than that of other men, actually falls below it, from the circumstance that it is the opinion or suffrage of a mind unhinged upon one point, and capable of being misled by the false judgment that he was inspired by God.

He

Another explanation of the origin of Christianity has been, that it was a pious fraud from the beginning. Jesus of Nazareth was a transcendent religious genius, and a zealous philanthropist and reformer. He saw the world sunk in barbarism and idolatry, and his own nation dwarfed and enslaved by ignorance and superstition, and knowing that his countrymen expected about that time a great national deliverer, and that there were passages in their sacred writings which they deemed prophetical, he undertook a moral and religious reformation upon the basis of those prophecies and expectations. knowingly misrepresented the dictates of his own powerful understanding, as the immediate inspiration of God. He either pretended to work miracles, or his followers pretended that he did. He commenced a public ministry, and committed himself to the current of circumstances, to succeed or fail, as fortune might direct. He was successful in rallying around him a party, which formed the nucleus of a Church, an extensive organization which perpetuated itself, and has continued to the present day; but in doing so he became involved with the civil authorities, and lost his life.

Such are some of the hypotheses which have been resorted to in order to account for the New Testament and the Christian Church as historical phenomena, without admitting the supernatural element

which they involve. I do not pretend to have exhausted them all. It may suffice to have given those already mentioned as specimens of the whole.

Another class of unbelievers take another ground. They do not consider themselves bound to account for the New Testament or the Church at all. They bring forward certain parts of the New Testament, and certain things contained in it, as false or incredible, and on the strength of them reject the whole book as fabulous and unreliable.

An unbeliever there is, now alive,. who has attempted to edify the world by detailing the process of rejection which went on in his own mind, till, in his own language, "Christ and the Devil faded out of his spiritual vision, only to leave more vividly God and Man." Such is his estimate of probabilities, that he considers an abstract a priori argument sufficient to refute the whole positive testimony of the New Testament. "It is," says he, "an unplausible opinion, that God would deviate from his ordinary course in order to give us anything so undesirable as an authoritative oracle would be, which would paralzye our moral powers exactly as an infallible Church does, in the very proportion to which we succeed in eliciting answers from it." This objection has certainly the merit of originality to recommend it, with this further advantage, that it gives us the means of forming a judgment of the intellectual calibre of one of the most zealous of modern assailants of the divine origin and authority of Christianity.

Another class of unbelievers tell us, that the New Testament is to be rejected as an authentic history of past transactions, because of the discrepancies of

the different writers, and the variations of the testi

mony of the different witnesses. One gives the genealogy of Jesus as ascending through one line of ancestry, and another through another. One tells us that Judas, the traitor, died by his own hand in one way, and another in another. One says, that a certain field was bought by the rulers of the Jews with the price of treachery, which Judas brought back, and another, that it was bought by Judas himself; and two different reasons are given why it was called "the field of blood."

One Evangelist relates, that Jesus, on a certain occasion, in going out of Jericho, met two blind men, who were importunate in their entreaties to him to heal them, and he did so. Another, detailing the same accompanying circumstances, says, that there was one blind man, and gives his name as Bartimeus. The four Gospels give four different inscriptions upon the cross of Christ. It is naturally impossible that more than one of these can be verbally correct, and perhaps not one of them.

But what follows from this? That Christ was never crucified, and that no inscription was placed upon his cross? He who should draw such a conclusion would outrage all reason and common sense. These different inscriptions only prove that the testimony is human, not that it is untrue. All human testimony admits of verbal and immaterial variations, without impairing its trustworthiness. It is so in matters involving life and death. So the two different genealogies of Jesus do not prove that there was no such person, or that he was not a lineal descendant of David. He might have been descended from the

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royal stock by several lines, as we are all equally descended from sixteen progenitors of the fourth degree. Certain it is, that the genealogy of Christ must have been satisfactory to his contemporaries; for no one would have been listened to a moment who pretended to be the Messiah, unless he could show his descent, by the public registers, from the royal lineage of David and Solomon.

Others are scandalized by certain opinions, which they allege were entertained by the writers of the New Testament. It seems evident to them, that the Apostles believed in a personal Devil, and in the existence of wicked spirits, which had the power to possess and torment mankind, to inflict upon them bodily diseases, and mental disorders; and that Jesus actually drove them out, and delivered men from their inflictions. Men entertaining such puerile superstitions are not to be trusted as witnesses of matters of fact, nor as historians of the events of their own age.

But it may be answered, that all history extending back more than three hundred years, on this principle, must be set aside as altogether uncertain, since the belief in witchcraft was universal before that period, and the wisest of men took part in putting their fellow-creatures to death for the crime of witchcraft. The origin of diseases was a matter of science, and not of religion; and a religious teacher, who should have attempted to set the world right on all matters of science collateral with religion, would have accomplished nothing, and probably have fallen a sacrifice to his philosophical doctrines quite as soon as to his religious dogmas.

The same is true of the geological opinions which then prevailed of the structure of the earth. It was thought to be a plain, instead of a globe, having beneath it a vast expanse, corresponding in depth and extent to the height and breadth of heaven above. To this world they seem to have supposed that all souls descended when released from the body, not excepting the soul of Christ himself. Any attempt to correct this universal opinion would have been useless, and it was better left to the progress of science and discovery.

Gibbon has made it the ground of profane scoff, and, as he supposed, a triumphant reason for the rejection of Christianity, that the Apostles seem to have expected a personal return of Christ to the earth during their own day, or at least at no distant period. If this be admitted, what inference can be legitimately drawn from it? Does it affect their credibility as witnesses? -for this is the capacity in which they stand between us and Christ. Not at all. It merely concerns the extent of their inspiration. There is a previous and very important question: Was it taught by Christ, or was it a misinterpretation of his language, which it required merely the lapse of time to correct? Is it credible that he did teach such a doctrine, at the same time that he professed to be promulgating a universal religion, and the call of those very disciples made a part of his arrangements for "teaching that religion to all nations"? He professed to be that personage to whom Abraham and Moses and the prophets looked forward, as ushering in a more important period of the world's history than had ever occurred before; when men should no longer wor