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II.

THE ADEQUACY OF THE GOSPEL RECORDS.

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"... Which he may read that binds the sheaf,

Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef."

Tennyson, In Memoriam.

2 PET. I. 16.

For we have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

"NOT on the false track of myths, artificially elaborated”οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες. In such words more than 1800 years ago did St Peter' anticipate and reject the gnostic theories which began so early to trouble the Church, and which have sprung up in modern times, thick and rank as grass upon the housetops. The expression agrees with the calm declaration of St Paul, that they, the Apostles, were not as the many who trafficked with, who adulterated (in one place οὐ καπηλεύοντες, in another μηδὲ δολοῦντες), ie. who falsified, mutilated, misrepresented the word of God,— but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God,

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2 I may be allowed incidentally and en passant to quote this Epistle as having been written by St Peter, without entering into the controversy about its genuineness.

F. H. L.

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so spake they in Christ'. Such were the deliberate claims of men preeminently holy, preeminently truthful, preeminently soberminded; of men so widely dif ferent that the one was but a simple provincial fisherman with no power or inspiration save what he had derived from the Holy Spirit of God, and the other was a man whose boyhood had been passed in the most learned of heathen, and his youth in the most sacred of Jewish cities; and yet both of whom, having given their clear testimony to facts for which both suffered a martyr's death, are now, on no grounds save those of an unphilosophical prepossession, contemptuously waived aside as idle dreamers whose fictions were only, if at all, excusable on the score of idealising mysticism or superstitious credulity.

A second step, then, in our enquiry awaits us, no less needful than the last.

If it be our object, my brethren, in these Lectures, to test as it were the strength of those buttresses on which leans the great edifice of historic Christianity, then the enquiry which occupied us last Sunday was not only important but indispensable. For the Divinity of our Blessed Lord is the central question of modern theology, and it is chiefly denied by those whose abandonment of all belief in the supernatural has been due to the very prepossessions which we endeavoured to remove. Strauss, the coryphæus of modern scepticism, on the one hand avows that his standpoint was the

1 2 Cor. ii. 17, οὐ καπηλεύοντες τὸν λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ, cf. iv. 2, μηδὲ δολοῦντες τὸν λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ.

philosophy of Hegel', and on the other starts with the emphatic dogma-a dogma which he assumes as unworthy of further demonstration-that whatever Christ was or did, he can have done nothing which was superhuman or supernatural.

If then we have seen that an à priori rejection of the miraculous is unphilosophical, and that it is absurd to attempt "the settlement of historic problems by philosophic categories," we arrive at this point-that the credibility of miracles is in each instance simply and solely a question of evidence, and consequently that our belief or rejection of the Christian miracles must mainly depend on the character of the Gospels in which they are recorded. Now into the question of the genuine

1 The relation of Strauss to the Philosophy of Hegel was this: Hegel had left undefined the relation of the historical Jesus to the idea of God-in-man; his orthodox followers had endeavoured to fill up this blank by shewing that the Idea, being necessary, must have found its fulfilment in a real person, namely in Jesus of Nazareth. Strauss, by the application of historical criticism, shewed how essential were the differences between dogma and speculation, between the presentation and the notion. See Schwarz, Gesch. der Neuesten Theologie, p. 21. "Strauss erklärt die Geschichte Jesu für falsch ; Hegel erklärt sie für irrelevant, für völlig gleichgültig." Hafermann, Athen oder Bethlehem? 103.

2 "Wir wissen gewiss was Jesus nicht war und nicht gethan hat; nämlich, nichts Uebermenschliches und Uebernatürliches." "In the person and acts of Jesus no supernaturalism shall be suffered to remain ; nothing which shall press upon the souls of men with the leaden weight of arbitrary, inscrutable authority [how much does that sentence reveal!]...for we can plainly perceive this—that no single gospel, nor all the gospels together, can claim that degree of historical reliability which would be required in order to make or debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.” Strauss, New Life of Jesus, XII. (Eng.Tr.).

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