to the conclusion of their own reason, whether death were necessarily the destruction of our being, and whether it were not the purpose of the Creator of man to raise him to a new and immortal life. "As

by man came death, so by man came the resurrection of the dead." God knew the principles of the human mind which he addressed, and he knew the inference men would draw, that "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive," and the result has commended the wisdom of the arrangement. Furnished with this single fact, the twelve Apostles, obscure individuals of a despised race though they were, and persecuted everywhere, accomplished more in establishing the conviction of the immortality of the soul, than all the philosophers of the heathen world, though aided by the highest rank, the most extensive learning, and consummate eloquence. The private schools of the philosophers were forsaken for the humble churches of the Apostles, for the simple reason, that what was taught in one as a philosophic probability was promulgated in the other as a positive, ascertained fact. Zeno, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus had propounded many things that seemed like truth, but they were all uncertain, and different from each other. Truth is but one, and Christ taught it without error and with satisfactory authority. All those philosophers had yielded to the common lot of humanity, they had died like other men, and their ashes had been blown about the earth, or buried beneath it. Christ had not only taught, but demonstrated, immortality. He had returned to life, been conversant for forty days with his former companions, and then ascended to heaven in their sight.

Here, then, was something additional to the light of nature, on a subject the most interesting of all others to the human mind, and it quickened men's moral and religious natures, and gave confidence to their hopes of immortality, precisely in proportion to their reliance on the original testimony of the Apostles.

Thus it is that Christianity is founded on historical facts, facts of such a nature as to be the proper subjects of human testimony, submitted to the calm scrutiny of the senses, showing themselves in the conduct and sentiments to which they led, and impressing themselves upon the age in which they happened.

Among them, and towering far above them all, is the resurrection of Christ. It is the keystone of the arch of Christian faith. Take this away, and it all falls a heap of ruins. The Christian Church is a building without a foundation, our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain. "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept." "This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."

4

DISCOURSE III.

REALITY OF PERSONS, TIMES, AND PLACES.

THE FORMER TREATISE HAVE I MADE, O THEOPHILUS, OF
ALL THAT JESUS BEGAN BOTH TO DO AND TEACH, UNTIL
THE DAY IN WHICH HE WAS TAKEN UP, AFTER THAT HE
THROUGH THE HOLY GHOST HAD GIVEN COMMANDMENTS
UNTO THE APOSTLES WHOM HE HAD CHOSEN TO WHOM
ALSO HE SHOWED HIMSELF ALIVE AFTER HIS PASSION, BY
MANY INFALLIBLE PROOFS, BEING SEEN OF THEM FORTY
DAYS, AND SPEAKING OF THE THINGS PERTAINING TO THE
- Acts i. 1-3.
KINGDOM OF GOD.

Most persons, on reading the New Testament, receive from it a strong impression of historic truth. They feel that they are reading of real persons and real transactions. It has been so from the beginning. The bare reading of the record has generally produced faith. There have been millions and millions of believers in Christianity, yet few of them have read any treatise on the evidences of Christianity. The bare, naked narrative, just as it stands on the sacred pages, has been sufficient to produce belief. Ninety-nine out of a hundred have believed the whole, and the sceptical have been compelled to believe it up to the very borders of the supernatural.

It is next to impossible, for any person possessing ordinary human faculties, to read the New Testament, and entertain a serious doubt that there was such a person as Jesus Christ, or call in question the reality of his ministry. The real existence of his most prominent Apostles is no less unquestionable. Peter, John, and Paul are as real to us as Cæsar, Antony, and Cicero. There is the same difference to us when we read of them and the imaginary beings of romance, as there is when we see a real child beside a lifeless doll, a living man beside a dead statue, a cluster of natural flowers beside a bunch of painted ribbons. The sceptic cannot deny this, as I have already said, up to the very borders of the supernatural. And then the supernatural is so interwoven with the natural, they so interpenetrate each other, they are so connected, as cause and effect, and so grow out of each other and into each other, that they cannot be separated without violence, and without utter destruction to the whole tissue. This is the strong ground of Christianity. This is the reason why it has obtained so wide a reception in the world, without any argumentation. It has all the marks of simple nature so plainly, substance, form, complexion, action, that it is as spontaneous to believe, as to believe in the existence of external nature, which daily presents itself to our senses.

It is the purpose of this discourse to detect, analyze, define, and enumerate the causes which produce this almost universal belief in the historical truth of the New Testament. Every historical transaction, real or fictitious, must have a time and a place, must have actors, or persons concerned in it;

and, to be credible, must have consistency and reasonableness, that is to say, the events must agree with each other, the persons must act in character, and the various movements must be capable of being accounted for by those motives which ordinarily govern the conduct of human beings. All these features of truth, I contend, are found in the New Testament.

In the first place, the narrative of the New Testament has a time. It is not placed at a period antehistoric or unhistoric. The time of the events related by the Evangelists and Apostles is placed at a period which embraces the reigns of four of the first five of the Roman Emperors, a period when the civilization, the literature, and intelligence of the ancient world reached the highest point of development. They were contemporary with three of the greatest Roman historians, and with Josephus and Philo, almost the only eminent writers in the Greek language which the Jewish nation ever produced. The period, then, was eminently historic. The eminent men and most important transactions of that age are almost as well known as the conspicuous events and characters of England during the last century. The attempt to interpolate a chapter into the history of the world in such an age as that, which should introduce a number of the most conspicuous individuals of the time, would be utterly desperate; as much so as for a writer of the present day to forge a journal of Franklin in Paris, during the Revolutionary war, and introduce into it the names of the principal men then upon the stage in such a way that the narrative could possibly be true. No ingenuity can make his