the thing has been done is certain; and that it has been done by these men is also certain; but if we are asked to believe that these men did it without the special endowment of an Inspiration peculiarly Divine, then it is no longer Christianity that makes a demand upon our Faith, but the infatuation of Scepticism that seeks to impose on our credulity.

He who believes that minds that can only produce Talmuds should have conceived such fictions as the Gospels, ought no longer to be called an unbeliever. No believer in Christianity believes half as much. Far easier would it be to believe that some dull chronicler of the middle ages composed Shakspeare's Plays, or that a clownish ploughman had written Paradise Lost; only that to parallel the present case, we ought to believe that four such ploughmen wrote four Paradise Losts! Nor will it mend the matter to say that it was Christians, not Jews, who compiled the New Testament; for they must have been Jews before they were Christians; and the twofold moral and intellectual problem comes back upon our hands,-to imagine how the Jewish mind could have given birth to the ideas of Christianity, or have embodied them in such a surpassing form. And as to the intellectual part of the difficulty; unhappily, abundant proof exists in Christian literature that the early Christians could as little have invented such fictions as the Jews themselves! "The New Testament is not more different from the writings of Jews, or superior to them, than it is different from the writings of the Fathers, and superior to them. It stands alone like the peak of Teneriffe. The Alps amidst the flats of Holland would not present a greater contrast than the New Testament and the Fathers." Even Professor Newman-with all his dislike for "book revelation "-is constrained to admit the truth of this important fact. He says, "On the whole, this reading [of the Apostolical Fathers] greatly exalted my sense of the unapproachable greatness of the New Testament. The moral chasm between it and the very earliest Christian writers seemed to me so vast, as only to be accounted for by the doctrine. . . . that the New Testament was dictated by the immediate action of the Holy Spirit.""

5

See the passage at length, in The Eclipse of Faith," 6th ed., pp. 176-178. "Phases of Faith," p. 25.

PROFESSOR NEWMAN'S TESTIMONY.

391

We commend this admission to the notice of our adversaries. What they have to account for is the great fact of "THE UNAPPROACHABLE GREATNESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT."

Let them treat the literary and moral phenomenon presented by this Book as they would treat any other phenomenon. Let their theories be made to fit the facts; instead of mutilating the facts until they can be compressed within the narrow limits of the theories. Let there be no unworthy attempt to hide the real question by piling up a heap of wordy evasions. Nothing in the world is more certain than "the unapproachable greatness of the New Testament: Whence came it? How was it caused?

"That would be a strange account of a geological stratum, which should omit all reference to the organic remains embedded in it. Science would make short work of a cosmogony— Mosaic or other-that proposed to treat all fossils as so many lusus naturæ, which were of no account in the investigation of the history of the globe; or, worse still, that should suppose them integral parts of the respective strata, and not deposits therein. Now such an interpolated deposit in the section of human history is Christianity; there it is, fixed immovably in the midst of the centuries,-in them, but not of them; and those centuries of secular history give no clue to its origin, which must be sought from itself alone.

"It is easy to sketch the rise and fall of empires and races, like the elevation and subsidence of geologic beds, and assign plausible reasons for them; but this affords no rationale of the world's history till we account for the unique phenomenon of the New Testament. The problem is this:-Given, the writings of Philo on the one hand, and the Shepherd of Hermas on the other, to account for the interjection of St. John's gospel and St. Paul's epistles between them? Here, we contend, is a manifest interpolation, as demonstrable as that of a fossil in sandstone. It is clearly defined as a distinct and independent organism. Its vitality is self-complete and individual. Philo did not engender it; Hermas did not continue it. The fossil must tell its own story, or remain a hopeless riddle: the circumjacent sandstone can tell us nothing of its production. What then are we to think of a philosophy that shuts its eyes

to this fossil form; that gives us an elaborate speculation about the sandstone apart from all allusion to the organic remains, and calls it a theory of the universe? What, too, of that philosophy which affects to throw aside the fossil as a lusus unworthy of serious investigation, and the question of whose origin may be put off with solutions of fantastic absurdity? When Emerson tells us that transcendentalism, falling upon a superstitious age, makes prophets and apostles; or when M. Renan refers the greatest moral and intellectual revolution that ever passed over mankind to the monomania of a Jewish peasant; or when we are asked to believe that the sublimest ethical system the world has known, was the result of a quasifraud, perpetrated by men who themselves died for conscience sake, and by whose instrumentality myriads since have done the same? It is surely not too much to say, that these dreamers stand convicted of the rankest folly by the first principles of the science they are so eager to pervert."

It

"View it in what light we may," says Theodore Parker, "the Bible is a very surprising phenomenon. This collection of books has taken such a hold on the world as no other ever did. The literature of Greece, which goes up like incense from that land of temples and heroic deeds, has not half" (say not a thousandth part) "the influence of this book from a nation alike despised in ancient and modern times. The sun never sets on its gleaming page. It goes equally into the cottage of the plain man and the palace of the king. It is woven into the literature of the scholar and colours the talk of the street. enters men's closets; it mingles with all the cheerfulness of life. The Bible attends men in their sickness; the aching head finds a softer pillow when the Bible lies underneath. The mariner escaping from shipwreck clutches this first of his treasures and keeps it sacred to God. It goes with the pedler in his crowded pack, cheers him in the fatigue of eventide, and brightens the freshness of his morning face. It lifts man above himself; the best of our prayers are in its language, in which our fathers and the patriarchs prayed. The timid man, about to escape from this dream of life, looks through the glass of

Christian Advocate: vol. iv. p. 153.

THEODORE PARKER'S TESTIMONY.

393

scripture, and his eye grows bright; he fears not to take Death by the hand, and bid farewell to wife and babes and home. Now for all this there must be an adequate cause. That nothing comes of nothing is true all the world over. It is no light thing to hold a thousand hearts, though but for an hour; what is it then to hold the Christian world, and that for centuries? Are men fed with chaff and husks? A thousand famous writers come up in this century, to be forgotten in the next; but the silver cord of the Bible is not loosed, nor its golden bowl broken, as time chronicles its tens of centuries passed by. Has the human race gone mad? Some of the greatest institutions seem built upon the Bible; such things will not stand on heaps of chaff, but on mountains of rock. WHAT IS THE SECRET CAUSE OF THIS WIDE AND DEEP INFLUENCE? IT MUST BE FOUND IN THE BIBLE ITSELF, and MUST BE ADEQUATE TO THE EFFECT."

"What need we any further witness?" The facts admitted by our adversaries are such as, on their principles, have never yet been accounted for. The very admissions which they are compelled to make are sufficient of themselves to establish our

case.

It is therefore proved and certain, that "If the Bible be not Divine, it is an Effect without a Cause:

"A SACRED PAGE

Where triumphs immortality; a page

WHICH NOT THE WHOLE CREATION COULD PRODUCE,
WHICH NOT THE CONFLAGRATION SHALL DESTROY."

CHAPTER XIII.

IT IS CERTAIN THAT THE LIFE OF CHRIST ALONE IS SUFFICIENT TO DEMONSTRATE THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.

"If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus were those of a God."-ROUSSEAU.

PERFECTLY distinct from the subject to be considered in this chapter, yet closely connected with it, are two others, either of which will be found to furnish sufficient warrant for our faith in Christianity. Yet our faith does not rest on the ground of either alone, but on the combination of both: and it acquires immoveable stability from the mutual corroboration which each affords to the other. Christ's Teaching was unlike all other teaching. Christ's Miracles were unlike all other miracles. "Never man spake like this Man ;" and the works that He did, bare witness of Him, that He was a "Teacher come from God." And between these two there existed a peculiar and reciprocal fitness and propriety. The Teaching was so sublime as to be worthy of miraculous attestation, and the Miracles were never wrought except for the furtherance of moral ends.

But while it is strictly true that in both these respects the Founder of Christianity is without a parallel, it is not to be denied that those who "will not have this Man to rule over" them have laboured incessantly to find a parallel. True, the moral greatness of Jesus Christ shews Him to be incomparable; yet there have been men who have attempted to compare Him with Socrates. True, the miracles of Jesus Christ are phenomena perfectly unique; yet Hume pretended to think that they might be compared with the occurrences at the tomb of the Abbé Paris.