and we do not believe it can be shown that, in the fourteen centuries when the world was dependent on the pen of the copyist for the transmission of the Divine Word, there was ever a bona fide attempt of any importance to tamper with the original text. No classical work has stood the stress of modern criticism in the way that the New Testament has done. The works of Plato and Aristotle have been handled so freely by modern critics that the original text recedes into a nebulous background. Even Shakespeare is a battleground for textual purists, and it is surprising how many various readings are supported by good authority, and yet Shakespeare wrote when printing had given an author incomparable advantages over the writers of the New Testament. We venture to predict that eighteen hundred years after Shakespeare wrote, the true text of his plays will be involved in immensely greater obscurity than are the writings of the New Testament at the present day.

The argument against the authority of the New Testament, drawn from its textual variations, falls to the ground when thoroughly sifted; indeed a

strong argument may be made out in favour of a special Providence from the wonderful success that has attended the preservation of the Divine records.

We have not touched here upon the question of the textual purity of the Old Testament; it requires an extent of learning which the writer does not possess, nor has it an essential bearing upon the general scope of our argument. We will only remark, that the Hebrew race paid extraordinary attention to the preservation of their sacred books; their scribes counted not merely the words, but the letters in the Old Testament, and the copies were revised with the most vigilant care, so that there is every reason to believe that our Hebrew version of the Old Testament is identical with what the Jews possessed many hundreds of years before Christ.

The general conclusion to which we are led from these observations is as follows :- -A written and authoritative record of God's revelation was necessary to perpetuate the Christian religion. That record has been provided in the Bible. It comes down to us with the sanction of the univer

sal Church; it is attested by the most abundant evidence, as having from the earliest times spoken with the authority of the word of God, and there is no proof that it has been tampered with to any appreciable extent, but ample evidence that we have the ipsissima verba of the writers as closely as is compatible with the fact, that human agency has transmitted them through countless generations, and that God has not chosen to work a special miracle on their behalf.

CHAPTER V.

ALLEGED INEXACTNESS OF THE BIBLE-ITS TEACH

ING PICTORIAL RATHER THAN SCIENTIFIC.

HUS much for the outward and historical

Tside of our

side of our argument, and now we shall turn to the inward, or subjective side, and examine some of the objections brought against the New Testament, on the ground of its contents.

We shall first deal with that well-worn objection, drawn from the many sects into which Christians are divided, and the common appeal they make to the word of God in support of their views. Arians and Socinians, Calvinists and Arminians, all alike, find or profess to find in Scripture the basis of their theology, and yet it cannot be denied that the difference between their systems is very important. It is a specious objection that a Book which can be interpreted in so many different ways is unworthy of the

rank it holds. It is alleged that it cannot be the workmanship of God if it speaks with so uncertain a voice. Surely, the Deity, if He spoke at all, would do so in accents so clear, that man's versatile intellect would be shut up to the single function of receiving the divine mandate. We believe there is no excuse which the unbeliever so often furnishes to his own conscience as this of the supposed uncertainty of what the Bible teaches. Now we will distinguish in limine between two groups of controversies that have been waged since the time of Christ about the Christian religion. One of them is represented by the Gnostics and other sects of ancient times, who assigned the Bible a secondary place, and treated reason and philosophy as of conjoint authority. The rationalistic schools of to-day are their lineal successors, and the Bible is to them a book of only limited authority. We hold that all the sects which have sprung from this impure source lie outside the pale of honest difference of Christian opinion. There is no limit to the fantastic shapes into which they throw Christian doctrine, and the Bible has no