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and benevolence, becomes a mere phantom of delusion, and the fear, which oppresses a guilty conscience, of what shall be after death, becomes the weakest of superstitions. The solemnity of an oath, which is at present the safeguard of life, liberty, and property, is the idlest of mockeries. And were such to be the universal conviction, the main-spring of the order and progress of society would be broken, and society itself would collapse into a state of complete demoralization.

In the resurrection of Christ, those who believed in it as an historical fact conceived themselves to have received strong confirmation of the natural hope of immortality. Through the risen Saviour, they had received certain intelligence from the spiritual world, which is veiled from the eye of sense, and the members of the Christian Church which was first organized by a belief in the fact, were immediately elevated by that belief to a level of moral purity, of religious fervor, of mutual esteem and affection, of spirituality and devotedness, that the world had never seen before.

Faith in Christ, then, as an authenticated messenger from God, as the founder of a religious society, and as a risen, ever-living Saviour, was the foundation of the Christian Church. Upon the strength of this faith, his religion has spread over a large part of the globe. Thus was Christ the corner-stone, and in Divine Providence he has been the instrument, in the hands of God, of effecting the moral regeneration of the world.

But the reception of Jesus of Nazareth as the corner-stone, as the moral power by which the world

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was to be regenerated, was not unanimous. According to the history, at the age of about thirty, he came forth into the world and assumed the position of a supernatural mission from God; and of superhuman authority over men, as naturally flowing from it. To that position his whole bearing and conduct were adjusted. He demanded it as a right, he required submission to it as a duty. He bore witness to it from his own consciousness. He appealed to the spotless integrity of his whole character, and defied his enemies to convict him of the slightest moral obliquity. He appealed to the testimony of John the Baptist, he appealed to his own miracles, he alleged the transcendent wisdom of his doctrine, as the accumulated proofs that he was what he claimed to be, and finally staked his claim upon the fulfilment of his prophecy of rising from the dead. By the rulers of his nation he was rejected and put to death. By those whom he called about him, and who were witnesses of his daily life, he was viewed as a teacher sent from God, and as bearing the words of eternal life. He was rejected by the rulers, as an impostor, and put to death as a seditious person and a disturber of the peace.

His disciples testified to the world that God raised him from the dead, according to his own prediction, and sent them abroad to propagate his religion over the world. They recorded his history and teaching; they left an account of their own doings as his Apostles; and their correspondence is still extant, while they were engaged in the establishment of the Christian Church. And so both the Church and their writings have come down to our day.

But there are some, as at first, who now reject Christ as the corner-stone, and deny his claims to all supernatural authority. They give a different version to the whole account of the origin of Christianity. They repudiate the supernatural element altogether. They allege that there has been somewhere a grand mistake. The rejection of the miraculous has been the sum and substance of modern unbelief. But all confess that it is in the New Testament. If it is an interpolation, some account must be given of the way by which it got there. And on this point there is the greatest possible variety of opinion. Time would fail us to consider the various hypotheses which have been started, all different, and most of them contradictory to each other.

By some, miracles are set aside, as so improbable in themselves as to be incapable of proof. They are improbable, because it is not to be supposed that a Being infinitely wise and powerful would construct the world, either of mind or matter, in such a way as to need alteration or amendment. They are incapable of proof, because they must rest on human testimony, and human testimony is more likely to be false than the laws of nature to be changed.

The miraculous, therefore, in Christianity, so far from lending additional support to the doctrine of immortality, is unable to bear its own weight. Those, therefore, who hold the doctrine of immortality to be naturally improbable, consider the attempt to substantiate that doctrine by miraculous evidence as an endeavor to corroborate one improbability by another. They consider the doctrines of the New Testament to be less likely to be true from

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the miraculous element there is in it, instead of more so. All writings are rendered suspicious and unreliable by containing any recognition of the miraculous.

This objection, however confidently made, has hitherto had but little weight with thinking men. It seems idle to affirm what that omnipotent Power, who made and sustains the world, can, or cannot, do. These very unbelievers in revelation, because it contains records of the miraculous, believe the geologist when he tells them that there was a time when the race of man did not exist upon our earth. It is undeniably certain, that the first pair were created by miracle, and not according to any known law. If miracles are impossible, then we must deny that there is any such thing as the human race upon the face of the earth.

Another undertakes to tell us how and when the mistake of incorporating the miraculous with Christianity was committed. The New Testament was not written by the Apostles, or their companions, or by any original witnesses of the ministry of Jesus. The life and history of Jesus subsisted in the form of oral traditions. Jesus had been a remarkable man, and a remarkable teacher. A religious sect sprung up under his name, and was held together by his doctrines. Veneration for his character, and a love of the marvellous, interspersed the narrative of his birth, his life, his death and burial, with various miracles and prodigies, which were thought to correspond with his real greatness and his historical importance.

Another admits that the documents which compose the New Testament bear indisputable internal

evidence of being the production of the Apostolic age. Some of them were written by the Apostles themselves, the companions and contemporaries of Jesus. Yet, connected with the reports of the sublime discourses of Jesus, there are exhibitions of so much ignorance, credulity, and superstition, that it is rendered more probable that they were mistaken or carried away by their enthusiasm, than that the miracles they reported should have really taken place. Miracles have been attested by eyewitnesses in all ages of the world, and still wise and conscientious men do not hesitate to reject such accounts as intrinsically improbable.

Others carry the mistake still higher, and suppose it to have originated with Jesus himself. A distinguished statesman of our own country has said of him: "Elevated by the enthusiasm of a warm and pure heart, conscious of the high strains of an eloquence which had not been taught him, he might easily mistake the coruscations of his own fine genius for inspiration of a higher order. This belief, therefore, carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates, that himself was under the care and admonitions of a guardian Dæmon."

But this imputation, under the color of doing honor to Christ and saving his personal character, strikes a fatal blow to all reliance on his teachings. In that case, what he has taught us on the subject of immortality, as a certainty positively known to himself, falls from that level to that of his individual opinion, the suffrage of his judgment upon a disputed matter of great uncertainty. And the weight of his opinion upon this subject, instead of being greater

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