lives, so truthlike in all their statements, so utterly unlike the visionary in their entire cast of character-these men, so matter of fact in their mental constitution that they were always misunderstanding their Master when He spoke in parables, and needed to question Him whenever He used figurative language-these men so slow to learn spiritual truths, so carnal in their first conceptions of Christ's Kingdom, we are to conceive of, as with one consent dreaming the wildest dream that ever entered the mind of man-a dream of an empty tomb, of a vision of angels, of an apparition of their Master during forty days, of His dialogue with Thomas, of that unbelieving disciple thrusting his hands into the prints of the nails, and lastly of their Master's ascension to heaven! These simple and guileless men, most of them rustics from Galilee, are somehow all to imagine they saw these things, and all to relate them with unvarying uniformity during their lifetime, and to teach them with such evident sincerity that the Church of Christ from that day to this has never doubted them! We are further to suppose that the Apostle Paul was the victim of sheer hallucination when

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he saw the heavenly vision, that he was changed from being the bitter persecutor of the Christians to their greatest champion, all through a piece of phantasmagoria, that, in fact, his whole mind and character were changed as by the spell of an enchanter! So removed is the process from all that we know of human life and conduct, that we find ourselves involuntarily thinking of Aladdin's lamp or the wand of Circe; for surely no poet of romance ever dreamed of sorcery more unearthly than those men of pure reason who transform Saul the bigoted Pharisee into Paul the Apostle of the Gentiles by a stroke of the magician's wand! Surely, to these modern ideologists nothing is impossible! That Pio

Nono should dream a dream some night and the next day awake a follower of John Wesley, with a complete, well-balanced Protestant creed, would appear nothing impossible !-that he should go about the world denouncing his former life as wicked and his former religion as false-that he should submit to intense privations in defence of his new creed, and finally lay down his life for it would all prove nothing as to the soundness

of his convictions, nor involve the necessity of believing for a moment that he gave a true account of the method of his conversion! This marvellous phenomenon could all be explained by supposing a mental hallucination! Truly, in their eyes the region of spiritual ideas is a region of enchantment!-it lies far above and beyond all rules of evidence, all rational and moral considerations! They have no difficulty in conceiving that the acute and logical mind of Paul should have performed a somersault in a single hour, abjured the faith of his prime and taught a system the exact contrary of it for the remaining thirty years of his life; that this system should have been reasoned out with such convincing power as to mould Christian theology for all time, and enforced with such self-sacrifice as none but the Master Himself ever surpassed; and yet the basis of this sublime life, of this marvellous edifice of Christian doctrine, was the fantastic dream that one day at noon the Lord Jesus spoke to him from heaven!

We envy not those whose spiritual diagnosis is so grotesque; we envy not those moral perceptions which can praise the great Apostle, and

convict him in the same breath of being a lunatic. We have difficulty in conceiving on what foundation they would plant morality at all, when they hold that the best religion may be taught on a basis of puerile fiction! In what respect is St. Paul to be placed above Joe Smith or Joanna Southcote, not to speak of Mahomet, if his story of the heavenly vision is nonsense, and all his teaching about the resurrection a fable? They will say that his morality is purer; but even that may be questioned, for, on their theory, he taught men to cast away their earthly goods, to face the disruption of family, to risk life itself—all for belief in a myth. As Demetrius the silversmith truly said, he turned the world upside down; and, as he himself said more truly still, "If Christ be not raised ye are yet in your sins and we are, of all men, most miserable." He did indeed fill the world with confusion, and brought nothing but privation and earthly loss to the followers of the new religion, and it would be a strange sort of morality if it were to be held that all this could rightfully be accomplished by preaching the illusion of a fevered brain!

Nothing is more remarkable with this School of Scepticism than their Proteus-like habit of changing their front; no sooner are they dislodged from one position than they take up another, and when you think you have caught them on one or other horn of a dilemma-alas ! vain thought, they escape under a new disguise.

There are some who hold that the Apostles neither believed nor taught the resurrection at all, but simply repeated the moral teachings of Christ; and that the Gospel narratives are superstitious legends.

We feel, in contemplating this theory, as if history were dissolving into cloudland, as if the solid earth were leaving our feet, and all things melting into primeval chaos; we feel as though we were confronted by the assertion that Alexander never conquered Persia, or fought with Darius,-that his very existence was doubtful; that Curtius and Arrian, Plutarch and Diodorus invented the story of his career, as Homer may have imagined the adventures of Ulysses, or Tennyson the "Idylls of the King"! But we dare not dismiss this last conceit with mere irony; we must probe it to the bottom and unmask its absurdity.