dents of his life and citing the language of coincident speakers, they employ his proper name. In no one instance do they represent his contemporaries as addressing him by the divine title Christ, except that of his persecutors, who "smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, who is it that smote thee?"

No other theory but the one here suggested will sufficiently account for the fact that Jesus is much oftener called Christ by Paul and all the later writers of the New Testament, than by his four special biographers. In the fourth book of his memoirs, the word Jesus occurs 233 times, and the word Christ, with various applications, only 21 times. I collate this verbal criticism with another on Paul, who in his first letter to the Corinthians designates Jesus by the appellation Christ 46 times, and calls him by his proper name only twice. The compilers of our evangelic history have represented Matthew and John as putting this divine title for the cognomen of Jesus twice each, and Mark once. In Luke Jesus Christ seems never to have been heard of, for this writer does not so name the hero of his narrative at all. In

this respect there is a striking contrast between the diction of the evangelists and that of Paul, who, though he never saw Jesus in the flesh, and knew nothing of his character and mission except by inference, or more correctly presumption, as will appear in the process of our argument, repeats the above misnomer in all his epistles about 180 times.

All this must look very strange and unaccountable to one who still fancies that Christ was the surname of Jesus from his infancy. The only explicative truth is, that hardly anybody thought that Jesus was the Christ, till after his pure and unexampled life had terminated in a remarkable and cruel death. Then, in the yearning bosoms of his life-associates, reverence ripened into faith. Then began the labor of the apostles so-called, as announced in the sermon of Peter at the Pentecost: "Let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ." Indeed, to establish this assumption, now beginning to be conceived and cherished by the most intimate disciples of Jesus, but never before preached by anybody, is truthfully declared by one of the evangelists

to be the very end for which they wrote. "And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book," declares John in the close of his narrative; but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." Thus conclusive is the evidence that Christ was not written nor spoken as the surname of Jesus till some time after his departure from the sphere of sensuous life.

Here then is a fact which stands directly opposed to the doctrine of a supernatural Savior of the World. Had Jesus been the Christ, he must have known and named himself accordingly. Why should his parents be ignorant of the fact?

Why should the

angel of his annunciation name him otherwise or less than what he was? These questions demand the same answers as the following. Why did his disciples name him Christ after his spiritual ascension? Simply because they believed that he was the Christ. Why then did they not so name him during his sublunary life? Verily, because while he was with them they were less mistaken as to his manhood, and did not suppose that he was anybody but JESUS.

SECTION II.

Jesus himself did not profess to be Christ in the sense contended for by his worshipers.

In all the memoirs of Jesus it does not appear that he took any pains to make himself known as the Christ, either in the Jewish or Gentile acceptation. He seems, indeed, to have lived very obscurely till he was about thirty years old, having made no reputation out of Nazareth, except that occasioned by a visit to Jerusalem in his youth, when his singular manners and precocious understanding are said to have stirred a little the humor of the doctors; and even at home being thought very little of, according to his own saying that "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house," as well as the record of John that "his brethren did not believe in him." From his birth to within three or four years of his death, everybody, including his own kindred, seems to have forgotten the dream of Joseph, the angel visits to Mary and the shepherds, and the whole wonder-tale of Holy Ghost paternity and the prognostic star which turned the heads of all the eastern

any

Magi. There is no mention of these prodigies in of the reported conversations of Jesus with his various associates through life, and no intimation that he was ever informed of them. How marvelously stupid the people of those times must have been, to be "musing of John, whether he were the Christ or not," as Luke tells us, for thirty years after the Messiahship of Jesus had been thus publicly and miraculously signified! What profound blockheads too must have been nearly all his disciples, never to be reminded of what he was to be by what he wrought! How strange that they should remember so well the old prophecies about an impersonal Christ, and yet forget entirely the predictions of their own day, confirmed by angel hosts and special motions of a very particular star, that all was to be fulfilled in the notable personage before their eyes! For me it is easier to believe that such wonders never happened, than that everybody should have so conspired to keep silence about them till about fifty years after their occurrence. much is certain, that the doctrine which these tales were made to sustain did not originate with Jesus,

This