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pering with the sacred work of those men whom they revered and looked up to as the inspired Apostles of Christ, if, as Renan says,' they were all at this time, as they had been taught, looking for the immediate end of the world, what possible motive could they have for all this painstaking in order to their each possessing a copy of the Gospel perfected according to his own mind? Feeling the force of this position, singularly enough by some process of mental infatuation, he even confounds himself on this very page by saying, "As men still believed that the world was nearly at an end, they cared little to compose books for the future; it was sufficient to preserve merely in their hearts a lively image of Him whom they hoped soon to see again in the clouds." Absurd, in the first instance, to suppose that the Gospels would have been written at all, had such been the Apostles' belief, the absurdity is but increased and rendered the more conspicuous in supposing that the people, who, according to Renan's theory of interpretation, were daily expecting the appearance of their Lord in the clouds, and the end of the world, should, nevertheless, put themselves to the trouble of "collating, copying, variously combining, elaborating, and completing" those Gospels. But leaving such inconceivable inconsistency out of the question, it being nowhere else to be found than in the brain of M. Renan -as to the assumption, which he, in another place, softens down to "It appears most likely that we have not the entirely original compilations of either Matthew or of Mark; but that our first two Gospels are versions in which the attempt is made to fill up the gaps of the one text by the other," the books as they have come down to us speak for themselves. There is no indication in them of their having been thus assimilated. They are not only not identical, but in

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many respects are quite distinct, one omitting what the other supplies, and vice versa, both as to the narrative of facts, and the record of Christ's discourses: variations they contain that are utterly irreconcilable with the assumption that a general assimilation of the two has been unscrupulously attempted.

Allow me to further observe, that the Church, which was the Divinely appointed repository of God's Word, cannot be supposed to have allowed the unhallowed and unscrupulous tampering with it, of which Renan speaks. Bishops and elders were appointed to preside over the Churches and overlook such things from the time that the Gospels and the other Scriptures were first written; and it is well-known that the orthodox Churches, from the time of the Apostles and onwards, zealously and "earnestly contended for the faith once delivered to the saints." As, therefore, they were thus by Divine and Apostolic appointment entrusted with the charge of the Holy Books, so they are to be regarded as not only the lawful defenders of the faith, but the safeguards of the purity and integrity of the sacred text.

That the Churches and followers of Christ had become very numerous and widely spread, even in Apostolic times, may be gathered not only from Scripture history itself, but from the writings of heathen as well as Christian authors. Tacitus, a Roman historian, who was born about A.D. 56, in giving an account of the persecution of the Christians under Nero, about thirty years after the Crucifixion, styles them "a set of people called Christians," and says that "The founder of that name was Christ, who suffered death in the reign of Tiberius, under his procurator, Pontius Pilate." He further says, after referring to the cruel punishments inflicted upon the Christians by the emperor : "This

hurtful superstition thus checked for a time, broke out again and spread not only over Judea, where the evil originated, but through Rome also, to which everything bad finds its way, and in which it is practised."1

Suetonius, another Roman historian, contemporary with Tacitus, speaks of their persecution in a similar strain, calling it a "punishment," and says that "the Christians were a set of men of a new and evil superstition."a

Pliny the Younger, also, who was Proconsul of Pontus. and Bithynia, a writer of the first century, and who died A.D. 115, in an official letter to the Emperor Trajan, writes of the Christians, that they were "many of every age, and of both sexes. Nor has the contagion prevailed among cities only, but among villages and country districts. . . . I take the liberty," he says to the Emperor, "to give you an account of every difficulty that arises to me : I have never been present at the examinations of the Christians; for which reason I know not what questions have been put to them, nor in what manner they have been punished. My behaviour towards those who have been accused to me, has been this I have interrogated them, in order to know whether they were really Christians. When they have confessed it, I have repeated the same question two or three times, threatening them with death if they did not renounce this religion. Those who have persisted in their confession, have been by my order led to punishment. . . These persons declare that their whole crime, if they are guilty, consists in this that on certain days they assemble before sunrise to sing alternately the praises of Christ, as of God; and to oblige themselves, by the performance of their religious rites, not to be guilty of theft or adultery, to observe inviolably their word, and to be true to their trust. This disposi2 Suetonius, Nero, c. 16.

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1 Tacitus Ann. xv. 44.

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tion has obliged me to endeavour to inform myself still further of this matter, by putting to the torture two of their women servants, whom they call deaconesses; but I could learn nothing more from them than that the superstition of these people is as ridiculous as their attachment to it is astonishing." Their worshipping Jesus Christ as God, we may here remark, was contrary to one of the most ancient laws of the Roman Empire, which expressly forbade the acknowledging of any god, which had not been approved of by the Senate. But, "notwithstanding the violent opposition made to the establishment of the Christian religion, it gained ground daily, and very soon made surprising progress in the Roman Empire. In the third century, there were Christians in the senate, in the camp, in the palace; in short, everywhere but in the temples and the theatres; they filled the towns, the country, and the islands. Men and women of all ages and conditions, and even those of the first dignities, embraced the faith; insomuch that the pagans complained that the revenues of their temples were ruined. They were in such great numbers in the empire, that (as Tertullian expresses it) were they to have retired into another country, they would have left the Romans only a frightful solitude."

Just as the Jews, wherever dispersed, carried with them. copies of the Law and the Prophets, so did the early Christians carry with them copies-authorised copies, doubtless made with scrupulous exactness, and hence regarded as equally valuable with the original-of the Gospels, and of the other books of Scripture; and from these, extensive and exceedingly numerous quotations were made during the first three centuries, by Christian and heathen writers in the course of their religious controversies.

Numerous commentaries on the New Testament Scrip

1 See "Christianity and Positivism," by Dr. McCosh.

tures, harmonies of their contents, and catalogues of them, similar to those found in modern authors, were also early written—some as early as the second and third centuriesby Theophilus of Antioch, Tatian, Origen, and many others. For the information of the general reader, we may further remark, that many hundred ancient manuscript copies of the New Testament Scriptures have been collected and preserved in the British Museum, the Borgian Museum, the Royal Library, Paris; the University Library, Sweden; the Dresden, Ingolstad, Leyden, Bodleian, and in other celebrated libraries; that numbers of these manuscripts are still to be found in those places; and others, known to have existed till within a late period, served, ere they disappeared, as exemplars from which others were taken; that while some of them, in Greek, were written about A.D. 400, others, as the Syriac and Latin, bear a much earlier date, being written in the early part of the second century; and that these manuscript copies, which were originally taken from the writings of the Apostles, correspond, in all points of fact and doctrine, with our own Scriptures. 1

By a continued miracle there is no doubt that even the autograph writings of the Apostles might have been preserved; but, however desirable this might have been, such is human nature, that had they been thus preserved, they would probably have been idolised and made a bad and superstitious use of, as it is well-known that relics less sacred. have been. At all events, it is certain that for some good and wise reason, God suffered them to disappear, probably through the operation of the natural law that the frequent use of a thing soon destroys it. That the original writings of the Apostles were much used by the Churches among whom 1 See "American Religious Encyclopedia," and Dr. Plumer on

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