death, and he notes the accomplishment of another, uttered before his birth. Where is now the temple of the Jews to which their Messiah was to come? Its ponderous stones are thrown down, and it is for ever swept away.

I have said, in a preceding part of my discourse, that it could make but little difference whether St. Mark or St. Peter composed the Gospel, which has always gone under the name of the former. I meant with regard to the truth of the facts related: in other respects a considerable difference exists, and that in favour of Christianity; for we possess the testimony of St. Peter in his epistle; and St. Mark therefore here appears as an additional evidence. It is certain that one man, more especially an eyewitness, may so relate the circumstances of any event as to procure the most unquestionable credit to his statement. A single author may also so write the life of an eminent person, with whom he has lived in unreserved friendship and intimacy, with such sincerity and caution, with such an examination of facts, such an interrogation of

collateral evidence, and such an investigation of written documents, as to leave but little doubt of the personal character and principal occurrences in the life of him who is the subject of the work. But when two writers, professing to have the same means of intelligence, undertake to describe the same person, a fresh system of proof springs up, and is required; and the truth of the separate relations is ascertained, not only by the agreement of each with itself in its several parts, by its consistency from first to last, (an excellence of no easy attainment in works of imagination, or the description of a fictitious character,) but by the concordance of the two works with each other. The proof is strengthened by the multiplicity of uncontradictory narratives.

Now the writers of our Saviour's life are four men of different occupations in society, though all of humble rank, each differently educated, and of different ages. How could it have failed, had such men been left to their natural powers, or had they had any other object but truth in view, in the composition of their works, but that the person,

whom they had undertaken to describe, would have appeared in different colours in their several narratives ?

One man would have thought that important which to another would have seemed trivial in short, each would have produced that kind of personage which accorded with his own ideas of great and good. Whereas, under existing circumstances, no one has ever yet said that the character of our Saviour stood thus as represented by St. Matthew, and thus as drawn by St. Mark; that in one he appeared more tender, in another more austere; in one more courageous, in another more prudent. Infidels and believers agree alike in the identity of the character represented in the several Gospels.

Two incidents in the history of the Church will evince the impossibility of making uninspired men agree in their ideas of the qualities which constitute a character of divine excellence. The history of the woman taken in adultery is excluded from two versions (the Syriac and Coptic) of the New Testament, from an apprehension that the 7

founder of our religion had shown some indulgence to that crime, which strikes at the root of civil society, and would paralyse the tenderest affections of the human heart. Others had omitted that passage in which Jesus is said to have wept on beholding the city of Jerusalem, as if tears were an indication of weakness unbecoming the dignity of the divine character. It is difficult to say, therefore, how four such men as the evangelists, if left to themselves, would have described a person whom each singly, or all unitedly, might have conceived to be of transcendent excellence; what powers, what qualities of body or mind they would have assigned to him as constituting the great and good; or how, indeed, with the model before them, they should not still have introduced some crude notions, some prejudices of their own in the description of it, had not their pens been guided by the spirit of truth.

But I will show you how the character, as it now stands, has appeared to a most eloquent unbeliever. It remains for his admirers to reconcile their incredulity with such an acknowledgment. "I must avow still," says

he, "that the majesty of the Scriptures as"tonishes me; the sanctity of the Gospel

speaks to my heart. Look at the works of "the philosophers, with all their pomp, how little they are by the side of this! Is it

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possible that a book at the same time so "sublime and so simple, should be the work "of men? Is it possible that he, of whom "it gives the history, should himself be only

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a man? Is this the tone of the enthusiast 66 or the ambitious leader? What sweetness, "what purity in his manners, what an affect

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ing grace in his instruction! What eleva❝tion of sentiment in his maxims, what profundity of wisdom in his discourses, what presence of mind, what address and propriety in his answers! Where but here "do we find the man, where the sage, who

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knows how to act, to suffer, and to die, "without weakness, and without ostenta"tion? In fine, it is more inconceivable that several men should have conspired to fabricate this book than that one should have lived to furnish the subject of it. "Never could Jewish authors have dis"covered that morality; and the Gospel

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