any one, who reflects that the resurrection is, in some form or other, asserted, referred to, or assumed, in every christian writing, of every description, which hath come down to us.

And if our evidence stopped here, we should have a strong case to offer: for we should have to allege, that, in the reign of Tiberius Caesar, a certain number of persons set about an attempt of establishing a new religion in the world; in the prosecution of which purpose, they voluntarily encountered great dangers, undertook great labors, sustained great sufferings, all for a miraculous story which they published wherever they came; and that the resurrection of a dead man, whom, during his life, they had followed and accompanied, was a constant part of this story. I know nothing in the above statement which can, with any appearance of reason, be disputed: and I know nothing in the history of the human species similar to it.

ANNOTATION.

'There is no room for insinuating that our books were fabricated with a studious accommodation to the usages which obtained at the time when they were written.'

Not only is this true, but the OMISSION in the New Testament of many things which-humanly speaking—we should have expected to find there, is a strong (though often overlooked) internal evidence of divine agency. We find in the New Testament nothing of the character of the Catechisms, such as we are sure must have been employed for instructing learners in the first rudiments of Christianity; nor again do we find any thing of the nature of a Creed; nor a Liturgy; nor any thing answering to a Rubric (or a set of Canons prescribing the mode of administering the Sacraments, and of conducting all parts of the Church-Service; nor any precise description of the manner of ordaining Ministers, and of carrying on Church-government.

Yet all these things, we are sure, must have existed. We even find frequent mention of prayers offered up by Apostles;

See Essay on the Omissions, &c.

and of their breaking bread' [celebrating the Lord's Supper] in the congregations. But the prayers which they used, on these and on other occasions, are not recorded. And it is very remarkable that the only two prayers of the Apostles that we do find recorded in words, had reference to such peculiar occasions (the election of an Apostle in Acts i., and their first persecution, Acts iv.) as made them quite unsuitable for ordinary public worship. The same is the case, in a less degree, with the three Hymns, that of Zacharias, that of the Virgin Mary, and that of Simeon, which are introduced from the New Testament into our Service. They had, each, reference to a peculiar occasion, but not to such a degree as to unfit them altogether for ordinary worship; for which they have been adopted accordingly. The same may be said of the prayers of the first martyr, Stephen; and also of those prayers of Jesus Himself which are recorded in John's Gospel. One short form of prayer which our Lord taught to his disciples-and that, before the chief part of the Gospel had been revealed—is all that we find recorded.

Now that no Liturgies, Creeds, or other Formularies, such as we have been speaking of, should have been committed to writing by any of the Apostles or Evangelists, is a fact which will appear the more unaccountable,-humanly speaking,— the more we reflect on the subject. Supposing Paul to have been too much occupied with other writings to find leisure for recording such things, why was it not done, by his direction or permission, by one or other of his companions and assistants? -by Luke, or Timothy, or Titus, or some of the others whom we find mentioned? If not by any of these, why not by Barnabas, or Peter, or some other Apostle? or by some of their numerous fellow-laborers?

There must have been hundreds quite competent to the task; which would have been merely to write down what they saw and heard; and this would have been eagerly read by thousands, and carefully copied and preserved. Yet what it would have. been, seemingly, so natural and so easy to do, by each of a great number of men, was done by no one.

And as the drawing up of such records is what would naturally have occurred to men of any nation, situated as the Apostles and their companions were, so, it seems doubly strange

that this should not have occurred to Jews; to men brought up under that Law which prescribed with such minute exactness all the ceremonials of their worship,-all the Articles of their belief, and all the rules they were to observe.

The omission, therefore, which we have been speaking of is, on all natural principles, quite unaccountable, and, indeed, incredible. And there seems no way of explaining it, except by concluding that the Apostles and their attendants were super-naturally restrained from drawing up any such written records as we have been speaking of. We must conclude that divine Providence had decreed that no Canons, Liturgies, or Creeds, &c., should form any part of Holy Scripture; and that, accordingly, the inspired Writers were withheld from committing any to paper.

And in confirmation-if any confirmation could be neededof what we have now been saying, we find that soon after the age of inspiration, and when men were left to act on their own judgment, they did draw up Creeds (several of which have come down to us), Liturgies, and directions for the celebration of divine worship, called the 'Apostolical Constitutions.' Pliny records the custom of the Christians in his day (in the early part of the second century), of singing a hymn to Christ as God.' This is supposed by some to have been that which we call the Te Deum,' or some portion of it. But at any rate it must have been something written down and learnt by the congregation. Whatever may be urged in behalf of extemporary prayers, a hymn at least could not be so. And these compositions, though professing to be records of what had come down by tradition from the times of the Apostles (which is, probably, in part true), were never received by any Church as Holy Scripture. Even the Church of Rome, which pronounces all traditions sanctioned by itself, of equal authority with Scripture, still maintains the distinction. It has never inserted in the New Testament any of those compositions we have been speaking of. And here we have, by the way, a testimony which would, alone, completely refute the wild theory of some (socalled) Theologians, that the New Testament was a compilation drawn up in the third or fourth Century from floating Traditions. It would be a sufficient answer (though many other disproofs might be given) to remark, that in that case it would not have failed to contain the Liturgies, Apostolic Constitutions,

&c., which were then in circulation;-and in circulation with a tradition of their being derived from the Apostles. Now, one would have expected, as most probable (humanly speaking), that many compositions of this kind, drawn up by several of the Apostles and their numerous attendants, would have come down to us as a portion of the New Testament.

But that no one of them should have committed to writing any thing of the kind, is, according to the ordinary course of nature, quite incredible.

We have here, therefore, in this omission, a standing miracle; —at least, a monument of a miracle. The christian Scriptures, considered in this point of view, are in themselves a proof of their having been composed under superhuman guidance; since they do not contain what we may be certain they would have contained, had the Writers been left to themselves.

And the argument, we should observe, is complete, even though we should be quite unable to perceive the wisdom of this ordinance of Providence, or at all to conjecture why the sacred Writers were thus withheld from doing what they must naturally have been disposed to do. For if the gospel was not from Man, it must have been from GOD. Though we may not be able always to explain why the christian Scriptures are, in each point, just such as they are, still, if we can perceive them to be such as they certainly would not have been if composed by unaided Man, we must conclude that the Writers were divinely overruled.

CHAPTER VIII.

There is satisfactory evidence, that many persons, professing to have been original witnesses of the christian miracles, passed their lives in labors, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of the truth of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives, to new rules of conduct.

THAT

HAT the story which we have now is, in the main, the story which the apostles published, is, I think, nearly certain from the considerations which have been proposed. But

whether, when we come to the particulars and the detail of the narrative, the historical books of the New Testament be deserving of credit as histories, so that a fact ought to be accounted true because it is found in them; or whether they are entitled to be considered as representing the accounts, which, true or false, the apostles published; whether their authority, in either of these views, can be trusted to, is a point which necessarily depends upon what we know of the books, and of their authors.

Now, in treating of this part of our argument, the first, and a most material, observation upon the subject is, that such was the situation of the authors to whom the four gospels are ascribed, that, if any one of the four be genuine, it is sufficient for our purpose. The received author of the first was an original apostle and emissary of the religion. The received author of the second was an inhabitant of Jerusalem at the time, to whose house the apostles were wont to resort, and himself an attendant upon one of the most eminent of that number. The received author of the third was a stated companion and fellow-traveller of the most active of all the teachers of the religion, and in the course of his travels frequently in the society of the original apostles. The received author of the fourth, as well as of the first, was one of these apostles. No stronger evidence of the truth of a history can arise from the situation of the historian than what is here offered. The authors of all the histories lived at the time, and upon the spot. The authors of two of the histories were present at many of the scenes which they describe; eye-witnesses of the facts, earwitnesses of the discourses; writing from personal knowledge and recollection; and, what strengthens their testimony, writing upon a subject in which their minds were deeply engaged, and in which, as they must have been very frequently repeating the accounts to others, the passages of the history would be kept continually alive in their memory. Whoever reads the gospels (and they ought to be read for this particular purpose) will find in them not merely a general affirmation of miraculous powers, but detailed circumstantial accounts of miracles, with specifications of time, place, and persons; and these accounts many various. In the gospels, therefore, which bear the name of Matthew and John, these narratives, if they really proceeded

and