, but how these tendencies originated he cannot say, nor how men may be delivered from them. Not all can be moral; the majority must be restrained by fear. He finds in God no motive, and love to God is not so much as mentioned as the source of moral action. A proud, composed, self-centered, and self-contained man is his ideal character. See Nicomachean Ethics, 7:6, and 10:10; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:92-126. Alexander, Theories of Will, 39-54—Aristotle held that desire and reason are the springs of action. Yet he did not hold that knowledge of itself would make men virtuous. He was a determinist. Actions are free only in the sense of being devoid of external compulsion. He viewed slavery as both rational and right. Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 76—“While Aristotle attributed to the State a more complete personality than it really possessed, he did not grasp the depth and meaning of the personality of the individual.” A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 289—Aristotle had no conception of the unity of humanity. His doctrine of unity did not extend beyond the State. “He said that ‘the whole is before the parts,’ but he meant by ‘the whole’ only the pan-Hellenic world, the commonwealth of Greeks; he never thought of humanity, and the word ‘mankind’ never fell from his lips. He could not understand the unity of humanity, because he knew nothing of Christ, its organizing principle.” On Aristotle’s conception of God, see James Ten Broeke, in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892—God is recognized as personal, yet he is only the Greek Reason, and not the living, loving, providential Father of the Hebrew revelation. Aristotle substitutes the logical for the dynamical in his dealing with the divine causality. God is thought, not power. Epicurus (342-270) regarded happiness, the subjective feeling of pleasure, as the highest criterion of truth and good. A prudent calculating for prolonged pleasure is the highest wisdom. He regards only this life. Concern for retribution and for a future existence is folly. If there are gods, they have no concern for men. “Epicurus, on pretense of consulting for their ease, complimented the gods, and bowed them out of existence.” Death is the falling apart of material atoms and the eternal cessation of consciousness. The miseries of this life are due to imperfection in the fortuitously constructed universe. The more numerous these undeserved miseries, the greater our right to seek pleasure. Alexander, Theories of the Will, 55-75—The Epicureans held that the soul is composed of atoms, yet that the will is free. The atoms of the soul are excepted from the law of cause and effect. An atom may decline or deviate in the universal descent, and this is the Epicurean idea of freedom. This indeterminism was held by all the Greek sceptics, materialists though they were. Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy (340-264), regarded virtue as the only good. Thought is to subdue nature. The free spirit is self-legislating, self-dependent, self-sufficient. Thinking, not feeling, is the criterion of the true and the good. Pleasure is the consequence, not the end of moral action. There is an irreconcilable antagonism of existence. Man cannot reform the world, but he can make himself perfect. Hence an unbounded pride in virtue. The sage never repents. There is not the least recognition of the moral corruption of mankind. There is no objective divine ideal, or revealed divine will. The Stoic discovers moral law only within, and never suspects his own moral perversion. Hence he shows self-control and justice, but never humility or love. He needs no compassion or forgiveness, and he grants none to others. Virtue is not an actively outworking character, but a passive resistance to irrational reality. Man may retreat into himself. The Stoic is indifferent to pleasure and pain, not because he believes in a divine government, or in a divine love for mankind, but as a proud defiance of the irrational world. He has no need of God or of redemption. As the Epicurean gives himself to enjoyment of the world, the Stoic gives himself to contempt of the world. In all afflictions, each can say, “The door is open.” To the Epicurean, the refuge is intoxication; to the Stoic, the refuge is suicide: “If the house smokes, quit it.” Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:62-161, from whom much of this account of the Greeks systems is condensed, describes Epicureanism and Stoicism as alike making morality subjective, although Epicureanism regarded spirit as determined by nature, while Stoicism regarded nature as determined by spirit. The Stoics were materialists and pantheists. Though they speak of a personal God, this is a figure of speech. False opinion is at the root of all vice. Chrysippus denied what we now call the liberty of indifference, saying that there could not be an effect without a cause. Man is enslaved to passion. The Stoics could not explain how a vicious man could become virtuous. The result is apathy. Men act only according to character, and this a doctrine of fate. The Stoic indifference or apathy in misfortune is not a bearing of it at all, but rather a cowardly retreat from it. It is in the actual suffering of evil that Christianity finds “the soul of good.” The office of misfortune is disciplinary and purifying; see Seth, Ethical Principles, 417. “The shadow of the sage’s self, projected on vacancy, was called God, and, as the sage had long since abandoned interest in practical life, he expected his Divinity to do the same.” The Stoic reverenced God just because of his unapproachable majesty. Christianity sees in God a Father, a Redeemer, a carer for our minute wants, a deliverer from our sin. It teaches us to see in Christ the humanity of the divine, affinity with God, God’s supreme interest in his handiwork. For the least of his creatures Christ died. Kinship with God gives dignity to man. The individuality that Stoicism lost in the whole, Christianity makes the end of the creation. The State exists to develop and promote it. Paul took up and infused new meaning into certain phrases of the Stoic philosophy about the freedom and royalty of the wise man, just as John adopted and glorified certain phrases of Alexandrian philosophy about the Word. Stoicism was lonely and pessimistic. The Stoics said that the best thing was not to be born; the next best thing was to die. Because Stoicism had no God of helpfulness and sympathy, its virtue was mere conformity to nature, majestic egoism and self-complacency. In the Roman Epictetus (89), Seneca (65), and Marcus Aurelius (121-180), the religious element comes more into the foreground, and virtue appears once more as God-likeness; but it is possible that this later Stoicism was influenced by Christianity. On Marcus Aurelius, see New Englander, July, 1881:415-431; Capes, Stoicism. 4. SYSTEMS OF WESTERN ASIA. Zoroaster (1000 B. C. ?), the founder of the Parsees, was a dualist, at least so far as to explain the existence of evil and of good by the original presence in the author of all things of two opposing principles. Here is evidently a limit put upon the sovereignty and holiness of God. Man is not perfectly dependent upon him, nor is God’s will an unconditional law for his creatures. As opposed to the Indian systems, Zoroaster’s insistence upon the divine personality furnished a far better basis for a vigorous and manly morality. Virtue was to be won by hard struggle of free beings against evil. But then, on the other hand, this evil was conceived as originally due, not to finite beings themselves, but either to an evil deity who warred against the good, or to an evil principle in the one deity himself. The burden of guilt is therefore shifted from man to his maker. Morality becomes subjective and unsettled. Not love to God or imitation of God, but rather self-love and self-development, furnish the motive and aim of morality. No fatherhood or love is recognized in the deity, and other things besides God (e. g., fire) are worshiped. There can be no depth to the consciousness of sin, and no hope of divine deliverance. It is the one merit of Parseeism that it recognizes the moral conflict of the world; its error is that it carries this moral conflict into the very nature of God. We can apply to Parseeism the words of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards to the Buddhists of Japan: “All religions are expressions of man’s sense of dependence, but only one provides fellowship with God. All religions speak of a higher truth, but only one speaks of that truth as found in a loving personal God, our Father. All religions show man’s helplessness, but only one tells of a divine Savior, who offers to man forgiveness of sin, and salvation through his death, and who is now a living person, working in and with all who believe in him, to make them holy and righteous and pure.” Matheson, Messages of Old Religions, says that Parseeism recognizes an obstructive element in the nature of God himself. Moral evil is reality; but there is no reconciliation, nor is it shown that all things work together for good. See Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1:47-54; Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures), 109-144; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 25; Whitney on the Avesta, in Oriental and Linguistic Studies. Mohammed (570-632 A. D.), the founder of Islam, gives us in the Koran a system containing four dogmas of fundamental immorality, namely, polygamy, slavery, persecution, and suppression of private judgement. Mohammedanism is heathenism in monotheistic form. Its good points are its conscientiousness and its relation to God. It has prospered because it has preached the unity of God, and because it is a book-religion. But both these it got from Judaism and Christianity. It has appropriated the Old Testament saints and even Jesus. But it denies the death of Christ and sees no need of atonement. The power of sin is not recognized. The idea of sin, in Moslems, is emptied of all positive content. Sin is simply a falling short, accounted for by the weakness and shortsightedness of man, inevitable in the fatalistic universe, or not remembered in wrath by the indulgent and merciful Father. Forgiveness is indulgence, and the conception of God is emptied of the quality of justice. Evil belongs only to the individual, not to the race. Man attains the favor of God by good works, based on prophetic teaching. Morality is not a fruit of salvation, but a means. There is no penitence or humility, but only self-righteousness; and this self-righteousness is consistent with great sensuality, unlimited divorce, and with absolute despotism in family, civil and religious affairs. There is no knowledge of the fatherhood of God or of the brotherhood of man. In all the Koran, there is no such declaration as that “God so loved the world”_ (John 3:16)_. The submission of Islam is submission to an arbitrary will, not to a God of love. There is no basing of morality in love. The highest good is the sensuous happiness of the individual. God and man are external to one another. Mohammed is a teacher but not a priest. Mozley, Miracles, 140, 141—“Mohammed had no faith in human nature. There were two things which he thought men could do, and would do, for the glory of God—transact religious forms, and fight, and upon these two points he was severe; but within the sphere of common practical life, where man’s great trial lies, his code exhibits the disdainful laxity of a legislator who accomodates his rule to the recipient, and shows his estimate of the recipient by the accommodation which he adopts.... ‘Human nature is weak,’ said he.” Lord Houghton: The Koran is all wisdom, all law, all religion, for all time. Dead men bow before a dead God. “Though the world rolls on from change to change, And realms of thought expand, The letter stands without expanse or range, Stiff as a dead man’s hand.” Wherever Mohammedanism has gone, it has either found a desert or made one. Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1882:866—“The Koran has frozen Mohammedan thought; to obey is to abandon progress.” Muir, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 14—“Mohammedanism reduces men to a dead level of social depression, despotism, and semi-barbarism. Islam is the work of man; Christianity of God.” See also Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures, Second Series), 361-396; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 1:448-488; 280-317; Great Religions of the World, published by the Harpers; Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.

3. The person and character of Christ.

A. The conception of Christ’s person as presenting deity and humanity indissolubly united, and the conception of Christ’s character, with its faultless and all-comprehending excellence, cannot be accounted for upon any other hypothesis than that they were historical realities.

The stylobate of the Parthenon at Athens rises about three inches in the middle of the 101 feet of the front, and four inches in the middle of the 228 feet of the flanks. A nearly parallel line is found in the entablature. The axes of the columns lean inward nearly three inches in their height of 34 feet, thus giving a sort of pyramidal character to the structure. Thus the architect overcame the apparent sagging of horizontal lines, and at the same time increased the apparent height of the edifice; see Murray, Handbook of Greece, 5th ed., 1884, 1:308, 309; Ferguson, Handbook of Architecture, 268-270. The neglect to counteract this optical illusion has rendered the Madeleine in Paris a stiff and ineffective copy of the Parthenon. The Galilean peasant who should minutely describe these peculiarities of the Parthenon would prove, not only that the edifice was a historical reality, but that he had actually seen it. Bruce, Apologetics, 343—“In reading the memoirs of the evangelists, you feel as one sometimes feels in a picture-gallery. Your eye alights on the portrait of a person whom you do not know. You look at it intently for a few moments and then remark to a companion: ‘That must be like the original,—it is so life-like.’ ” Theodore Parker: “It would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus.” See Row, Bampton Lectures, 1877:178-219, and in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 22; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ; Barry, Boyle Lecture on Manifold Witness for Christ.

(a) No source can be assigned from which the evangelists could have derived such a conception. The Hindu avatars were only temporary unions of deity with humanity. The Greeks had men half-deified, but no unions of God and man. The monotheism of the Jews found the person of Christ a perpetual stumbling-block. The Essenes were in principle more opposed to Christianity than the Rabbinists.

Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, 279—“The coëxistence of a perfect man and an imperfect society is impossible; and could the two coëxist, the resulting conduct would not furnish the ethical standard sought.” We must conclude that the perfect manhood of Christ is a miracle, and the greatest of miracles. Bruce, Apologetics, 346, 351—“When Jesus asks: ‘Why callest thou me good?’ he means: ‘Learn first what goodness is, and call no man good till you are sure that he deserves it.’ Jesus’ goodness was entirely free from religious scrupulosity; it was distinguished by humanity; it was full of modesty and lowliness.... Buddhism has flourished 2000 years, though little is known of its founder. Christianity might have been so perpetuated, but it is not so. I want to be sure that the ideal has been embodied in an actual life. Otherwise it is only poetry, and the obligation to conform to it ceases.” For comparison of Christ’s incarnation with Hindu, Greek, Jewish, and Essene ideas, see Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, Introduction. On the Essenes, see Herzog, Encyclop., art,: Essener; Pressensé, Jesus Christ, Life, Times and Work, 84-87; Lightfoot on Colossians, 349-419; Godet, Lectures in Defence of the Christian Faith.

(b) No mere human genius, and much less the genius of Jewish fishermen, could have originated this conception. Bad men invent only such characters as they sympathize with. But Christ’s character condemns badness. Such a portrait could not have been drawn without supernatural aid. But such aid would not have been given to fabrication. The conception can be explained only by granting that Christ’s person and character were historical realities.

Between Pilate and Titus 30,000 Jews are said to have been crucified around the walls of Jerusalem. Many of these were young men. What makes one of them stand out on the pages of history? There are two answers: The character of Jesus was a perfect character, and, He was God as well as man. Gore, Incarnation, 63—“The Christ of the gospels, if he be not true to history, represents a combined effort of the creative imagination without parallel in literature. But the literary characteristics of Palestine in the first century make the hypothesis of such an effort morally impossible.” The Apocryphal gospels show us what mere imagination was capable of producing. That the portrait of Christ is not puerile, inane, hysterical, selfishly assertive, and self-contradictory, can be due only to the fact that it is the photograph from real life. For a remarkable exhibition of the argument from the character of Jesus, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 276-332. Bushnell mentions the originality and vastness of Christ’s plan, yet its simplicity and practical adaptation; his moral traits of independence, compassion, meekness, wisdom, zeal, humility, patience; the combination in him of seemingly opposite qualities. With all his greatness, he was condescending and simple; he was unworldly, yet not austere; he had strong feelings, yet was self-possessed; he had indignation toward sin, yet compassion toward the sinner; he showed devotion to his work, yet calmness under opposition; universal philanthropy, yet susceptibility to private attachments; the authority of a Savior and Judge, yet the gratitude and the tenderness of a son; the most elevated devotion, yet a life of activity and exertion. See chapter on The Moral Miracle, in Bruce, Miraculous Element of the Gospels, 43-78.

B. The acceptance and belief in the New Testament descriptions of Jesus Christ cannot be accounted for except upon the ground that the person and character described had an actual existence.

(a) If these descriptions were false, there were witnesses still living who had known Christ and who would have contradicted them. (b) There was no motive to induce acceptance of such false accounts, but every motive to the contrary. (c) The success of such falsehoods could be explained only by supernatural aid, but God would never have thus aided falsehood. This person and character, therefore, must have been not fictitious but real; and if real, then Christ’s words are true, and the system of which his person and character are a part is a revelation from God.

“The counterfeit may for a season Deceive the wide earth; But the lie waxing great comes to labor, And truth has its birth.” Matthew Arnold, The Better Part: “Was Christ a man like us? Ah, let us see, If we then too can be Such men as he!” When the blatant sceptic declared: “I do not believe that such a man as Jesus Christ ever lived,” George Warren merely replied: “I wish I were like him!” Dwight L. Moody was called a hypocrite, but the stalwart evangelist answered: “Well, suppose I am. How does that make your case any better? I know some pretty mean things about myself; but you cannot say anything against my Master.” Goethe: “Let the culture of the spirit advance forever; let the human spirit broaden itself as it will; yet it will never go beyond the height and moral culture of Christianity, as it glitters and shines in the gospels.” Renan, Life of Jesus: “Jesus founded the absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing, save its essence.... The foundation of the true religion is indeed his work. After him, there is nothing left but to develop and fructify.” And a Christian scholar has remarked: “It is an astonishing proof of the divine guidance vouchsafed to the evangelists that no man, of their time or since, has been able to touch the picture of Christ without debasing it.” We may find an illustration of this in the words of Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 207—“Jesus’ doctrine of marriage was ascetic, his doctrine of property was communistic, his doctrine of charity was sentimental, his doctrine of non-resistance was such as commends itself to Tolstoi, but not to many others of our time. With the example of Jesus, it is the same as with his teachings. Followed unreservedly, would it not justify those who say: ‘The hope of the race is in its extinction’; and bring all our joys and sorrows to a sudden end?” To this we may answer in the words of Huxley, who declares that Jesus Christ is “the noblest ideal of humanity which mankind has yet worshiped.” Gordon, Christ of To-Day, 179—“The question is not whether Christ is good enough to represent the Supreme Being, but whether the Supreme Being is good enough to have Christ for his representative. John Stuart Mill looks upon the Christian religion as the worship of Christ, rather than the worship of God, and in this way he explains the beneficence of its influence.” John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, 254—“The most valuable part of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced, by holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and can never more be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than God whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of nature, who, being idealized, has taken so great and salutary hold on the modern mind. And whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left: a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal preaching.... Who among his disciples, or among their proselytes, was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels?... About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight which, if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this preëminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than the endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life. When to this we add that, to the conception of the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ actually was ... a man charged with a special, express and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue, we may well conclude that the influences of religion on the character, which will remain after rational criticism has done its utmost against the evidences of religion, are well worth preserving, and that what they lack in direct strength as compared with those of a firmer belief is more than compensated by the greater truth and rectitude of the morality they sanction.” See also Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 129-157; Schaff, Person of Christ; Young, The Christ in History; George Dana Boardman, The Problem of Jesus.

4. The testimony of Christ to himself—as being a messenger from God and as being one with God.

Only one personage in history has claimed to teach absolute truth, to be one with God, and to attest his divine mission by works such as only God could perform.

A. This testimony cannot be accounted for upon the hypothesis that Jesus was an intentional deceiver: for (a) the perfectly consistent holiness of his life; (b) the unwavering confidence with which he challenged investigation of his claims and staked all upon the result; (c) the vast improbability of a lifelong lie in the avowed interests of truth; and (d) the impossibility that deception should have wrought such blessing to the world,—all show that Jesus was no conscious impostor.

Fisher, Essays on the Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 515-538—Christ knew how vast his claims were, yet he staked all upon them. Though others doubted, he never doubted himself. Though persecuted unto death, he never ceased his consistent testimony. Yet he lays claim to humility: Mat. 11:29—“I am meek and lowly in heart.” How can we reconcile with humility his constant self-assertion? We answer that Jesus’ self-assertion was absolutely essential to his mission, for he and the truth were one: he could not assert the truth without asserting himself, and he could not assert himself without asserting the truth. Since he was the truth, he needed to say so, for men’s sake and for the truth’s sake, and he could be meek and lowly in heart in saying so. Humility is not self-depreciation, but only the judging of ourselves according to God’s perfect standard. “Humility” is derived from “humus”. It is the coming down from airy and vain self-exploitation to the solid ground, the hard-pan, of actual fact. God requires of us only so much humility as is consistent with truth. The self-glorification of the egotist is nauseating, because it indicates gross ignorance or misrepresentation of self. But it is a duty to be self-asserting, just so far as we represent the truth and righteousness of God. There is a noble self-assertion which is perfectly consistent with humility. Job must stand for his integrity. Paul’s humility was not of the Uriah Heep variety. When occasion required, he could assert his manhood and his rights, as at Philippi and at the Castle of Antonia. So the Christian should frankly say out the truth that is in him. Each Christian has an experience of his own, and should tell it to others. In testifying to the truth he is only following the example of “Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession”_ (1 Tim. 6:13)_.

B. Nor can Jesus’ testimony to himself be explained upon the hypothesis that he was self-deceived: for this would argue (a) a weakness and folly amounting to positive insanity. But his whole character and life exhibit a calmness, dignity, equipoise, insight, self-mastery, utterly inconsistent with such a theory. Or it would argue (b) a self-ignorance and self-exaggeration which could spring only from the deepest moral perversion. But the absolute purity of his conscience, the humility of his spirit, the self-denying beneficence of his life, show this hypothesis to be incredible.

Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 39—If he were man, then to demand that all the world should bow down to him would be worthy of scorn like that which we feel for some straw-crowned monarch of Bedlam. Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, 22, 76—Christ never united with his disciples in prayer. He went up into the mountain to pray, but not to pray with them: Luke 9:18—“as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him.” The consciousness of preëxistence is the indispensable precondition of the total demand which he makes in the Synoptics. Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 81, 82—We value the testimony of Christians to their communion with God. Much more should we value the testimony of Christ. Only one who, first being divine, also knew that he was divine, could reveal heavenly things with the clearness and certainty that belong to the utterances of Jesus. In him we have something very different from the momentary flashes of insight which leave us in all the greater darkness. Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 5—“Self-respect is bottomed upon the ability to become what one desires to be; and, if the ability steadily falls short of the task, the springs of self-respect dry up; the motives of happy and heroic action wither. Science, art, generous civic life, and especially religion, come to man’s rescue,”—showing him his true greatness and breadth of being in God. The State is the individual’s larger self. Humanity, and even the universe, are parts of him. It is the duty of man to enable all men to be men. It is possible for men not only truthfully but also rationally to assert themselves, even in earthly affairs. Chatham to the Duke of Devonshire: “My Lord, I believe I can save this country, and that no one else can.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his thirtieth year, to the Duke of Milan: “I can carry through every kind of work in sculpture, in clay, marble, and bronze; also in painting I can execute everything that can be demanded, as well as any one whosoever.” Horace: “Exegi monumentum ære perennius.” Savage, Life beyond Death, 209—A famous old minister said once, when a young and zealous enthusiast tried to get him to talk, and failing, burst out with, “Have you no religion at all?” “None to speak of,” was the reply. When Jesus perceived a tendency in his disciples to self-glorification, he urged silence; but when he saw the tendency to introspection and inertness, he bade them proclaim what he had done for them (Mat. 8:4; Mark 5:19). It is never right for the Christian to proclaim himself; but, if Christ had not proclaimed himself, the world could never have been saved. Rush Rhees. Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 235-237—“In the teaching of Jesus, two topics have the leading place—the Kingdom of God, and himself. He sought to be Lord, rather than Teacher only. Yet the Kingdom is not one of power, national and external, but one of fatherly love and of mutual brotherhood.” Did Jesus do anything for effect, or as a mere example? Not so. His baptism had meaning for him as a consecration of himself to death for the sins of the world, and his washing of the disciples’ feet was the fit beginning of the paschal supper and the symbol of his laying aside his heavenly glory to purify us for the marriage supper of the Lamb. Thomas à Kempis: “Thou art none the holier because thou art praised, and none the worse because thou art censured. What thou art, that thou art, and it avails thee naught to be called any better than thou art in the sight of God.” Jesus’ consciousness of his absolute sinlessness and of his perfect communion with God is the strongest of testimonies to his divine nature and mission. See Theological Eclectic, 4:137; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 153; J. S. Mill, Essays on Religion, 253; Young, Christ of History; Divinity of Jesus Christ, by Andover Professors, 37-62.

If Jesus, then, cannot be charged with either mental or moral unsoundness, his testimony must be true, and he himself must be one with God and the revealer of God to men.

Neither Confucius nor Buddha claimed to be divine, or the organs of divine revelation, though both were moral teachers and reformers. Zoroaster and Pythagoras apparently believed themselves charged with a divine mission, though their earliest biographers wrote centuries after their death. Socrates claimed nothing for himself which was beyond the power of others. Mohammed believed his extraordinary states of body and soul to be due to the action of celestial beings; he gave forth the Koran as “a warning to all creatures,” and sent a summons to the King of Persia and the Emperor of Constantinople, as well as to other potentates, to accept the religion of Islam; yet he mourned when he died that he could not have opportunity to correct the mistakes of the Koran and of his own life. For Confucius or Buddha, Zoroaster or Pythagoras, Socrates or Mohammed to claim all power in heaven and earth, would show insanity or moral perversion. But this is precisely what Jesus claimed. He was either mentally or morally unsound, or his testimony is true. See Baldensperger, Selbstbewusstsein Jesu; E. Ballentine, Christ his own Witness.

1. The rapid progress of the gospel in the first centuries of our era shows its divine origin.

A. That Paganism should have been in three centuries supplanted by Christianity, is an acknowledged wonder of history.

The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity was the most astonishing revolution of faith and worship ever known. Fifty years after the death of Christ, there were churches in all the principal cities of the Roman Empire. Nero (37-68) found (as Tacitus declares) an “ingens multitudo” of Christians to persecute. Pliny writes to Trajan (52-117) that they “pervaded not merely the cities but the villages and country places, so that the temples were nearly deserted.” Tertullian (160-230) writes: “We are but of yesterday, and yet we have filled all your places, your cities, your islands, your castles, your towns, your council-houses, even your camps, your tribes, your senate, your forum. We have left you nothing but your temples.” In the time of the emperor Valerian (253-268), the Christians constituted half the population of Rome. The conversion of the emperor Constantine (272-337) brought the whole empire, only 300 years after Jesus’ death, under the acknowledged sway of the gospel. See McIlvaine and Alexander, Evidences of Christianity.

B. The wonder is the greater when we consider the obstacles to the progress of Christianity:

(a) The scepticism of the cultivated classes; (b) the prejudice and hatred of the common people; and (c) the persecutions set on foot by government.

(a) Missionaries even now find it difficult to get a hearing among the cultivated classes of the heathen. But the gospel appeared in the most enlightened age of antiquity—the Augustan age of literature and historical inquiry. Tacitus called the religion of Christ “exitiabilis superstitio”—“quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat.” Pliny: “Nihil aliud inveni quam superstitionem pravam et immodicam.” If the gospel had been false, its preachers would not have ventured into the centres of civilization and refinement; or if they had, they would have been detected. (b) Consider the interweaving of heathen religions with all the relations of life. Christians often had to meet the furious zeal and blind rage of the mob,—as at Lystra and Ephesus. (c) Rawlinson, in his Historical Evidences, claims that the Catacombs of Rome comprised nine hundred miles of streets and seven millions of graves within a period of four hundred years—a far greater number than could have died a natural death—and that vast multitudes of these must have been massacred for their faith. The Encyclopædia Britannica, however, calls the estimate of De Marchi, which Rawlinson appears to have taken as authority, a great exaggeration. Instead of nine hundred miles of streets, Northcote has three hundred fifty. The number of interments to correspond would be less than three millions. The Catacombs began to be deserted by the time of Jerome. The times when they were universally used by Christians could have been hardly more than two hundred years. They did not begin in sand-pits. There were three sorts of tufa: (1) rocky, used for quarrying and too hard for Christian purposes; (2) sandy, used for sand-pits, too soft to permit construction of galleries and tombs; (3) granular, that used by Christians. The existence of the Catacombs must have been well known to the heathen. After Pope Damasus the exaggerated reverence for them began. They were decorated and improved. Hence many paintings are of later date than 400, and testify to papal polity, not to that of early Christianity. The bottles contain, not blood, but wine of the eucharist celebrated at the funeral. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 256-258, calls attention to Matthew Arnold’s description of the needs of the heathen world, yet his blindness to the true remedy: “On that hard pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell. In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, The Roman noble lay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the Appian Way; He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers,—No easier nor no quicker passed The impracticable hours.” Yet with mingled pride and sadness, Mr. Arnold fastidiously rejects more heavenly nutriment. Of Christ he says: “Now he is dead! Far hence he lies, In the lorn Syrian town, And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down.” He sees that the millions “Have such need of joy, And joy whose grounds are true, And joy that should all hearts employ As when the past was new!” The want of the world is: “One mighty wave of thought and joy, Lifting mankind amain.” But the poet sees no ground of hope: “Fools! that so often here, Happiness mocked our prayer, I think might make us fear A like event elsewhere,—Make us not fly to dreams, But moderate desire.” He sings of the time when Christianity was young: “Oh, had I lived in that great day, How had its glory new Filled earth and heaven, and caught away My ravished spirit too!” But desolation of spirit does not bring with it any lowering of self-esteem, much less the humility which deplores the presence and power of evil in the soul, and sighs for deliverance. “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick”_ (Mat. 9:12)_. Rejecting Christ, Matthew Arnold embodies in his verse “the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the languor of death” (Hutton, Essays, 302).

C. The wonder becomes yet greater when we consider the natural insufficiency of the means used to secure this progress.

(a) The proclaimers of the gospel were in general unlearned men, belonging to a despised nation. (b) The gospel which they proclaimed was a gospel of salvation through faith in a Jew who had been put to an ignominious death. (c) This gospel was one which excited natural repugnance, by humbling men’s pride, striking at the root of their sins, and demanding a life of labor and self-sacrifice. (d) The gospel, moreover, was an exclusive one, suffering no rival and declaring itself to be the universal and only religion.

(a) The early Christians were more unlikely to make converts than modern Jews are to make proselytes, in vast numbers, in the principal cities of Europe and America. Celsus called Christianity “a religion of the rabble.” (b) The cross was the Roman gallows—the punishment of slaves. Cicero calls it “servitutis extremum summumque supplicium.” (c) There were many bad religions: why should the mild Roman Empire have persecuted the only good one? The answer is in part: Persecution did not originate with the official classes; it proceeded really from the people at large. Tacitus called Christians “haters of the human race.” Men recognized in Christianity a foe to all their previous motives, ideals, and aims. Altruism would break up the old society, for every effort that centered in self or in the present life was stigmatized by the gospel as unworthy. (d) Heathenism, being without creed or principle, did not care to propagate itself. “A man must be very weak,” said Celsus, “to imagine that Greeks and barbarians, in Asia, Europe, and Libya, can ever unite under the same system of religion.” So the Roman government would allow no religion which did not participate in the worship of the State. “Keep yourselves from idols,” “We worship no other God,” was the Christian’s answer. Gibbon, Hist. Decline and Fall, 1: chap. 15, mentions as secondary causes: (1) the zeal of the Jews; (2) the doctrine of immortality; (3) miraculous powers; (4) virtues of early Christians; (5) privilege of participation in church government. But these causes were only secondary, and all would have been insufficient without an invincible persuasion of the truth of Christianity. For answer to Gibbon, see Perrone, Prelectiones Theologicæ, 1:133. Persecution destroys falsehood by leading its advocates to investigate the grounds of their belief; but it strengthens and multiplies truth by leading its advocates to see more clearly the foundations of their faith. There have been many conscientious persecutors: John 16:2—“They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall think that he offereth service unto God.” The Decretal of Pope Urban II reads: “For we do not count them to be homicides, to whom it may have happened, through their burning zeal against the excommunicated, to put any of them to death.” St. Louis, King of France, urged his officers “not to argue with the infidel, but to subdue unbelievers by thrusting the sword into them as far as it will go.” Of the use of the rack in England on a certain occasion, it was said that it was used with all the tenderness which the nature of the instrument would allow. This reminds us of Isaak Walton’s instruction as to the use of the frog: “Put the hook through his mouth and out at his gills; and, in so doing, use him as though you loved him.” Robert Browning, in his Easter Day, 275-288, gives us what purports to be A Martyr’s Epitaph, inscribed upon a wall of the Catacombs, which furnishes a valuable contrast to the sceptical and pessimistic strain of Matthew Arnold: “I was born sickly, poor and mean, A slave: no misery could screen The holders of the pearl of price from Cæsar’s envy: therefore twice I fought with beasts, and three times saw My children suffer by his law; At length my own release was earned: I was some time in being burned, But at the close a Hand came through The fire above my head, and drew My soul to Christ, whom now I see. Sergius, a brother, writes for me This testimony on the wall—For me, I have forgot it all.”

The progress of a religion so unprepossessing and uncompromising to outward acceptance and dominion, within the space of three hundred years, cannot be explained without supposing that divine power attended its promulgation, and therefore that the gospel is a revelation from God.

Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:527—“In the Kremlin Cathedral, whenever the Metropolitan advanced from the altar to give his blessing, there was always thrown under his feet a carpet embroidered with the eagle of old Pagan Rome, to indicate that the Christian Church and Empire of Constantinople had succeeded and triumphed over it.” On this whole section, see F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 91; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 139.

2. The beneficent influence of the Scripture doctrines and precepts, wherever they have had sway, shows their divine origin. Notice:

A. Their influence on civilization in general, securing a recognition of principles which heathenism ignored, such as Garbett mentions: (a) the importance of the individual; (b) the law of mutual love; (c) the sacredness of human life; (d) the doctrine of internal holiness; (e) the sanctity of home; (f) monogamy, and the religious equality of the sexes; (g) identification of belief and practice.

The continued corruption of heathen lands shows that this change is not due to any laws of merely natural progress. The confessions of ancient writers show that it is not due to philosophy. Its only explanation is that the gospel is the power of God.

Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 177-186; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, chap. on Christianity and the Individual; Brace, Gesta Christi, preface, vi—“Practices and principles implanted, stimulated or supported by Christianity, such as regard for the personality of the weakest and poorest; respect for woman; duty of each member of the fortunate classes to raise up the unfortunate; humanity to the child, the prisoner, the stranger, the needy, and even to the brute; unceasing opposition to all forms of cruelty, oppression and slavery; the duty of personal purity, and the sacredness of marriage; the necessity of temperance; obligation of a more equitable division of the profits of labor, and of greater coöperation between employers and employed; the right of every human being to have the utmost opportunity of developing his faculties, and of all persons to enjoy equal political and social privileges; the principle that the injury of one nation is the injury of all, and the expediency and duty of unrestricted trade and intercourse between all countries; and finally, a profound opposition to war, a determination to limit its evils when existing, and to prevent its arising by means of international arbitration.” Max Müller: “The concept of humanity is the gift of Christ.” Guizot, History of Civilization, 1: Introd., tells us that in ancient times the individual existed for the sake of the State; in modern times the State exists for the sake of the individual. “The individual is a discovery of Christ.” On the relations between Christianity and Political Economy, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, pages 443-460; on the cause of the changed view with regard to the relation of the individual to the State, see page 207—“What has wrought the change? Nothing but the death of the Son of God. When it was seen that the smallest child and the lowest slave had a soul of such worth that Christ left his throne and gave up his life to save it, the world’s estimate of values changed, and modern history began.” Lucian, the Greek satirist and humorist, 160 A. D., said of the Christians: “Their first legislator [Jesus] has put it into their heads that they are all brothers.” It is this spirit of common brotherhood which has led in most countries to the abolition of cannibalism, infanticide, widow-burning, and slavery. Prince Bismarck: “For social well-being I ask nothing more than Christianity without phrases”—which means the religion of the deed rather than of the creed. Yet it is only faith in the historic revelation of God in Christ which has made Christian deeds possible. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 232-278—Aristotle, if he could look over society to-day, would think modern man a new species, in his going out in sympathy to distant peoples. This cannot be the result of natural selection, for self-sacrifice is not profitable to the individual. Altruistic emotions owe their existence to God. Worship of God has flowed back upon man’s emotions and has made them more sympathetic. Self-consciousness and sympathy, coming into conflict with brute emotions, originate the sense of sin. Then begins the war of the natural and the spiritual. Love of nature and absorption in others is the true Nirvana. Not physical science, but the humanities, are most needed in education. H. E. Hersey, Introd. to Browning’s Christmas Eve, 19— “Sidney Lanier tells us that the last twenty centuries have spent their best power upon the development of personality. Literature, education, government, and religion, have learned to recognize the individual as the unit of force. Browning goes a step further. He declares that so powerful is a complete personality that its very touch gives life and courage and potency. He turns to history for the inspiration of enduring virtue and the stimulus for sustained effort, and he finds both in Jesus Christ.” J. P. Cooke, Credentials of Science, 43—The change from the ancient philosopher to the modern investigator is the change from self-assertion to self-devotion, and the great revolution can be traced to the influence of Christianity and to the spirit of humility exhibited and inculcated by Christ. Lewes, Hist. Philos., 1:408—Greek morality never embraced any conception of humanity; no Greek ever attained to the sublimity of such a point of view. Kidd, Social Evolution, 165, 287—It is not intellect that has pushed forward the world of modern times: it is the altruistic feeling that originated in the cross and sacrifice of Christ. The French Revolution was made possible by the fact that humanitarian ideas had undermined the upper classes themselves, and effective resistance was impossible. Socialism would abolish the struggle for existence on the part of individuals. What security would be left for social progress? Removing all restrictions upon population ensures progressive deterioration. A non-socialist community would outstrip a socialist community where all the main wants of life were secure. The real tendency of society is to bring all the people into rivalry, not only on a footing of political equality, but on conditions of equal social opportunities. The State in future will interfere and control, in order to preserve or secure free competition, rather than to suspend it. The goal is not socialism or State management, but competition in which all shall have equal advantages. The evolution of human society is not primarily intellectual but religious. The winning races are the religious races. The Greeks had more intellect, but we have more civilization and progress. The Athenians were as far above us as we are above the negro race. Gladstone said that we are intellectually weaker than the men of the middle ages. When the intellectual development of any section of the race has for the time being outrun its ethical development, natural selection has apparently weeded it out, like any other unsuitable product. Evolution is developing reverence, with its allied qualities, mental energy, resolution, enterprise, prolonged and concentrated application, simple minded and single minded devotion to duty. Only religion can overpower selfishness and individualism and ensure social progress.

B. Their influence upon individual character and happiness, wherever they have been tested in practice. This influence is seen (a) in the moral transformations they have wrought—as in the case of Paul the apostle, and of persons in every Christian community; (b) in the self-denying labors for human welfare to which they have led—as in the case of Wilberforce and Judson; (c) in the hopes they have inspired in times of sorrow and death.

These beneficent fruits cannot have their source in merely natural causes, apart from the truth and divinity of the Scriptures; for in that case the contrary beliefs would be accompanied by the same blessings. But since we find these blessings only in connection with Christian teaching, we may justly consider this as their cause. This teaching, then, must be true, and the Scriptures must be a divine revelation. Else God has made a lie to be the greatest blessing to the race.

The first Moravian missionaries to the West Indies walked six hundred miles to take ship, worked their passage, and then sold themselves as slaves, in order to get the privilege of preaching to the negroes.... The father of John G. Paton was a stocking-weaver. The whole family, with the exception of the very small children, worked from 6 a. m. to 10 p. m., with one hour for dinner at noon and a half hour each for breakfast and supper. Yet family prayer was regularly held twice a day. In these breathing-spells for daily meals John G. Paton took part of his time to study the Latin Grammar, that he might prepare himself for missionary work. When told by an uncle that, if he went to the New Hebrides, the cannibals would eat him, he replied: “You yourself will soon be dead and buried, and I had as lief be eaten by cannibals as by worms.” The Aneityumese raised arrow-root for fifteen years and sold it to pay the £1200 required for printing the Bible in their own language. Universal church-attendance and Bible-study make those South Sea Islands the most heavenly place on earth on the Sabbath-day. In 1839, twenty thousand negroes in Jamaica gathered to begin a life of freedom. Into a coffin were put the handcuffs and shackles of slavery, relics of the whipping-post and the scourge. As the clock struck twelve at night, a preacher cried with the first stroke: “The monster is dying!” and so with every stroke until the last, when he cried: “The monster is dead!” Then all rose from their knees and sang: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”... “What do you do that for?” said the sick Chinaman whom the medical missionary was tucking up in bed with a care which the patient had never received since he was a baby. The missionary took the opportunity to tell him of the love of Christ.... The aged Australian mother, when told that her two daughters, missionaries in China, had both of them been murdered by a heathen mob, only replied: “This decides me; I will go to China now myself, and try to teach those poor creatures what the love of Jesus means.”... Dr. William Ashmore: “Let one missionary die, and ten come to his funeral.” A shoemaker, teaching neglected boys and girls while he worked at his cobbler’s bench, gave the impulse to Thomas Guthrie’s life of faith. We must judge religions not by their ideals, but by their performances. Omar Khayyam and Mozoomdar give us beautiful thoughts, but the former is not Persia, nor is the latter India. “When the microscopic search of scepticism, which has hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a Creator, has turned its attention to human society and has found on this planet a place ten miles square where a decent man can live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating his children, unspoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is reverenced, infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard—when sceptics can find such a place ten miles square on this globe, where the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way and laid the foundations and made decency and security possible, it will then be in order for the sceptical literati to move thither and to ventilate their views. But so long as these very men are dependent upon the very religion they discard for every privilege they enjoy, they may well hesitate before they rob the Christian of his hope and humanity of its faith in that Savior who alone has given that hope of eternal life which makes life tolerable and society possible, and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom.” On the beneficent influence of the gospel, see Schmidt, Social Results of Early Christianity; D. J. Hill, The Social Influence of Christianity.