Mohammedanism and Mormonism,-impostures which enlist disciples by promising free license to lust, robbery, and murder, and retain them by the terror of the scymitar and the rifle-ball-which reduce mankind to the most abject servitude, and womankind to the most debasing concubinage which have turned the fairest regions of the earth to a wilderness, and under whose blighting influence commerce, arts, science, industry, comfort, and the human race itself, have withered away, he simply insults our common sense, by ignoring the difference between backgoing vice and ongoing virtue; or acknowledges that he knows as little about Mohammedanism as he does about Christianity. The gospel stands alone in its doctrines, singular in its operation, unequalled in its success.

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2. The next important point for consideration is, that the Christianity preached by Christ and his apostles is a whole, a single system, which we must either take or leave-believe entirely, or entirely reject as an imposture. There is no middle ground for you to occupy. It is all true, or all false. For instance, you cannot take one of Paul's Epistles, and say, "This is true," and take another of the same man's letters, containing the very same religion, and say, This is false." If you accept the very briefest of Paul's letters-that to Philenion-containing only thirteen sentences on private business, you accept eleven distinct assertions of the authority, grace, love, and divinity of our Lord. Nor can you say you will accept Peter's letters and reject Paul's: for you will find the very same facts asserted by the one as by the other; and, moreover, Peter endorses "all the Epistles of our beloved brother Paul," as on the same pedestal of authority with the other Scriptures. You cannot say, "I will accept the letters and reject the history," for the letters have no meaning without the history. They are founded upon it, and assume or allege its facts on every page. Were the Gospels lost, we could collect a good account of the birth, teaching, death, resurrection, ascension, and almighty power of the Lord Christ from Paul's Epistles; and these letters are just as confident in alleging the miraculous part of the history as the Gospels themselves. Neither can you gain any advantage by saying, "I accept the Gospels, but reject the letters," for there is not a doctrine of the New Testament which is not taught in the very first of them, the Gospel by Matthew. Further, the Gospels contain the most solenin authentication of the commissions of the apostles, so that whosoever rejects their teaching, brings upon himself guilt equal to that of rejecting Christ himself. "Lo, I am with you alway"-"He that receiveth you, receiveth me; and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me”—"Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city."

It is, if possible, more absurd to attempt to dissect

the morality of the gospel from its history, and to say, "We are willing to receive the Christian code of morals as a very excellent rule of life, and to regard Jesus as a rare example of almost superhuman virtue; but we must consider the narrative of supernatural events interwoven with it as mythological,”—that is, false. Which is much the same as to say, "We will be very happy to receive your friend if he will only cut his head off." Of what possible use would the Christian code of morals be without the authority of Christ, the lawgiver? If he possessed no divine authority, what right has he to control your inclination or mine? And if he will never return to inquire whether men obey or disobey his law, who will regard it? Do you suppose the world will be turned upside down, and reformed, by a little good advice? Nay, verily, the world has had trial of that vanity long enough. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men."

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Take away the miraculous and supernatural from the gospel history, and there is nothing left for you to accept. There is no natural history nor worldly code of morality in it. It is wholly the history of a supernatural person, and every precept of his morality comes with a divine sanction. Further, you know nothing of either his life or his morality but from the gospel history, and if the record of the miracles which occupy three-fourths of the Gospels be false, what reason have you to give any credit to the remainder? For, as the German commentator, De Wette, well says, "The only means of acquaintance with a history is the narrative we possess concerning it, and beyond that narrative the interpreter cannot go. In these Bible records, the narrative reports to us only a supernatural course of events, which we must either receive or reject. If we reject the narrative, we know nothing at all about the event, and we are not justified in allowing ourselves to invent a natural course of events of which the narrative is totally silent." So, you see, you cannot make a Christ to suit your taste, but must just take the Christ of the gospel, or reject him.

If you reject the testimony of Christ and his apostles as false, and say you cannot believe them in matters of fact, how can you respect their morality? Of all the absurdities of modern infidelity, the respectful language generally used by its advocates in speaking of Christ and his apostles, is the most inconsistent. He claimed to be a divine person, and professed to work miracles. The infidel says he was not a divine person, and wrought no miracles. The consequence is unavoidable-such a pretender is a blasphemous impostor. And yet they speak of him as a "nrodel man," an "exemplar of every virtue." What! an impostor a model man! A blasphemer and liar an exemplar of every virtue! Is that the infidel's notion of virtue? Why, the devils were more consistent in their commendations of his character, "We know thee who thou art, THE HOLY ONE OF GOD."

Let our modern enemies of Christ learn consistency from their ancient allies. We have also learned from our Master to refuse all hypocritical, half-way professions of respect for his character and teachings from those whose business is to prove him a deceiver, and whose object in speaking respectfully of such a one can only be to gain a larger audience, and a readier entrance for their blasphemy among his professed disciples. From every man who professes respect for Christ's character, and for the morality which he and his apostles taught, we demand a straightforward answer to the questions: When he declared himself the Son of God, the Judge of the living and the dead, did he tell the truth, or did he lie? When he promised to attest his divine commission by rising from the dead on the third day, had he any such power, or did he only mean to play a juggling imposture? Is Jesus the Christ the Son of the living God, or a deceiver? There is no middle ground. He that is not with him is against him.

The case is just the same with regard to the witnesses of his miracles, death, and resurrection. They either give a true relation of these things, or they have manufactured a series of falsehoods. How can we believe anything from persons so habituated to lying as the narrators of the mighty works of Jesus must be, if those mighty works were never performed? How can we accept their code of morals, if we refuse to believe them when they speak of matters of fact? Is it possible to respect men as moral teachers, whom we have convicted of forging stories of miracles that never occurred, and confederating together to impose a lying superstition on the world? For this is plainly the very point and centre of the question about the truth of the Bible, and I am anxious you should see it clearly. A fair statement of this question is half the argument. The question then is simply this, Was Jesus really the divine Person he claimed to be, or was he a blasphemous impostor? When the apostles unitedly and solemnly testified that they had seen him after he was risen from the dead, that they ate and drank with him, that their hands had handled his body, that they conversed with him for forty days, and saw him go up to heaven, did they tell the truth, or were they a confederated band of liars? There is no reason for any other supposition. They could not possibly be deceived themselves in the matters they relate. They knew perfectly whether they were true or not. We are not talking about matters of dogma, about which there might be room for difference of opinion, but about matters of fact-about what men say they saw, and heard, and felt-about which no man of common sense could possibly be mistaken. "That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life; that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you." Such is their language. We must either take it as truth, or reject it as falsehood. It is utter nonsense to talk of the intense subjectivity of the Jewish mind, and the belief of the apostles, that

the Messiah would do wonders when he came, and the powerful impressions produced by the teaching of Jesus on their minds. We are not talking about impressions on their minds, but about impressions produced on their eyes, and ears, and hands. Did these men tell the truth when they told the world that they did eat and drink with Jesus after he rose from the dead, or did they lie? That is the question.

3. It is a hard matter to lie well. A liar has need of a good memory, else he will contradict himself before he writes far. And he needs to be very well posted up in the matters of names, dates, places, manners, and customs, else he will contradict some well-known facts, and so expose his forgery to the world. Therefore writers of forgeries avoid all such things as much as possible; and as surely as they venture on specifications of that sort, they are detected. A man who is conscious of writing a book of falsehoods, does not begin on this wise:"Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness." Here, in one sentence, are twenty historical, geographical, political, and genealogical references, every one of which we can confirm by references to secular historians. The enemies of the Lord have utterly failed in their attempts to disprove one out of the hundreds of such statements in the New Testament. The only instance of any public political event recorded in the gospel, said not to be confirmed by the fragments of secular history we possess, is Lake's account of a census of the Roman Empire, ordered by Augustus Cæsar. Were it so that Luke stood alone in his mention of this, surely his credit as a historian would be as good for this fact as the credit of Tacitus, when he states matters of which Suetonius makes no mention; or of Pliny, when he relates things not recorded by Tacitus. But we can account for the want of corroborative history in this instance, when we know that all the history of Dion Cassius, from the consulships of Antistius and Balbus to those of Messala and Cinna-that is, for five years before and five years after the birth of Christ -is lost; as also Livy's history of the same period. It is certain that some one did record the fact; for Suidas, in his lexicon upon the word apographe, says “that Augustus sent twenty select men into all the provinces of the empire to take a census, both of men and property, and commanded that a just proportion of the latter should be brought into the imperial treasury. And this

was the first census."

To object to the gospel history, that everything contained in it of the doings of Christ and his apostles in Judea is not recorded by the historians of Greece and Italy, is much the same as to say that there are a multitude of facts recorded in D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation in Germany," of which Hume and Macaulay

make no mention in their histories of England. How should they-treating of different countries, and, for the most part, of different periods, and writing civil, and not Church history? Does anybody go to Macaulay to look for the history of the Westminster Assembly? or to Bancroft for an account of the Great Revival in New England? Or is the veracity of Baillie or Edwards suspected, because political history does not concern itself much about religion? It is enough, that not a single statement of the gospel history has ever been disproved. I might give you quotations from the enemies of the Christian faith-from Josephus the Jew, and Celsus and Porphyry, heathen philosophers, and from the Emperor Julian, the apostate, who, having been educated a Christian, became a heathen, and used all his ingenuity to overturn the religion of Christ-expressly admitting the principal miracles recorded in the gospel. But I attach no such importance to the testimony of this class of persons as to suppose that it should be placed, for one moment, on a level with the testimony of the apostles, or that their testimony to the facts of the life and death of Christ needs any confirmation from such witnesses. We have such overwhelming evidence of the sincerity and truth of the witnesses chosen by God to bear testimony to the resurrection of Christ, as we never can have of the credibility of any secular historian whatever.

You will remember that these are the writers whose accounts of the existence, the faith and worship, the numbers and morals of the Christian Church, we have seen so strikingly confirmed by their enemies; and we now inquire, Can we believe the other part of their history to be as true? These are the men who taught the heathen a pure Christian morality, one principal article of which was, "Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds"-"All liars shall have their portion in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone"-and we are to inquire if they themselves lied-lied publicly, lied repeatedly-if the very business of their lives was to propagate falsehood, and if they died with a lie in their right hands. You will remember that we proved conclusively that the belief of the death and resurrection of Jesus did turn immense multitudes of wicked men to a life of virtue; and now we are to inquire if the belief of a lie produced this blessed result; and whether, if so, there be any such thing as truth in the world, or any use in it.

4. Of no other series of events of ancient history do we possess the same number of records by contemporary historians, as of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We have four direct systematic memoirs of him by four of his companions; and we have a collection of letters by four others, in which the events of the memoirs are continually referred to. At the mouth of two or three witnesses, any man's property and life will be disposed of in a court of justice; but here we have the testimony of eight eye-witnesses of the facts they relate, and they refer to five hundred other persons-the greater part of whom were then alive-who had also

seen and heard Christ after his resurrection. These eight persons give us their separate and independent statements of those things they deemed worthy of record in the life and death of Christ, and of the sayings and doings of several of his friends and enemies. Now, every person knows that it is impossible to make two crooked boughs tally, or two false witnesses agree. You never saw two lying reports of any considerable number of transactions agree, unless the one was copied from the other.

It is evident that the Gospels were not copied from each other, for they often relate different events; and when they relate the same occurrence, each man relates those parts of it which he saw himself, and which impressed him most. Yet the utmost ingenuity of infidelity has utterly failed to make them contradict each other in any particular. Here are eight witnesses to the truth of the same story, four of whom in their letters make occasional allusions to the facts of the history as being perfectly well known, and therefore needing only to be alluded to; yet these cursory references fit into the history with every mark of truthfulness. Does the history of Matthew, written at Jerusalem, tell us that Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them? Peter, in his letter, written from Babylon, says, "We were eyewitnesses of his majesty.. ......We were with him in the holy mount" (2 Pet. i. 16, 18). If the history tells how Paul was beaten and cast into prison at Philippi, and his feet made fast in the stocks, and that, nevertheless, he manfully defended his birthright as a Roman citizen, and made the tyrannical magistrates humble themselves and apologize for their illegal conduct, we find Paul himself, in a letter to a neighbouring Church, appealing to their knowledge of the facts, "that after we had suffered before, and were shamefully entreated, as ye know, at Philippi, we were bold in our God to speak unto you the gospel of God with much contention. For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile...... For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloke of covetousness" (1 Thess. ii. 2, 3, 5). Hundreds of such undesigned coincidences may be found in the New Testament, confirming the veracity of the several historians and letterwriters, and giving that impression of the naturalness and truth of the story which can neither be described nor disputed. The reader who desires to prosecute this interesting branch of the evidences of Christianity, will find an ample collection of these coincidences in Paley's "Hore Paulinæ."

This agreement of independent writers is the more remarkable, as the writers were persons of very various degrees of education, of different professions and ranks of life, born in different countries, and writing from various places in Italy, Greece, Palestine, and Assyria, without any communication with each other. Matthew was an officer of customs in Galilee; Mark, a Hebrew citizen of Jerusalem; Luke, a Greek physician of An

Simon Magus, or a schismatical Church at Corinth, or a persecuting high priest and Sanhedrim, with this power of the Holy Ghost. "Tongues," says Paul, “ are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not ;" and this is true of all other miracles. This marks the difference between real miracles and those of pretenders, who have never attempted to establish a new religion by them, or to convert unbelievers hostile to their claims and able to examine them, without immediate exposure. But you never heard of an impostor standing up before the tribunal of his judges and alleging the miraculous cure of a well-known public beggar, lame from his mother's womb, whom they had seen at the church gate every Sabbath for forty years, and bringing the man into court after such a fashion as this, "If we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole; be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole." Such an appeal was unanswerable. "Beholding the man which was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it." Nay, they were compelled to acknowledge "that indeed a notable miracle hath been done by them is manifest to all them that dwell in Jerusalem; and we cannot deny it." (Acts iv.)

The denial of the miracles of the gospel is a modern invention of the enemy. The scribes and priests, emperors and philosophers, of the first centuries, who had the best opportunity of proving their falsehood, were unable to do so. The persecutors and apostates, whose malice against the Church knew no bounds, never dared to utter a charge of deception against the apostles. Why, then, you ask, did they not all become Christians? Because miracles cannot convert any man against his will. Christianity is not merely a belief in miracles, but the love of Christ and a life of holiness. There are many readers of this paper who would not turn from their sins if all the dead in Spring Grove Cemetery should rise to-morrow to warn them. God does not intend to force any man to become a Christian. He just gives evidence enough to try you, whether you will deal honestly and fairly with your own soul and your God; and if you are determined to hate Christ and his holy religion, you shall never want a plausible excuse for unbelief: as it is written, "Unto them which are disobedient, Christ is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence." These ancient enemies of Christ acknowledged the reality of his miracles, but attributed them to magical power, or the help of Satan. The Jews said that he had acquired the power of miracles by learning to pronounce the incommunicable name of God. Modern infidels deny all his miracles save the greatest-the turning of men from their sins. They cannot deny that-they cannot ascribe it to the power of Satan or of magic, for

they do not believe in either-but they follow as nearly in the footsteps of their fathers as possible, when they tell us that multitudes of men, in every age and in every land, have been turned from falsehood to truth by the belief of a lie, and from vice to virtue by the example of an impostor!

6. But the strongest proof of the truth of the facts of the gospel, is the existence, the labours and sufferings, of the apostles themselves. Nobody denies that such men lived, and preached, and were persecuted on account of their preaching that Jesus died and rose again. Now, if this was a falsehood, what motive had they to tell it? It was very displeasing to their rulers who had crucified Him, and who had every inclination to give them the same treatment. To preach another king, one Jesus, to the Romans, was to bring down the power of the empire upon them. Nothing could be more absurd in the eyes of the Grecian philosophers than to speak of the resurrection of the body. Nor could any plan be devised more certain to arouse the fury of the pagan priesthood, than to denounce the craft by which they had their wealth, and to preach that there are no gods which are made by hands. The most degraded wretch who perishes by the hand of the hangman, is not so contemptible in our eyes, as the crucified malefactor was in the eyes of the Roman people; nor could anything more disagreeable to the Jewish nation be invented, than the declaration that the Gentiles should become partakers of the kingdom of God. What then should induce any man in his senses to provoke such an opposition to a new religion, and to make it so contemptible and disagreeable to those whom he sought to convert, if he were manufacturing a lie to gain power and popularity ?

The religion they preached was not adapted to please sensual men. "Our exhortation," says Paul-and every reader of the New Testament knows that he says truth-"Our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor of guile." Infidels admit that they preached a pure morality. But it is a long time since men learned the proverb, "Physician heal thyself." "Thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege ?" It could not, then, be to obtain license for lust that these men preached holiness.

There is only one other conceivable motive which should induce men to confederate together for the propagation of falsehood-the design of making money by it. But their new religion made no provision for any such thing. One of their first acts was to desire the Church to elect deacons who might manage its money matters, and allow them to give themselves wholly to prayer and to the ministry of the word. Twenty-five years after that they could appeal to the world that "even to this present hour we [the apostles] both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and