authority affixed to them. Had they felt it desirable or useful, over and above the accounts of the four evangelists, to read the lesser memoirs also; this might have given rise to such a demand, as would lead to a renewal of their copies, and so to their preservation. But the very reason why they were suffered to perish, is, because of their felt insignificance and worthlessness at the time, when compared with the pieces which have come down to us. In the fact of their disappearance, we behold the testimony of that contemporaneous age to the superior value of those actual scriptures which have been admitted into our canon-or, in other words, the judgment to this effect of the men best qualified, by their opportunities of observation, and their nearness to the events of the gospel history. In the credit and the completeness of the four gospels, they felt themselves independent of these supplementary memoirs; and by what strange illusion then is it, that we should not feel the same independence, or that we should desiderate, and for the purpose of gaining more evidence too, those additional memorials-when the very fact of their having been permitted to go into oblivion, if viewed aright, would enhance the splendour of that evidence which beams direct upon us from the canonical scriptures themselves. It is true that they are lost; but they have been lost in that blaze of light which shone upon the church, from the writings of apostles and apostolic men.

22. We have already put the case of Mark having had a station assigned to him, which he only could have had, because of the inferior estima

tion in which he was held by his contemporaries— so that in the state in which he has actually come down to us, his testimony is absolutely of greater value, however weaker the impression may be which it makes upon us. Without insisting longer upon this case, we hold it of importance to remark while upon the subject, that, works may have disappeared which produced a great effect in their day, and have left behind them a permanent benefit which shall be felt to the latest ages of the church. Take for an example the Hexapla of Origen, the first of our scriptural polyglots, consisting of the Hebrew Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek characters, along with four distinct versions of the same in Greek-that is, the Septuagint, and those of Aquilas Symmachus and Theodotion. This stupendous work, consisting as it did of forty or fifty manuscript volumes, could not have been multiplied and transmitted but at a prodigious expense; and it is not therefore to be wondered at, that so few remains of it should have survived to the present day. Yet who can doubt the enduring benefit which the church has received from this work, in restoring and purifying the sacred text, and so improving every subsequent edition that was framed by those who availed themselves of the labours of its author.

23. At all events it remains a sensible proof of the estimation in which the scriptures in former ages have been held over all other books-the immense superiority in the number of its existing manuscripts over those of all other works. It gives, as it were, the evidence of eye-sight to our cause. A work not possessing authority, was simply left

to disappear from the non-multiplication of its copies. Whereas, on the other hand, the indefinite number of ancient copies of the sacred scriptures actually before our eyes, speaks most decisively for the concurrent reverence in which these records were held in earlier times. The force of this consideration will be unfelt by those, who stop short at any century in the middle ages, and conceive of it as the fountain-head of this sort of testimony. But when, on the faith of undoubted documents, we can carry upwards the same expression of a preference for the scriptures over all other works, to those ages when Christianity was an oppressed and suffering religion—such an expression of general respect and confidence for the scriptures at such periods, carries an evidence along with it that is quite irresistible.

24. On the whole then, it may be concluded, that the evidence for the truth of Christianity does not commence with Barnabas the first of the apostolic fathers. It has an origin in the writers themselves of the inspired volume; and, broad and brilliant as the flood of light is which descends along the historic pathway of the christian church, there is even a surpassing brilliancy in that primitive halo by which the fountain-head is irradiated.

CHAPTER V.

On the Testimony of subsequent Witnesses.

1. IV. BUT this brings us to the last division of the argument, viz. that the leading facts in the history of the Gospel are corroborated by the testimony of others.

2. The evidence we have already brought forward for the antiquity of the New Testament, and the veneration in which it was held from the earliest ages of the church, is an implied testimony of all the Christians of that period to the truth of the gospel history. By proving the genuineness of St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians, we do not merely establish his testimony to the truth of the christian miracles, we establish the additional testimony of the whole church of Corinth, who would never have respected these Epistles, if Paul had ventured upon a falsehood so open to detection, as the assertion, that miracles were wrought among them, which not a single individual ever witnessed. By proving the genuineness of the New Testament at large, we secure, not merely that argument which is founded on the testimony and concurrence of its different writers, but also the testimony of those immense multitudes, who, in distant countries, submitted to the New Testament as the rule of their faith. The testimony of the teachers, whether we take into consideration the subject of that testimony, or the circumstances

under which it was delivered, is of itself a stronger argument for the truth of the gospel history, than can be alleged for the truth of any other history which has been transmitted down to us from ancient times. The concurrence of the taught carries along with it a host of additional testimonies, which gives an evidence to the evangelical story, that is altogether unexampled. Or a point of ordinary history, the testimony of Tacitus is held decisive, because it is not contradicted. The history of the New Testament is not only not contradicted, but confirmed by the strongest possible expressions which men can give of their acquiescence in its truth; by thousands, who were either agents or eye-witnesses of the transactions recorded; who could not be deceived; who had no interest, and no glory to gain by supporting a falsehood; and who, by their sufferings in the cause of what they professed to be their belief, gave the highest evidence that human nature can give of sincerity.

3. In this circumstance, it may be perceived, how much the evidence for Christianity goes beyond all ordinary historical evidence. A profane historian relates a series of events which happen in a particular age; and we count it well, if it be his own age, and if the history which he gives us be the testimony of a contemporary author. Another historian succeeds him at the distance of years, and, by repeating the same story, gives the additional evidence of his testimony to its truth. A third historian perhaps goes over the same ground, and lends another confirmation to the history. And it is thus, by collecting all the lights which are thinly