ascension; the outpouring of the Holy Ghost at pentecost; the gift of tongues; the continued apostolic miracles; the supernatural triumphs of the persecuted faith in its conquering march from kingdom to kingdom, and from continent to continent. Brooding over the ruins of Jerusalem, he read there the tremendous fulfilment of the predictions of the Son of God. Bewildered in the contemplation of all these original and supplemental marvels congregated together like mountain piled upon mountain, the Hebrew rabbi may have stood confounded and overwhelmed. Without magnanimity to admit, or hardihood to deny that his nation, headed by its priesthood, had slain the Lord of glory, the historian of the Jews might well have remained speechless. Speechlessness is a confession of guiltiness more potent than language. It was the speechlessness of the guest without the wedding garment, that crowned the evidence upon which he was justly bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness, where is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

After the death of Josephus, the meagre literature of the Jews was concentrated in their Mishna and Talmuds. The Mishna was a collection of all the Jewish traditions in six books, commencing

at a remote period of antiquity and continued until near the close of the second century, when it was published. To this original text, commentaries called the Gemara, were appended; and the text and its commentaries together constituted the Talmud. In process of time two Talmuds appeared; the Jerusalem Talmud, published about the year three hundred, in one large folio, and the Babylonian Talmud, published about the year five hundred, and which, by successive editions, has expanded into twelve folios.

It is a singular fact, that in the Mishna no distinct reference to the christian religion can be found. The Mishna was compiled by a learned Israelite, named Rabbi Judah, then rector of the Hebrew school at Tiberias, in Galilee. At the time of its compilation, the origin and spread of Christianity, and all its reported miracles, had become the wonder of the world. The heathen Celsus had recently published against the Gospel his voluminous work. Yet upon our holy religion, the Rabbi Judah was silent as the grave. Absorbed in contemplating the evangelical predictions of the destruction of Jerusalem, and their swift fulfilment in the smouldering ruins of the beloved city, the compiler of the Mishna was lost in amazement; his

tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth; the speechlessness of Josephus fell upon his successor.

Nor is any discussion of the truth or untruth of Christianity to be found in the Talmuds, volumi nous as those publications have become. Their brief and vague allusions to the subject, while virtually admitting the antiquity of the Gospel, and that its Founder and his disciples wrought signs and wonders, affect to deride the prodigies as the artifices of magic learned in Egypt; or as having been wrought by the right pronunciation of the ineffable name of Jehovah, stolen from the temple. Neither heathen nor Jewish pen ever dared to intimate that Jesus Christ was a fictitious personage, or that the christian Scriptures were the forgery of an age posterior to their assumed date.

We are not ignorant that there is a chain of christian authors, commencing at the apostolic era, and stretching downward until long after Christianity had permanently assumed the imperial purple, whose surviving works attest with overpowering force the genuineness and antiquity of the books composing the Gospel. These holy fathers, whose list is headed by the names of Barnabus, Clement and Hermas, the companions of the blessed Paul, were placed like watchmen along the track of de

scending centuries, with an average interval of only about ten years between them, ever intent upon the swelling stream of salvation, and exultingly pointing upwards to its divine fountain-head. An abridgment of the testimony of this vast host of christian witnesses, fills two large quarto volumes in the great work upon the historical proofs of Christianity, entitled, "The Credibility of the Gospel History," to which we have already referred. Further compression would vitally impair the strength of the testimony. Instead of attempting its faint sketch and virtual mutilation within the limits of our brief essay, devoted chiefly to the internal evidences of the Gospel, we refer the reader to the original abridgment compiled by the patient and masterly hand of the erudite Lardner.

CHAPTER III.

DIVINE REVELATION WAS COEVAL WITH THE CREATION OF MAN.

Any supernatural communication from God a divine revelationNo matter what its form or subject-Human race not from everlasting-Man created without instinct of brutes, or innate ideas to guide him-Our primeval ancestors at their creation were but grown-up infants-Utterly inexperienced, they would have perished from hunger, thirst, cold, or casualties, without supernatural instruction-Such instruction a divine revelation-General expectation of heathen world before birth of Christ that moral light was about to dawn.

THE primary objection of skeptical philosophy against the Gospel's claim to inspiration consists in the broad proposition, that God has never condescended to make a preternatural revelation of himself to the children of men. Infidelity confines not its attacks to the miraculous outworks of christian faith; it aims its shafts at the heaven-constructed citadel within. It repudiates miracles as opposed to the common laws of nature; it discards inspiration as opposed to those higher laws by which the Almighty binds his own infinite Majesty.

We must bear carefully in mind, that any supernatural communication from God to man is a divine