The truth of his religion has primarily to be established on other and surer principles than the mere isolated testimony of man. If men had the love of God in them, they would believe in him who cometh from God. If they had the love of truth, they would believe the truth. If they sought for the honour that cometh from God only, his word would have been its own witness, and they would have believed him who came in his Father's name. Without here claiming faith in the testimony borne by Scripture concerning the heart of manthough the words are those of a prophet who described the issue of national iniquities, as he laid bare the source of all sin in the human breast-it may not be altogether irrational to express a doubt whether the history of our race gives strong demonstration that the love of holiness has there its seat, and that moral and spiritual truth, without any repelling power from within, finds always in the heart of man an open entrance and ready reception. Such, at least, was not the testimony of Jesus, who, it is said, knew what was in man. And he proffered not his faith to mortals, as Mohammed did, on the simple allegation that it was from God, or with the command to believe, without any reason assigned, without any evidence given. Nor does he appeal to the testimony of man, exclusive of the witness of God. His claim was that of being the Messiah, of whom the Scriptures testified; of whom the Father had borne witness by the mouth of his prophets, and who spake not of themselves, but whose voice proclaimed, as the truth of their word hath proved, thus saith the Lord. It was to establish the truth that he was the predicted Messiah that all his miracles were wrought. And his allegation was not that he, but that Moses, in whom they trusted, accused the unbelieving Jews unto the Father; that faith in Moses was identified with faith in him; that to believe in the prophets was to believe in him; and that it was want of faith in the writings of Moses which had a disqualifying efficacy in their disbelief of his words. And such and so close is the alleged connexion between belief in Jesus and belief in the prophets, that it is recorded that he said unto two of his disciples as they communed and reasoned after his resurrection, “O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself."* The credibility of the Christian faith avowedly rested from the first on the testimony of the prophets, conjoined with the evidence of the facts. We read in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that so soon as they were endowed with power from on high, and opened their mouths to preach * Luke xxiv., 25, 27. the gospel, they made their first appeal to a prophecy; and that from hence the theme of their first discourse was the proof from other prophecies that that same Jesus who had been crucified, being delivered by the determinate wisdom and foreknowledge of God, as revealed in the scriptures, was both Lord and Christ, or the predicted Messiah.* And, as the record in the next chapter bears, no sooner was their first miracle wrought than they declared, "The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath magnified his Son Jesus; and those things which God before had showed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled."+ And it is the recorded declaration of Paul, that he witnessed "both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come."‡ In entering, then, on a more direct inquiry into the truth of the Christian faith, we appeal not alone to the testimony of man, nor look on that as the primary warranty of our creed. We ask not, as the charter of a heavenly hope, for the recorded testimony of men who lived eighteen centuries ago, in order to show from thence that a Divine Being, unheard of before, visited the earth in human form, and taught a new doctrine, of the nature and of the truth of which their record is the only voucher; and wrought miracles in its confirmation, of which their word is the only witness. If the doctrine of such imagined teachers were farther supposed to be holy, and if it be true that man is a sinner, assuredly their report would not be believed. But it is not thus that the credentials of Christianity are presented to the world, without corroborative proof, worthy alike of all acceptation on the part of man, and of a revelation from Heaven. For there is a record, substantiated in every age by a higher and more infallible testimony than that of man, which bears on its frontispiece not only the indelible, but the bright and ever-brightening, stamp of inspiration. And with that in his hand, and open to the view of all men, and in a language that none can misunderstand, every advocate of the Christian faith may, in the words of a Jew of old unto a Gentile, ask of any man who has ears to hear or eyes to see, Believest thou the Prophets? Their line, it may well be said, hath gone throughout all the earth, and their word to the world's end. The world hath felt its power, and every past convulsion attests its truth, as every coming change must finally give new manifestations of its unchangeableness. And the proof of the inspiration of the prophets being thus visibly set before all men, the same question comes home as closely to all as to Ibid. xxvi., 22. * Acts ii., 17, 23-36. + Ibid. iii., 12-18. the Jews on the first promulgation of the Christian faith, Believest thou the Prophets? Let this question be answered-as the enemies of the gospel have taught all to answer it—and nothing more is needed to prove that the witnesses of Jesus are entitled to a hearing in the court of reason. Their testimony, then, bears a new and a different character from what any testimony of man could otherwise have borne. And in contending for the truth of the gospel, the controversy is then the same with all men in every nation under heaven, whether Jesus be the Christ of whom the prophets testified. That is the doctrine of the New Testament to which the witnesses of Jesus bear their testimony. It is not of an unknown or unexpected Messiah that they speak, but professedly of Him of whom all the prophets before them since the world began had testified. This is the true light in which their testimony has to be viewed, the immoveable position which it maintains. If the wisest of the heathens could have expressed a hope that a Divine Being would visit the earth to enlighten the spiritual darkness of man, which they were wise enough to discern and to feel, was not the sure word of prophecy, confirmed as such, competent to show that such a Saviour would appear? And if it did bear witness of Jesus and his gospel, is there not then the strongest presumptive proof, antecedent to human testimony, that such a Saviour would appear, and that such a religion would be promulgated in the world? And even on the supposed truth of the averment of the first of those scoffers in these latter times-who have urged the argument against miracles, the fallacy of which may thus be detected, and the use of which may thus be appropriated and applied that "it is experience only which gives authority to human testimony," does not the experience of the truth of prophecy, than which nothing could be more evidently miraculous, give authority to human testimony, if otherwise complete and unimpeachable, when it relates those things which prophets had revealed? However incredible it might otherwise have been deemed, yet when it goes but to show how the testimony of God concerning Jesus was fulfilled, it becomes of all things the most credible, and, in the words of our adversary, "no room is left for any contrary supposition," established as the truth of prophecy is by a uniform and unalterable experience." 66 After affirming that all prophecies are real miracles, Hume, upon the whole, concludes that "the Christian religion even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without a miracle. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.' It is not a miracle that those scoffers in the last days do not "believe the Christian religion," whom " reason is insufficient to convince of its veracity!" If not thus irrationally hardened against conviction, men would be moved to assent to it by every evidence of its truth. But that man surely “subverts the principles of his understanding" who argues against facts, of which he is willingly ignorant. It is not without a reason of our faith that a hundred and forty propheciesall of which, literally true even at this day, are real miracles— form the basis of a demonstration of its veracity. All of these bear (as previously shown in the Evidence of Prophecy†) against the argument of Hume. But one prophecy alone from the New Testament is not "insufficient" to transform the subtlest arguer against the Christian miracles, and each sage in his train-by his own predicted character and argument, even at this day or in the last days-into "a continued miracle in his own person," which may be sufficient to subvert all the fallacies of a vain imagination, and give every wise man a determination to say, My soul, enter not thou into their counsel; rush not with a reed against the thick bosses of the buckler of the Almighty; for although there may, as thus seen, be strong delusion to disbelieve the Christian religion and to believe a lie, there is demonstration to believe, as invariably accordant with experience, in that word which never faileth, and which is indeed of everlasting use. CHAPTER III. ON THE ANTIQUITY AND AUTHENTICITY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES. ON comparing a portion of a single chapter of the Book of Daniel with the various histories of the successive kings of Syria and Egypt, Porphyry, an ancient enemy of the gospel, could not otherwise escape from the conclusion that the record was inspired, than by alleging that it must have been written subsequently to the events. Unaccustomed to the precision of Scriptural predictions, and versant only in the ambiguous responses of the Pythian oracle, he adduced the *Conclusion of Hume's Essay on Miracles. extreme definiteness and accuracy of the description as a substantial proof, in his estimation, that it could only have been drawn from the actual historical facts which it so tersely concentrated and so truly defined. No such alternative is now left for the skeptic who would deny the inspiration of the prophets of Israel. For in the gradual development of prophetic truth, which shows how all ages are at once open to the view of the Eternal, even as his eyes behold all nations, there stands in mere human view so long an interval, embracing so many generations of our race, from the time that the visions were seen by the prophets till each separate word has had its perfect work, or from the beginning, when it was declared, to the end as now seen by the naked eye, that every such cavil is at last silenced; and it is alike beyond all question, that no historian ever wrote with more accuracy than the prophets, and that their writings long preceded those events, which, in these latter times, proclaim their inspiration to the world. In entering, then, on the subject of the antiquity and authenticity of the books of the Old Testament, we have not to take them up and to try their genuineness, as if they were records newly discovered among ruins of which we had no antecedent knowledge, and on which no other writing was legible than that which the hand of man could have formed. But, whatever record as to other things they may bear, this at least is certain, that prophecy is ingrained throughout the whole, and that they are the charters which God has chosen as testimonials to all men of his omniscience. If the word of those men, who spoke with undeviating truth of things infinitely surpassing all human foresight, should yet be found in fault, testifying of falsehoods while they spake of things plainly cognizable by their senses; and if the truth of God should thus be found to be commingled in the same page with the lies of men, it may of a verity be said that the human understanding never solved such a problem nor disentangled itself from such a dilemma as to account for the seeming sanction that Heaven itself would thus have given to a record founded on fable and tarnished with lies. It is scarcely the sagest of creeds, that they who are found faithful in having written in a book what man of himself could have never known, thereby lose the credibility attached to common witnesses, in testifying that which they saw or which they did or that their testimony should sink below that of all other men, and their record below that of ordinary and fallible historians, in proportion as God has exalted them as his witnesses, and marked them out, from among all that had been born of woman, as the men who spake by inspiration of his Spirit. Were such monstrous absurdities to be urged with all the semblance of profound reasoning and all the |