—INTERNAL EVIDENCE.]

which the New Testament writers describe the weakness and faults of the disciples; not excepting some of the most eminent among the Apostles. Their 'slowness of heart,' (that is, dulness of understanding,) —their want of faith (trust) in their Master,—and their worldly ambition and jealousy among themselves, are spoken of without reserve, and as freely as the faults of their adversaries. This, and other points, would be very remarkable if met with in any one book; but it is still more so, when the same character runs through all the books of the New Testament, which are no less than 27 distinct compositions, of several different kinds, written apparently at considerable intervals of time from each other, and which have come down to us as the works of no less than eight different authors. You might safely ask an unbeliever to point out the same number-or half the number-of writers in behalf of any Sect, Party, or System, all of them, without a single exception, writing with the same modest simplicity, and without any attempt to excuse, or to extol, and set off themselves."*

"The picture drawn by the Evangelists is evidently an unstudied one. There is nothing in it of the nature of eulogium and panegyric. ...If they had had the inclination, they do not seem to have had the ability, to draw a fictitious character of great moral beauty. They write like (what they were) plain, unpractised authors, without learning, or eloquence, or skill in composition."+

The imputation of dishonesty, or of any kind of incompetency in the Evangelists, cannot for an instant be admitted by any advocate of Christianity; but, except upon the ground of plenary inspiration, the natural manifestation of the varying characteristics of their own human dispositions, is so far a convincing sign of their genuineness, and adds greatly to the power of their concurrent testimony.

"Taking the New Testament as a whole, we are not disposed to deny that it bears upon the face of it many indications that its several writers were not entirely exempt from mental imperfection-but we contend that the imperfection which their works exhibit is perfectly compatible with the communication to men of infallible knowledge respecting God, his moral relation to us, his purposes with regard to us, and the religious duties which these things enforce on all who would attain unto eternal life. And if this be true, the record, equally with the revelation, satisfies the spiritual need of man in its fullest extent."‡

[CHRISTIAN REVELATION.— lessons of universal acceptation which we find Jesus delivering elsewhere. ... This gospel, if alone, would leave the impression that belief in Jesus as the Christ, and the recognition of the high offices which the writer labours to attribute to him, is the chief obligation laid upon man. The commandment to love one another is certainly enforced with much strength and pathos; but the commandment partakes too much of an exclusive spirit; it is for the Christian sect alone; it is not the language of wide philanthropy, 'love all men'; but, I pray not for the world, but for these whom thou hast given me out of the world.' ”*

XXIV. Relations of Miracles have not the air of trustworthiness.

When we examine the Gospels in this manner, trying to judge them simply on their own merits, without any supposed Divine inspiration; and seeking to realize the position of the writers and their inducements to magnify the glory of their Master, whose character and sufferings, and the promises he held out to their spiritual ambition, had won them to his cause we are not surprised to find them full of "wonderful works which he did." Miracles belong of necessity to a miraculous revelation so the early disciples felt, and so also Paley well argues : "In whatever degree it is probable or not very improbable that a revelation should be communicated to mankind at all, in the same degree is it probable or not very improbable that miracles should be wrought."+ If our cultivated reason is shocked by the relation of them, it is because the very idea of Revelation is contrary to reason, and these results of it are a clear exposure, a reductio ad absurdum, of the principle at the base of it. But the question at present is how they stand as alleged facts. It is impossible here to enter upon a fair examination of them, but the following general objections to the miracles of Jesus may be urged against believing the gospel reports of them :

"I. Jesus himself put his miracles of healing upon a level with the performances of the Jewish exorcists. Matt. XII. 27.

II. He recognized the attempts of others as real miracles, making no distinction between them and his own. Mark IX. 38, 39.

III. He admits that there was more difficulty in performing some miracles than others. Matt. XVII. 21.

IV. He generally required to see that the applicants fully believed in his miraculous power before he attempted the cure. Matt. IX. 2; 27.

Mark VI. 5.

V. The answers usually given by Jesus were of such a nature as to dismiss the applicants without any injury to his own credit, whatever

*Origin of Christianity. pp. 181; 188-9; 200. See also on the composition of the Gospels, Mackay's Rise and Progress of Christianity, 1854.

Paley's Evidences. vol. 1. p. 3.

-INTERNAL EVIDENCE.]

XXIV. "Christianity is not only confirmed by miracles, but is in itself, in its very essence, a miraculous religion. It is not a system which the human mind might have gathered, in the ordinary exercise of its powers, from the ordinary course of nature. Its doctrines, especially those which relate to its founder, claim for it the distinction of being a supernatural provision for the recovery of the human race. ... We affirm, that when Jesus Christ came into the world, nature had failed to communicate instructions to men, in which, as intelligent beings, they had the deepest concern, and on which the full development of their highest faculties essentially depended; and we affirm, that there was no prospect of relief from nature; so that an exigence had occurred, in which additional communications, supernatural lights, might rationally be expected from the Father of spirits."

...

"A pervading element of supernaturalism was necessary to give completeness, authentication, and significance, to the symbol employed (by which Deity was represented in the person of Jesus Christ)... Miracles serve to mark off his life from human life in general, as the medium by which God has condescended to disclose himself, and his love, to our hearts. They are veritable flashings forth through him of the Almighty. They put the seal of God upon his life... Granted our need of a revelation of God to our affections-granted the fitness of a human life as the medium of such a revelation-and you grant also the necessity of miracles... All is homogeneous. We must accept all, or we must reject all. No miracles, no Christianity."+ "The manner of our Lord's miracles... is like that of the great works of God-sublimely quiet. The supernaturalism of the gospels is not a noisy, clattering, egotistic thing... There is a silence in it that awes, and a gentleness that startles, the soul... The trumpet is never blown to call the world to witness it. The occasion usually turns up in the most incidental way. ... It is anything but what we might have expected, if man's fancy or fanaticism had sketched and coloured the representation. And this view of the subject ought specially to be noted by those who ascribe the miraculous in Christ's memoirs to the after-touches of admiring and adoring followers. Pious passion does not paint in this severely sober style. The fervour which would infuse supernaturalism where there was none, would have infused more of it, and of a more ostentatious sort."

"On the hypothesis that the Miracles of the New Testament were masterly frauds on men's senses committed at the time and by the parties supposed in the records, the infidel must believe, that a vast number

* Channing's Works, pp. 324. 326.
+ Bases of Belief, pp. 186. 187.

Evidences of Revealed Religion.
Ibid. pp. 246. 248.

might be the result. John IX. 7.

[CHRISTIAN REVELATION.— Matt. VIII. 13; Ix. 29; xv. 23; 28; Mark x. 52;

VI. In Matthew and Mark, the more decided miracles, such as raising the dead, curing the blind, &c., are admitted to have been done in secret. Matt. VIII. 4; Ix. 30; Mark v. 43; vII. 36.

VII. The miracles were chiefly performed among the country people of Galilee, according to Matthew and Mark.

VIII. When Jesus was asked to do a public miracle in attestation of his divine mission, he not only refused to do it, but did not even appeal to his previous miracles. Matt. xvI. 1-4; comp. Mark VIII. 11; John vi. 30. It is true that Jesus is made to appeal to his miracles in answer to John the Baptist's disciples, and several times in the discourses attributed to him by John v. 36; x. 38; xiv. 10. Yet the above instances are sufficient to show that he did not usually rely upon them as the means of convincing opponents.

IX. In most of the narratives, the saying of Jesus and the incidents leading to it form the most conspicuous part; the accompanying miracle is but a brief echo. Matt. xv. 21-28.

X. None of those on whom the miracles were said to be performed come forward themselves to attest them in the subsequent part of the history, or play any conspicuous part in the affairs of the church, as gathered from the Acts and Epistles. The author of the Gospel of Nicodemus, which appeared at the end of the 3d century, has endeavoured to remedy the omission by making the centurion, the blind men, &c., give evidence before Pilate; but this forgery only renders the absence of any historical testimony to the same effect the more striking.

XI. None of the miracles produce any effect upon indisputable historical facts; but events go on in a natural course without the slightest symptom of supernatural disturbance. The Romans keep possession of Judea; Jesus is put to death as an innovator; his followers increase like other sects, by means of proselytism. All the miraculous consists of mere accessory incidents, which may be shaken off without hurt to the integrity of profane history, or even to the chief features of the gospel history itself.

XII. The supposed miracles had no effect on many of those who lived in the time of Jesus, and were most capable of appreciating them. John VII. 5; XII. 37; Matt. XI. 20; Mark vi. 52, comp. xvi. 14.”*

Of the miracles which are said to abound in the apostolic age, it is to be observed, that the low rank in which Paul places them appears inconsistent with the supposition of their being real and indubitable ones.

XXV.

The resurrection.

The crowning miracle of the gospels, however, the resurrection of Christ, requires special consideration.

* Origin of Christianity, chap. IX., condensed.

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of apparent miracles-involving the most astounding phenomena-such
as the instant restoration of the sick, blind, deaf, and lame, and the
resurrection of the dead-performed in open day, amidst multitudes of
malignant enemies-imposed alike on all, and triumphed at once over
the strongest predjudices and the deepest enmity ;-those who received
them and those who rejected them differing only in the certainly not
very trifling particular, as to whether they came from heaven or from
hell. He must believe that those who were thus successful in this ex-
traordinary conspiracy against men's senses and against common sense,
were Galilean Jews, such as all history of the period represents them;
ignorant, obscure, illiterate, and, above all, previously bigoted, like all
their countrymen, to the very system, of which, together with all other
religions on the earth, they modestly meditated the abrogation; he must
believe that, appealing to these astounding frauds in the face both of
Jews and Gentiles as an open evidence of the truth of a new revelation,
and demanding on the strength of them that their countrymen should
surrender a religion which they acknowledged to be divine, and that all
other nations should abandon their scarcely less venerable systems of super-
stition, they rapidly succeeded in both these very probable adventures;
and in a few years, though without arms, power, wealth, or science, were
to an
enormous extent victorious over all prejudice, philosophy, and
persecution; and in three centuries took nearly undisputed possession,
amongst many nations, of the temples of the ejected deities. He must
farther believe that the original performers, in these prodigious frauds
on the world, acted not only without any assignable motive, but against
all assignable motive; that they maintained this uniform constancy in un-
profitable falsehoods, not only together, but separately, in different
countries, before different tribunals, under all sorts of examinations and
cross-examinations, and in defiance of the gyves, the scourge, the axe,
the cross, the stake; that those whom they persuaded to join their enter-
prise, persisted like themselves in the same obstinate belief of the same
'cunningly devised' frauds; and though they had many accomplices in
their singular conspiracy, had the equally singular fortune to free them-
selves and their coadjutors from all transient weakness towards their
cause and treachery towards one another; and, lastly, that these men,
having, amidst all their ignorance, originality enough to invent the most
pure and sublime system of morality which the world has ever listened
to, had, amidst all their conscious villainy, the effrontery to preach it, and
which is more extraordinary, the inconsistency to practise it !"*

XXV. "The peculiar value of the history of the resurrection of Christ as an evidence of Christianity, is this: That it is completely certain, that

* Reason and Faith. Rogers' Essays. Vol. II. p. 284-6.