Two out of the four Gospels are professedly written by apostles, viz., Matthew and John; but as the authorship of the last is impugned by some modern sceptics, we will, for our present purpose, not insist upon it. The first Gospel has always been allowed to be the work of the apostle whose name it bears. But even that point we are willing to forego, for the purpose of this argument, and we will meet our opponents on their own ground, that the writers of the four Gospels are unknown. Their theory is, that those accounts are a mixture of truth and fable, and that all the miracles, and especially the resurrection, are creations of an age subsequent to the Apostolic. But the difficulty at once arises, how can the Gospels, and especially the first three, be the product of a late age, when we find them largely quoted by the earliest Church fathers-by men who flourished within a century to a century and a-half of the death of Christ? They were quoted as holy Scripture by men like JustinMartyr and Irenæus, who take it for granted in their writings that they were the recognised code of the Christian Church. It is self-evident that the three first Gospels at least belonged to a very early age.

They must have been written, if not in the lifetime of the Apostles, at the very latest in the lifetime of those who succeeded the Apostles. This is a fact which it is impossible for men to deny who know anything of historical criticism. We can now measure the credibility of this theory, which imputes to the writers of those Gospels the fabrication of the story of the Resurrection, a story which, according to them, the Apostles never taught at all. We are to suppose that the whole Christian Church scattered round the shores of the Mediterranean, and formed by the personal teaching of the Apostles, and especially of St. Paul, should be unable to detect in the following generation so gross an imposition as this—that they should receive narratives as sacred, teach them as the Word of God, and make them the rule of the universal Church, which narratives were totally different from the oral teaching of the Apostles some thirty or forty before. Is it not preposterous to suppose that the teaching of the Apostles should be so entirely lost in their lifetime, that a fabulous version of it should gain ascendancy all over the Christian Church, and that the true

account should be so wholly lost that not a trace has come down to us? That is the consequence we must face if we are to suppose that the Apostles never taught the Resurrection of Christ nor the other miracles, and that these were invented by the mendacious writers of the four Gospels. But this is only one side of the case. The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul all testify to the truth of the Gospel narratives; and the genuineness of most of them has never been seriously called in question. Indeed many of the Epistles of Paul can be proved to be his by a chain of evidence as clear as the Æneid can be traced to Virgil or the Commentaries of the Conquest of Gaul to Julius Cæsar. It is perfectly clear from them, even if the four Gospels be put out of court, that the resurrection was taught by the Apostles, and was, indeed, the corner-stone of their edifice. We can hardly bring ourselves to suppose that any man of intelligence and moral sense can really believe that the companions and Apostles of Christ did not teach the doctrine of the Resurrection; and we have only noticed this theory because it has been hastily put forward to shelter men from believing

anything definite regarding the facts of the Christian religion.

It is, indeed, as certain as anything in the past can be, that the Apostles taught the Resurrection of our Saviour as a fact, which they were cognisant of by their bodily senses, and as sure of as they were of their own existence; and not only did the twelve witness this fact, but St. Paul affirms that five hundred brethren beheld the risen Lord, most of whom were still living at the time he wrote. Building upon this undoubted foundation, we hold that he who denies the Resurrection of our Lord denies a historical fact, resting upon indubitable evidence; nay, he does violence to his own moral nature, for he forces his mind into an unnatural posture, before he can extort from his understanding a verdict so opposed to the laws of evidence. We maintain that an unbeliever who has so warped his mind as to deny the Resurrection, after studying the subject in all its bearings, must have arrived at that point where the confines of truth and falsehood are lost, and the power of discerning moral evidence is fatally impaired.

CHAPTER III.

THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST IN KEEPING WITH HIS

CHARACTER AND CLAIMS.

E now pass from the Resurrection of Christ

WR

to the miracles He is recorded to have wrought, and, supposing that the former is proved, we hold that the latter can readily be shown to follow as a natural sequence. The Resurrection of our Lord at once stamps Him as a being transcendently glorious it does not in itself prove Him to be divine, because He was not the first or only one recorded in the Bible to have risen from the grave, but it puts God's stamp upon the truth of His teaching, and the validity of His claims; for who can suppose for a moment the Most High would have wrought so great a miracle on behalf of one whose teaching was untrue, or even partially true, or who laboured under an illusion as to his person and mission? Would not that be making Almighty