Chapter II--Positive Proofs That the Scriptures Are Divine

CHAPTER II.

POSITIVE PROOFS THAT THE SCRIPTURES ARE A DIVINE
REVELATION.

I. The Genuineness Op 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 (loniv, 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.

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 which we use the term, does not necessarily imply authenticity (i. «., truthfulness and authority!; see Blunt, Diet. 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 Beat 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, Mcllvaine, Chalmers, Dodge, and Peabody, on the Evidences of Christianity.

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.

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.

(6) 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.

(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. On the Muratorian Canon, see Treirelles, Muratorian Canon. On the Peshito, see Sehuff, Introd. to Rev. Gk.-Eng. N. T., xxxvii.; Smith's Bible Diet., pp. 3388. 3389. On the whole subject, see Westcott, History of the N. T. Canon,and art.: Canon, in Smith's Bible Dictionary. Also, Reuss, History of the Canon; Mitchell, Crit. 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) Irenreus (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 Irenseua was the disciple and friend of Polycarp (80-155), who was himself a personal acquaintance of the Apostle John. The testimony of Irenieus 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 Irenieus says there are four gospels l>ecause there are four quarters of the world and four living creatures in the cherubim. But we reply that Irenieus 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 had uecepted the four gospels on any other ground than that of testimony that they were the productions of apostolic men.

(o) Justin Martyr (died 148) speaks of 'memoirs (airo/jv^/taveb/taTa) 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 identities the 'memoirs' with them (Apol., 1:66). 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. In a similar manner he always uses the term "Sunday" instead of "Sabbath." (2) That in quoting the words spoken from heaven at the Saviour's baptism, he makes them to be: "My Son, this day have I begotten thee." We reply that this was probably a slip of memory. 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. See Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 49, note.

(c) Papias (80-164), whom Irenreus calls a ' hearer of John,' testifies that Matthew " wrote in the Hebrew dialect the sacred oracles ('a A6)ih)" and that "Mark, the interpreter of Peter, wrote after Peter(i«ntpm Whjii.)) [or under Peter's direction], an unsystematic account (or reSf«)" 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 Meek, 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 un enlarged version of the same. (2) That Mark is the most systematic of all the 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 lie is the most unsystematic of the evangelists, showing little of the power of historical grouping which is so discernible in Matthew. See Block, Introduction to X. T., 1: 108, 130; Weiss, Life of Jesus.U: 25-39.

(d) The Apostolic Fathers,—Clement of Borne (died 101), Ignatius of Antioch (martyred 115), and Polycarp (80-165),—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." See Ante-Nicene Library of T. and T. ("lark: also, art.: Apostolic Fathers, in MeClintoek and Strong's Encyclopedia, 1: 315-317; Boston Lectures for 1871, essay by Prof. Thayer, 324.

(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, 0 Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach." If the Acts were written two years after Paul's arrival at Rome (A. D.63), "the former treatise," the gospel according to Luke, can hardly bo dated later than 58; 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 were familiar with the events of Jesus' life. See Norton, Genuineness of the Gospels; Alford, Greek Testament, Prolegomena, 30, 31, 30, 45-47.

C. It is to be jwesumed 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: Melito (168), Bishop of Sardis, who wrote a treatise on the Revelation of John, went as far as Palestine in order to ascertain on the spot the facts relating- to the Canon of the 0. T., and as a result of his investigations excluded the Apocrypha; Serapion, Bishop of Antioch (181-213, Abbot), says: "We receive Peter and the other apostles as Christ, but as skillful men we reject those writings which are falsely ascribed to them "; Tertullian (180-230) gives an example of the deposition of a presbyter in Asia Minor for publishing a pretended work of Paul. See Tertullian, De Baptismn, referred to by Godot on John, Introduction; Lardner, Works, 2: 304, 305; Mctlvainc, Evidences of Christianity, 92.

(6) 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, afford convincing proof that they belong to the apostolic

age.

Notice the mingling of Latin and Greek, as in <7jr«ouAaTwp (Mark 6: 27) and Ktvrvpiutv (Mark 15: 39): of Greek and Aramtean, as in npaotai npaaiat. (Hark 6: 40) and &&e\vy^a T»;n <p>lfiucrtu{ (Mat 24:15): this could hardly have occurred after the first century. Compare the anachronisms of style and description in Thackeray's "Henry Esmond." See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 27-37; Blunt, Scriptural Coincidences, 244-354.

(c) The genuineness of the fourth gospel is continued by the fact that Tatian (155-170), the Assyrian, a disciple of Justin, repeatedly quotes 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 difference in style between the Apocalypse and the Gospel of John is due to the fact that the Apocalypse was written during John's exile in Patmos, under Nero, In 67 or 68, soon after John hud left Palestine and had taken up his residence at Kphesus. He had hitherto spoken Aramiean, and Greek was comparatively unfamiliar to him. TinGospel was written thirty years after, probably about 97, when Greek had become to him like a mother tongue. See Light foot on Galattans, ;t43. 347. Phrases and ideas which indicate u common authorship of the Apocalypse 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, Hone Apocalyptioa¹, 1: 4, 5.

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, 330-382. and Foundations of Theistie und Christian Belief, 221-228; Sunday, Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and Gospels in the Second Century; Ezra Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, so 87; How, Bumpton 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-xxxli.

(<i) The epistle to the Hebrews appears to have been accepted during the first century after it was written (so Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, and the Peshito Version witness). Then for two centuries, especially in the Roman and North African churches, and probably because its iuternal characteristics were inconsistent with the tradition of a Pauliue authorship, its genuineness was doubted (so Tertullian, Cyprian, Iremeus, 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 Anally 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 lsarnsd 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. On Hebrews, see art. in Smith's Bible Dictionary, and Lange'sCom. (ed. Kendrick), Introduction.

(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequentlyheld to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier tlian 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.

Firrailianus (250), Bishop of Ciesarea in Cappadoela, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (330) 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 DeWette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning dispute as to their genuineness. The epistle was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom, and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. See Plumptre, on Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter. 4: Prolegomena, 157; Weatoott, on Canon, in Smith's Bible Diet., 1: 370, 373; Blunt, Diet. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.

(/) 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 sinco the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collection* 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. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 23-27.

D. nationalistic 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 accounts of Christ's life or doctrine. Only three of these theories require special notice:

1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss.

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 wluch 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 >iot, 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." See Strauss, Life of Jesus; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii; also Carpenter, Mental Philosophy, 302; Grote, Plato, 1 : 249.

We object to this view 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, are the slow growth of centuries.

Instance the Indian, Greek, Roman, and Scandinavian myths. See Cox, Miracles, 50.

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

Arnold of Rugby: "The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking such for realities!" Pilate's skeptical inquiry, "What is truth?" 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.

(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.

See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible. 01.

(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.

Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings. Cf. 2 Pet. 1:16—oi yap o-f<ro«i>nr^ei'ot? nv9ots ^a«oAou,>Tjffai-Tc?- " we have not been on the false tmek of myths artificially elaborated." See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88.

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

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

Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrancers of historical facts at the beginnings of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's supper, an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, in Present Day Tracts, 0 : no. 36.

On Strauss and his theory, see Haekett, in Christian Rev., 1845: 48: Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-103; Chrlstlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 37!Mi5: MaeLear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-38: H. B. Smith, in F'aith and Philosophy, 442-108; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4 : 74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism. 305-360; Bibliothoca Sacra, Oct., 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess. Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 364; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-07; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-120: A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Diet., 2: 954-958.

2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur.

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 And their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions."

Baur dates the fourth gospel at 100-170 A. D.; the synoptic gospels after 130 A. D. He 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 facta, 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"—!, e. miracles.. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. See liaur, Die Kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels {Engl, transD, 530. Supernatural Religion, 1: 21:2-444 and vol. 2; Ptieiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of llaur's position, see Herzog, Encyelopivdie. art. : Baur: Clarke's trans), of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-30; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 27", 278.

We object to this view 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 liistory impossible.

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

(6) 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 n 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 isee Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-70). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizlng 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 witli 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 these different views possible is the actual historical Christ. See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 01. Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155.

(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religiou8 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' fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hennas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Home's belief in the phoenix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.

(rf) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful desciple 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 bcI on (fin 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.

(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 Jolmnnine 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 " .-Eons."

(/) 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.

On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 10D-H4; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Bow, Hampton Lect. for 1877 : 289-;if>fl. On Ilaur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1 :175 Sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5 :1-42; Auberlen, Div. Kevelution; liib. Sac, 19 : 75; Answers to Supernatural Heligiou, in Wcstcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th cd., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contcmporary Review, Dec, 1874. and Jan., 1875.

3rd. The Romance-theory of Renan.

This theory admits a basis of truth in the gospels and holds that they were all written in the first century. "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 antmuM of this theory is plainly shown in Kenan'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. Itut 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 Kenan, " I admit as authentic the four cauonical gospels. All, in my opinion, date from the tirst century, and the authors are, generally speaking, those to whom they are attributed." 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. 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 Kenan, Life of Jesus, 21.

To this view 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.

(6) 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.

(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.

For reviews of Kenan, see Hutton, Essays, 363-281; H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 401-ltl; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt, 435-447; Pressense, In Theol. Eclec., 1:199; Uhlhorn. Mod. Representations of the Life of Jesus, 1-33; Bib. Sac., 33 :307; 23 : 353. 539; Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 16, and 4: no. 31.

2. Qenuineness of the books of the Old Testament. We show this:

(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 does not contain one authoritative or direct quotation from them; while, with the exception of Judges, Eeclesiastes, Canticles, Esther, Ezra, and Nelicmiah, every other book in the Hebrew canon is used either for illustration or proof." The only possible exception to this statement is found in Jade 14. which some hold to be a quotation from the Apocryphal book of Enoch (160 B. C.V). But Jude more probably quoted the same primitive tradition of which the author of the Apocryphal book made use—Volkmar, indeed, puts the date of the Book of Enoch at 132 A. D. See Scbodde, Book of Enoch, with In trod, by Ezra Abbot; Plumptre on Jude, 210, 216, 217.

(ft) 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 believed to be divine." 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, 380. Philo never quotes an Apocryphal book.

(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. Apocrj'pha, 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 (Icelua., prologue, and 48 : 24; also 24 : 23-27; 1 Kae. 12 : 9: 2 Mac. 6: 23; 1 Esd. 1: 28: 6:1; Barach 2: 21). So both ancient and modern Jews. See Bissell, in Lange's Commentary on the Apocrypha, Introduction, 44.

id) From the testimony of the Samaritan Pentateuch, dating from the time of the exile, or 600 B. C.

Samaritan colonists would not have accepted their Pentateuch from the Jews after the exile, on account of the enmity between them; they would not have accepted it durinu the exile, if they had not known it to be the immemorial and sacred book of the Jews. They received nothing but the Pentateuch, because the other Jewish literature recognized the claims of Jerusalem, while the Pentateuch ante-dated these claims. See Smith's Bible Dictionary, art.: Samaritan Pentateuch; Stanley Leathes, Structure of the O. T., 1-41.

(e) From indications that the books of the Old Testament were collected by competent authority so early as the time of Ezra, and were thenceforth preserved with the utmost care.

See Bib. Sac., 1863: 381, 660, 799; Smith's Bible Diet., art.: Pentateuch; Theological Eclectic, 8 :215; Bissell, Hist. Origin of the Bible, 398-103. On the " Men of the Great Synagogue," see Wright, Ecclesiastes, 5-12, 475-487.

(/) From the impossibility, on any hypothesis of forgery or of gradual accretion, of accounting for the internal characteristics of works which combine such manifest antiquity with a moral and religious teaching so consistent and sublime.

As the controversy with regard to the genuineness of the O. T. books has turned of late upon the claims of the Pentateuch to be regarded as the production of Moses, we subjoin a note upon

The AuthnruMp of the Pentateuch. 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) Decalogue; (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; (e) that the book of Judges, with its record of sacrifices offered In many places, gives no evidence that cither 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, 300, 386, and Prophets of Israel.

We may grant, 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 wholo 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. See Bible Commentary, 1:13.

But. as positive objections to the theory of later authorship, we urge the following:

1. Universal Jewish tradition attributes the Pentateuch to Moses. Only indubitable evidence to the contrary can outweigh the presumption that this tradition Is correct.

2. This is the express testimony of Christ (John5 : 46, 47—"Moses," "bis writings," "he wrote of me ") and of his apostles (Peter in Acts 3 : 22—" Hoses said," and Paul in Rom. 10 : 5—" Moses writath").

3. The dignity and majesty of Deuteronomy befit Mosaic authorship, and its hortatory design explains any differences of style between it and the earlier books.

4. The apparent lack of distinction between the different classes of Levites in Deuteronomy is 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 as a whole, and therefore naturally mentions the clergy as a whole. In Brat. 18 : 1-8, however, the distinction is certainly made. There "the priests, the L»Tites' — the Levitical priests.

5. The silence of the Hook of Judges as to the Mosaic ritual is 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; and 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 mediaeval 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).

6. The theory Is chargeable with an over-rigid interpretation of the Levitical system. Robertson Smith calls that system "a complete theory of the religious life." He does not admit that it allows any worship but that at Jerusalem. This is inconsistent with the history of Israel, both before and after the exile. Solomon recognizes the existence of prayer in other places than the sanctuary, when he speaks of praying toward God's home (1 L 8 : 38, 48; cf. Ps. 138 : 2—" I will worship toward tbj holy temple ").

I. The time of the exile, when there were no sacrifice and no sanctuary, was according to this theory the time when the lending minds of the nation were constructing a system of costly ceremonial. This contradicts the general principle that literary activity is coincident with periods of national prosperity, rather than of national depression.

8. In a historical and legal document, such as the Pentateuch professes to be, the putting of later laws and regulations into the mouth of Moses, with the declaration that Jehovah spoke by him, Is nothing less than forgery and profanity, to which the expanded poetical version of Job's speeches furnishes no proper parallel.

9. The hypothesis of a veritable Mosaic authorship is far the simpler and more natural. As poets like Homer and Shakespeare do not rise in successive generations, and the theory of one Homer and one Shakespeare is far more probable than that of many Homers and many Shakespeares, so the theory of one Moses is preferable to that of many law-givers, and many writers of law, among the Jews. As the theory of Haur with regard to the later and piecemeal authorship of the gospels had only temporary currency and is now laid to rest forever, so we may expect to see the speedy collapse of the destructive criticism with respect to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.

See Presb. Hev., art, by Green, Jan., 1882: by H. P. Smith, Apr., 1882; by Patton, 1883: 341-410; Bib. Sac, Apr., 181-2: 291-344; British Quarterly, July, 1881: 123; Green, Moses and the Prophets, and The Hebrew Feasts; Stebbins, A Study in the Pentateuch; Watts, The Newer Criticism; Dissell, Historic Origin of the Bible, 277-342, and The Pentateuch, Its Authorship and Structure; Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, 58; British Quarterly, Jan., 1884: 138-143; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 180-216: Payne-Smith, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 15; Edersheim, Warburton Lectures on Prophecy and History.

II. Credibility Of The Writers Op The Scriptures.

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 able 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 circum8tances 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 imperilled all their worldly interests. (6) 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.

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. (6) 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."

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; (6) 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. Krltik der Evang. Geschiehte; Rreenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, 30,31; Starkie on Evidence, 734; Whately, Historic Doubts as to Napoleon Bonaparte; Haley, Examination of Alleged Discrepancies; Dirks, 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 compares 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 writers 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 countjy 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 high, est degree prnttatile 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, mid afterward amongst those who peineeuted 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 reliirion, 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 u 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 consequence, 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."

III. The Supernatural Character Of The Scripture Teaching.

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.

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. Skepticism 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.

(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.

In this unity the Bible stands alone. Hindu, Persian, and Chinese religious books contain no consistent system of faith. There is progress in revelatiou 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 gcrminally in the pmtinmueliuni uttered to our first parents (Gen. 3 : 15— the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head; Hit. 5:17—"Think not Hut I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil ").

(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 Script ure. The classic nations had no such ideas and no such spirit.

(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.

Compare with the harmony between the different Scripture writers the contradictions and refutations which follow merely human philosophies—e. g., the Hegelian idealism and the Speneerian materialism.

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 Revelation for his imagination. Hence the popularity of the Scriptures. Their variety holds men. The Ilible 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.

(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 Lockbart. his son-in-law. "There is but one book!" said the dying man. Kevllle 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 qne 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, Supernat. Origin of Bible, 155-181; W. L. Alexander, Connection and Harmony of O. T. and N. T.; Stanley Loathes, 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; Iinmer, Hermcneuties, 91; Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 23; 5: no. 28; 6: no. 31; Lee on Inspiration, 2B-33.

2. Moral system of the Npav 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 those most generally misunderstood and neglected, while it permits no vice whatsoever.

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

(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.

(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.

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.

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, Hampton Lectures, 1877: 130-178; Fisher, Beginnings of Christianity, 28-38, 174. We append certain facts and references with regard to particular heathen systems.

1. Confucianism. Confucius (Kung-fu-Ue), B. C. 551-478, contemporary with Pythagoras and Buddha. Socrates was born ton years after Confucius died. Mencius (371-278) was n 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 a 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 worshiped 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.

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 tho related duties of husband to wife and of parent to child.

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, Sept., 1883: 565. Ezra Abbot says that Confucius gave the golden rule In positive as well as in negative form; see Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, 222. This, however, seems to be denied by Legge, Religions of China, 1-58.

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 of nature apart from the moral Personality that works in and through nature. Indeed, we may say that all heathenism is man's ohoice of a non-mbral in place of a moral God. Brahmanlsm 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 were worshiped as partial representations of the living principle which moved through all. Caste is fixed and consecrated as a manifestation of God.

Buddhism, beginning with Buddha, 000 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 tho human heart, and became, next to Christianity, the greatest missionary religion. Buddha would deliver man, not by philosophy, or 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. Finiteness and separateness are evil, and the ouly 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.

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 is sinful. The perfect man must forsake wife and children. All gratification of natural appetites and passions is sin. Salvation is not from sin, but from desire, and from this men can be saved only by escaping from life itself.

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'; Ileal, 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."

3. The Greek Systems. Pythaaoraa (584-504) based morality upon the principle of numbers. "Moral good was Identified with unity; evil with multiplicity; virtue was the 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 inculcated 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.

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.

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 failed to recognize God aB 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.

Aristotle (384-322) leaves out of view even the elements of God-likeness and antemundane evil which Plato so dimly recognized, and made morality the fruit of mere rational self-consciousness. He grants evil proclivities, but he refuses to call them immoral. He advocates 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 1m? 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.

Wuttke describes Epicureanism and Stoicism as alike making morality subjective; although Epicureanism regarded spirit as determined by nature. Stoicism regarded nature as determined by spirit. To A'picuru* (312-270) happiness, or the subjective feeling of pleasure, was 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. 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.

To Zeni), the founder of the Stole philosophy (340-264), virtue is the only good. Thought is to subdue nature. The free spirit is self-legislating, self-dependent, selfsufficient. 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 burdens, each can say, "The door Is open." To the Epicurean, the refuge is intoxication; to the Stoic, the refuge Is suicide.

In the Roman Epictct>v> (80), Seneca (+ 65), and Marcus Aureliw (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. The foregoing synopsis of the Greek systems is condensed from Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1: 62-161. On Marcus Aurelius, see N. Englander, July, 1881: 415-431; Capes, Stoicism.

4. Systems Of Western Asia. Zoroaster (1000 B. C. ?), the founder of the Parseeswas a dualist, at least so far as to explain the existence of evil and of good by the orlglnal presence in tbe 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 free 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. Are) are worshiped. There can be no depth to the consciousness of sin, and no hope of divine deliverance. See Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 1: 47-64: Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures), 109-144; Mitchell, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 25; Whitney on the A vesta, in Oriental and Linguistic Studies.

Mohammed (570-832 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 judgment. Mohammedanism Is heathenism in monotheistic form. Its good points are its conscientiousness and Its relation to God. But there is no basing of morality in love. The highest good is the sensuous happiness of the individual. The power of sin is not recognized. Evil belongs to the Individual, not to the race. There Is no need of redemption, but only of good works on the basis of prophetic teaching. God and man are external to one another. There is no atonement and no communion. Mohammed Is a teacher, but not a priest. 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. Fairbairn, In Contemp. Rev., Dec, 1882: 868—" The Koran has frozen Mohammedan thought: to obey it is to abandon progress." Mulr, 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." 8ee also Faiths of the World (St. Giles Lectures, second series). 361-396; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 1: 448-488, and 2: 2SO-817.

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.

Theodore Parker: "It would take a Jesus to forge a Jesus." Row, Hampton 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 sources 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-deiiied, 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 Rabbin ists.

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; Pressense, Jesus Christ, Life, Times, and Work, 84-87; Lightfoot on Colosslans, 349-419; Godet, Lectures in Defence of the Christian Faith.

(6) 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.

For a remarkable exhibition of the argument from the character of Jesus, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 278-332. Bushncll mentions the originality and vastness of Christ's plan, yet its simplicity and practical adaptation; his moral trait* 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 feeling, 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 a Judge, yet the gratitude and tenderness of a son; the most elevated devotion, yet a life of activity and exertion.

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. (6) There was no motive to induce acceptance of such false accounts, but every motive to the contrary, (c) The Buccess 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.

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 expectations 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 preeminent 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 skeptic, 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 TJlhnann, Sinlessness of Jesus; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 129-157; Schaff, Person of Christ; Young, The Christ of History.

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; (6) 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 Supcrnat. 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.

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 (6) a self-iguorance and self-exaggeration which coidd spring only from the deepest moral perversion. But the absolute purity of his conscience, the humility of bis 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. Theological Eclectic, 4: 187; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 153; J. S. Mill, Essays on Religion, 253: Young, Christ of History.

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 bo due to the action of celestial beings. 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 and morally unsound, or his testimony is true.

IV. The Historical Results Of The Propagation Of Scripture DocTrine.

1. The rapid progresss 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 eountry plaees, 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 (253-288), the Christians constituted half the population of Rome. The conversion of the emperor Constantlne (272-337) brought the whole empire, only 300 years after Jesus' death, under the acknowledged sway of the gospel. See Mcllvaine 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.

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 ago of literature and historical inquiry. Tacitus called the religion of Christ "exitiabilis superstltio"—"quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat." Pliny: "Nihil aliud inveni quam superstltlonem pravam et immodlcam." 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.

(6) The prejudice and hatred of the common people.

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 Ephesug.

(c) The persecutions set on foot by government.

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 Encyclopaedia Britannlca. 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 sandpits, 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 cucharist celebrated at the funeral.

0. The wonder becomes yet greater when we consider the natural insuffi- I ciency of the means used to secure this progress.

(a) The proclaimers of the gospel were in general unlearned men, belonging to a despised nation.

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.

(6) The gospel which they proclaimed was a gospel of salvation through faith in a Jew who had been put to an ignominious death. The cross was the Roman gallows—the punishment of slaves.

(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.

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 Theologioe. 1:133.

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.

On the whole section, see F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 91; Mcllvaine, 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; (6) the law of mutual love; (c) the sacredness of human life; (d) the doctrine of internal holiness; (e) the sanctity of home; (/) monogamy, and the religious equality of the sexes; (jj) 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.

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; (6) 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 should 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.

Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 177-18*1; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, chap, on Christianity and the Individual; Brace, Gesta Christ!, preface, vi.—"Practices and principles implanted, stimulated or supported by Christianity, such as regard for tho 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 saeredness of marriage ; the necessity of temperance; obligation of a more equitable division of the profits of labor, and of greater cooperation 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."