"In matters of public and general interest, all persons must be presumed to be conversant, on the principle that individuals are presumed to be conversant with their own affairs.

"Therefore it is that, in such matters, the prevailing current of assertion is resorted to as evidence, for it is to this that every member of the community is supposed to be privy. The persons, moreover, who multiplied these copies may be regarded, in some manner, as the agents of the Christian public, for whose use and benefit the copies were made; and on the ground of the credit due to such agents, and of the public nature of the facts themselves, the copies thus made are entitled to an extraordinary degree of confidence, and, as in the case. of official registers and other public books, it is not necessary that they should be confirmed and sanctioned by the ordinary tests of truth. If any ancient document concerning our public rights were lost, copies which have been so universally received and acted upon as the Four Gospels have been, would have been received as authority in all the courts of continental Europe, upon much weaker evidence. of its genuineness; for the integrity of the sacred text has been preserved by the jealousy of opposing sects, beyond any moral possibility of corruption; while that of the Roman Civil Law has been preserved by tacit consent, without the interest of any opposing school, to watch over and preserve it from alteration.

"The copies of the Holy Scriptures having thus been in familiar use in the churches from the time when the text was committed to writing; having been watched with vigilance by so many sects, opposed to each other in doctrine, yet all appealing to these Scriptures for the correctness of their faith; and having in all ages, down to this day, been respected as the authoritative source of all ecclesiastical power and government, and submitted to, and acted under in regard to so many claims of right, on the one hand, and so many obligations of duty on the other; it is quite erroneous to suppose that the Christian is bound to offer any further proof of their genuineness or authenticity. It is for the objector to show them spurious; for on him, by the plainest rules of law, lies the burden of proof. If it were the case of a claim to a franchise, and a copy of an ancient deed or charter were produced in support of the title, under parallel circumstances on which to presume its genuineness, no lawyer, it is believed, would venture to deny either its admissibility in evidence or the satisfactory character of the proof. In a recent case in the House of Lords, precisely such a document, being an old manuscript copy purporting to have been extracted from ancient journals of the House, which were lost, and to have been made by an officer whose duties were to prepare lists of the peers, was held admissible in a claim of peerage."

Concerning the credit which should be given to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Greenleaf goes on to say:

“Proceeding further, to inquire whether the facts related by the Four Evangelists are proved to be competent and satisfactory evidence, we are led, first, to consider on which side lies the burden of establishing the credibility of the witnesses. On this point the municipal law furnishes a rule which is of constant application in all trials by jury, and is indeed the dictate of that charity which thinketh no evil :

"In the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every witness is presumed credible, until the contrary is shown, the burden of impeaching his credibility lying on the objector.

"This rule serves to show the injustice with which the writers of the gospels have ever been treated by infidels; an injustice acquiesced in even by Christians; in requiring the Christian affirmatively, and by positive evidence, aliunde to establish the credibility of his witnesses above all others, before their testimony is entitled to be considered, and in permitting the testimony of a single profane writer, alone and uncorroborated, to outweigh that of any single Christian. This is not the course in courts of chancery, where the testimony of a single witness is never permitted to outweigh the oath of even the defendant himself, inter

ested as he is in the case; but, on the contrary, if the plaintiff, after requiring the oath of his adversary, cannot overthrow it by something more than the oath of one witness, however credible, it must stand as evidence against him. But the Christian writer seems, by the usual course of the argument, to have been deprived of the common presumption of charity in his favor; and reversing the ordinary rule in administering justice in human tribunals, his testimony is unjustly presumed to be false, until it is proved to be true. This treatment, moreover, has been applied to them all in a body; and without due regard to the fact, that, being independent historians, writing at different periods, they are entitled to the support of each other; they have been treated, in the argument, almost as if the New Testament were the entire production, at once, of a body of men, conspiring by joint fabrication, to impose a false religion upon the world. It is time that this injustice should cease; that the testimony of the evangelists should be admitted to be true, until it can be disproved by those who would impugn it; that the silence of one sacred writer on any point should no more detract from his own veracity or that of other historians, than the like circumstances is permitted to do among profane writers; and that the Four Evangelists should be admitted in corroboration of each other, as readily as Josephus and Tacitus, or Polibius and Livy."

To make a case parallel with the one cited, in the matter of the English peerage, we could, in all probability, if the case were one of sufficient importance to warrant the effort, secure the ancient Sinaitic manuscript, now in the custody of the church authorities of St. Petersburg, Russia, discovered by Dr. Tischendorf, an expert authority on ancient documents, in 1844, in a convent on Mt. Sinai. It contains the entire New Testament, as we now have it, together with the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. This expert witness, and others like Wescott and Hort, testify that the date of this manuscript cannot be later than 350 A. D. Suppose that this venerable document should be brought into court, could there be any question about its admissibility as evidence under the rule mentioned? Certainly not. A careful comparison of the manuscript with any of the copies of our Bible, in use in any of our churches, of whatever denomination, discloses the fact that these recent copies of the Scriptures have been made with a fidelity so striking as to challenge the admiration of friend and critic alike. If the Sinaitic manuscript were copied from the preceding one or ones with as much fidelity to truth and accuracy as the present ones have been copied from