ship God in this locality or that, but the true and spiritual worshippers should worship him acceptably all over the earth. It is incredible that Jesus, while utterring such predictions, and making such arrangements, could have taught that the world was soon coming to an end. The very enterprise of Christianizing the world must itself consume ages and centuries.

Others have taken offence at the phraseology of the New Testament, or rather at the doctrines which have been drawn from certain expressions used by Jesus and his Apostles. Jesus called himself the Son of God. And upon this expression, and others analogous to it, a most wonderful mythology has been constructed. As a son ordinarily has the same nature with his father, Jesus of Nazareth, besides his human nature, was supposed to have had a divine nature, derived immediately from the essence of God, and partaking of all his attributes. An analysis of the New Testament shows that this epithet had originally no such signification. Christ himself explained his use of it to have reference, not to his nature, but his mission, his having been "sanctified and sent into the world by God."

The same is true with the sacrificial language of the New Testament. At first sight it has the appearance of teaching the transfer of human guilt from one person to another, and, of course, the irrational doctrine of suffering punishment by proxy, and acquiring righteousness in the same way. These things being moral impossibilities, if really taught in the Scriptures, would diminish, if not destroy, their credibility as containing a revelation from God.

It is the object of the following Discourses to meet and obviate these various objections, to show, in opposition to the unbeliever, that Christianity has a solid basis of historical facts; that the history of the New Testament is an extract from the history of the world, and not an interpolation into it; that the Apostles were real men among the actors in the scenes of the past; that the variations of the Gospels are immaterial; and that, admitting almost any hypothesis of their origin, these compositions leave certain and undeniable the unique and extraordinary personality of Jesus Christ; they make certain his appearance among men, and the principal events of his life; they make certain his agency in establishing the Christian Church, in promulgating its doctrines and precepts and establishing its rites and discipline, and, moreover, his consciousness of a mission from God to take the position he assumed, and to do the work which he accomplished.

It will be the purpose of these Discourses to analyze the New Testament into its constituent elements; to show that it is not a homogeneous book,

that it contains various elements, such as HISTORY, DOCTRINES, OPINIONS, and PHRASEOLOGY.

When thus sent into the world by God, and authenticated as his Messenger, Christ taught certain doctrines, which embrace all the fundamental principles of religion, and gave them in charge to his disciples, to be perpetuated to the end of the world. But in inculcating these doctrines he necessarily used the language of the age and nation to which he belonged. He alluded to opinions which were then extant, without affirming or denying them. I

intend to show that it is highly improper and unjust to make these floating opinions constituent elements of Christianity, and then to set aside Christianity as untrue, because the floating opinions of that age were erroneous or superstitious. As well might it be attempted to deny the truth of all the science of this age, because scientific men still continue to speak with the multitude of the sun's rising and setting, although it is a well-established fact, that the sun neither rises nor sets, but the daily revolution of the earth upon its axis gives rise to this optical deception.

I intend, moreover, to demonstrate, that, of the four elements I have enumerated, the fourth, Phraseology, consisting of the mere modes of expression belonging to the age and nation, is equally demonstrable with the others. These were Judaisms and Orientalisms, forms of speech highly figurative or hyperbolic, which to our Occidental ears seem at first sight to have an extraordinary meaning, but on closer examination are found to relate to common and familiar things.

When these distinctions are made, it will be seen that the grounds of most of the controversies which have prevailed in the Christian Church are taken away. Many of them have arisen from pressing to a literal meaning words and phrases originally figurative. Many more have arisen from confounding opinions alluded to with doctrines affirmed.

It will be seen, that the scope of these Discourses is to remove the causes of scepticism and sectarianism, the great evils of the present age. It is to show, that a thorough study of the New Testament, in

stead of revealing new and insurmountable difficulty in the way of its reception as a revelation from God, instead of showing that it is a dishonest record made by contemporaries with an intent to deceive, or a forgery of after times, palmed off upon the world as the production of a former age, every feature bears the impress and lineaments of its appropriate age, and carries us back, with graphic and unmistakable minuteness of particularity, to the interesting scenes of the first planting of the Gospel in Judæa, eighteen centuries ago.

The tendency of these Discourses will be to persuade the reader, that the account given in the New Testament of the origin of the Gospel and of the Christian Church is not only historically, but philosophically, true. The New Testament and the Christian Church are phenomena now extant in the world. Every thinking man must have some way of accounting for the manner in which they came into existence. If the positions taken in the following Discourses are just, the most obvious way is the true way. The New Testament is what it is, the Church assumed the form it took in the age of the Apostles, because Jesus was what he assumed to be, a divinely inspired and authenticated Messenger from God. Place him in that position, and everything becomes natural and consistent. Probable causes are assigned for known effects. The language, the sentiments, and the conduct of the Apostles and early Christians are accounted for by the well-known laws of the human mind. Place him in any other position, suppose him to have been an enthusiast, mistaking the promptings of a superior genius for Divine inspira

tion, and his profound, calm, unerring, transcendent wisdom becomes wholly irreconcilable with the hypothesis. Such wisdom could not have inhabited the same mind with such fundamental error and hallucination. The supposition that he made claims which he knew did not belong to him, is made wholly impossible by an integrity which knew no stain, and a piety that never lost communion with God.

As little ground is there for the last refuge of unbelief, that Christianity was the natural growth and production of the age in which it sprang up; that Hebrew theology, Greek philosophy, and Oriental theosophy, mingling together in Palestine, corrected each other's errors, and combined the truth that was in all into a new and sublimer system of faith, a more perfect system of morality than the world had ever known before.

It is sufficient simply to deny that any such elements were then in existence, and that Jesus ever had access to them if there were. We know from contemporary history and literature the whole compass of Jewish thought. We know what were the then predominant sects, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. We know that they, each and all, had perverted and debased, instead of perfecting, the religion of the Mosaic dispensation. The Mishna and the Talmuds are all-sufficient documents to convince us, that the pure religion of the New Testament could never have originated in the trifling legends and the absurd puerilities of those depositories of superstition. Josephus tells us tales of the practical morality of his countrymen, which make