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are the arguments to be found now by which the verity of the Mahometan faith may be established? The evidence, however, of the truth of a new religion is of a different kind, and is to be found chiefly in the circumstances connected with its rise and promulgation. To these we revert. The first martyrs to the Christian faith were not the martyrs to opinions only, but to facts. It cannot be denied that their zeal might be warmed, or their courage sustained, by the knowledge of the purity of those doctrines which they were bound to inculcate, of their tendency to the perfection of human nature, and to the consummation of human happiness; but the testimony of the promulgators was to that which their eyes had seen, their ears heard, and their hands felt. "That "which was from the beginning, which we "have heard, which we have seen with our

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eyes, which we have looked upon, and our "hands have handled of the word of life; ... "that which we have seen and heard declare "we unto you*;" are the strong expressions of St. John.

a 1 St. John i. 1-3.

They had listened to the discourses of their Divine Master, singly and together; they had seen him expire on the cross, in conformity to his previous assurance; singly and together they had seen, and touched, and conversed with him after his resurrection. There can be no deception where every natural sense, and that not in one man only, but in many, habitually practised, presents the same objects; and it was in attestation of the truth of these facts, pregnant, no doubt, with important consequences, that the disciples voluntarily offered themselves

b It is by the perception of the natural senses that we know that body or matter exists, says Lucretius, following his great master Epicurus; and if we cannot trust the natural senses with which mankind is endowed, there is an end of all reasoning before it begins:

Corpus enim per se communis dedicat esse
Sensus; cui nisi prima fides fundata valebit,
Haud erit occultis de rebus quo referentes
Confirmare animos quicquam ratione queamus *.

And again,

Quo referemus enim? Quid nobis certius ipsis
Sensibus esse potest? quî vera ac falsa notemus? +"

* Lucretius, Lib. i. 423. ed. Wakefield.

+ Id. ib. 700.

to death. No other religion has martyrs of this kind. No other religion has martyrs to the testimony of their own senses. Reason differs in different human beings: but the senses are the same, where age or accident has not impaired their proper organs; and a religion which was meant for all rests upon evidence which all can understand and appreciate. Those facts then, the knowledge of which, derived from the senses, had irresistibly drawn the plain good men by whom our Saviour was personally surrounded, his first disciples, from the religion of their fathers to a more perfect form, were by them presented to others, and their testimony was believed.

St. Luke, the writer of the Gospel which stands as the third in our New Testament, was a convert of this class. His name is not mentioned amongst the twelve Apostles: neither does our Saviour appear during his natural life to have been known to him personally. Those who believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture will not see that there is any thing in these circumstances calculated to detract from the credit due to

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the work which bears the name of St. Luke. But such as are sceptical may expect that the Gospel now under consideration should be fenced round with all the external forms of truth, and require that its claim to paramount belief should be established by natural means, by the ordinary rules and maxims of evidence. This Gospel, then, begins in a manner totally different from the others: it opens with a preamble, or introduction, in which the author speaks of himself, his motives for undertaking his work, his object, and his means of information. These are all important subjects; and it may seem most satisfactory to lay them before you in the words of the Evangelist himself:

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Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to "set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them "unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word;

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it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from

the very first, to write unto thee, in "order, most excellent Theophilus, that

"thou mightest know the certainty of those

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things wherein thou hast been instructed.” The history itself commences from thence, describing the mysterious circumstances attendant on the birth of John the Baptist, the precursor of our Saviour; circumstances omitted by the other Evangelists, but of which a relation seemed necessary, as John the Baptist had for ages before been the subject of some of the Prophetic writings in the Jewish Scriptures, the accomplishment of which is here announced and described with great minuteness. St. Luke then writes his history in order that Theophilus, his disciple, and one of the first Christians, may know the certainty of those things in which he had been instructed; and the writer's qualification for imparting this certainty is that he himself had a perfect knowledge from the first of all that formed the subject of his communication, having received it of those who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers.

Now it is certain that the more sure and unexceptionable testimony is the testimony of eye-witnesses. That we have in the Gospels

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