gives so great value to the “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” for many of the facts recorded by Mr. Gibbon were undoubtedly such as a skeptic in religion would have wished to have been otherwise; in respect to many of those stated, Mr. Gibbon could not but see that the world would regard them as furnishing proof that the religion was of Divine origin; of many of those stated, therefore, it required all his great talents to explain them on the supposition that the religion was false. Yet he recorded them, without suppressing what was true, or interpolating what was false, or perverting what had occurred, leaving it to himself and to other skeptics to explain them as they could.

(@) When the facts referred to, and which are said to have occurred, furnish the most easy and natural explanation of the existing state of things, or go into existing events as the cause does into the effect, and are indispensable to the solution of what actually exists in the world. There are, undoubtedly, numerous things existing in the world—in the civilization, the arts, the laws, the religion—for which the alleged facts in history are the most natural explanation, and which are, in fact, indispensable to the explanation. The main facts which are said to have occurred in the life of Mohammed furnish the best explanation of the opinions, the laws, the customs, the religious belief of a hundred and sixty millions of the human family; nor can those opinions, laws, and customs be explained except on the supposition that those facts actually occurred.

(f) When those facts are commemorated, and the knowledge of them is perpetuated by monuments, coins, medals, games, festivals, processions, and celebrations from age to age; when, without the supposition of those

facts, all those things would be unmeaning, or would be wholly inexplicable. The annual observance of the fourth day of July in this country is founded on the Declaration of Independence, and can not be explained except on the belief of the facts as history states them. The division of the lands in England is founded on the fact that there was a “Doomsday Book," and that the lands were apportioned in accordance with that. The establishment of the Feudal System in England, the form of the government for ages, the tenure by which land is held, and the distinction of ranks, is founded on the fact that William the Norman was victorious at the battle of Hastings, and that the country was apportioned among his barons; nor can the laws in regard to real estate in England for eight hundred years be explained except on that supposition. The boundaries of the old thirteen states of the Union can be explained only on the supposition, which history states, that charters were granted to the colonies by the crown, fixing those boundaries—for there are no natural boundaries between Massachusetts and New Hampshire; between Connecticut and Massachusetts; between Pennsylvania and New York; between Virginia and North Carolina. The Tower of London can be explained only by a belief in the great facts of history as recorded in the books. What mean those standards taken in war, those old suits of armor, shields, and bows, and battle-axes, but that the nation once was as history represents it to have been? How came they there? Who invented them ? Who had power to persuade the nation that all these had been used in wars and conquests? And what mean those blocks, made as if for beheading men, and those axes, unless it were true that Lord Russell, and Sir Walter Raleigh, and Algernon Sidney were actually beheaded? Who placed them there? Who has been able to persuade the nation that they represent bloody realities?

Thus facts come to us about which the world does not doubt; reports of ancient things which can not be explained except on the supposition that the main facts as alleged by history are true. So the fossil remains of the earth—the coal-beds—the extinct remains of races swept off in times far remote-preserved in enduring rocks, and laid far below the surface of the earth-are, like these old pieces of armor in the Tower of London, memorials of what the history of our world has been. The geologist, a laborious and most useful historian, is performing, by toil and sorrow, what the conductor through the Tower of London does in explaining the history of the past.

Things, therefore, may be, and are made true in regard to the past. No man has any more doubt that Cæsar was assassinated than he has that Mr. Lincoln

was.

It remains to consider the application of these principles to the particular subject of Christianity-the question whether time has so affected the evidence in regard to the facts on which Christianity is based as to render those facts unworthy of belief.

I have already remarked that a more unsparing criticism has been applied to the historic records of Christianity than to any other records pertaining to the past. All that has been alleged against any other history has been urged against the books of the New Testament; all the charges which have been elsewhere alleged of incompetency on the part of witnesses; of defective observation; of personal interest; of corrupted manuscripts; of apocryphal writings; of inconsistencies and

;

contradictions; of uncertain authorship; of improbabil. ity in regard to the events; of mistakes and errors, have been and are alleged in regard to the Evangelists.

To the ordinary difficulties in regard to ancient records, there is, in reference to the New Testament, this additional difficulty, greatly augmented by the change in the views of the world on the subject of the supernatural and the marvelous, that the narrative requires us to believe in miracles—not merely that Jesus lived, and taught, and was a good man, and founded Christianity, as Strauss and Renan admit, but that he cast out devils; that he healed diseases by a word; that he raised the dead; that he raised himself from the grave and ascended to heaven-as the difficulty of believing the record of Livy in regard to the foundation of Rome would be greatly augmented if we were required to believe his legends about Romulus and Remus, or the miracle when a yawning chasm appeared in the city threatening its very existence, and the closing of the chasm by the self-sacrifice of the gallant Curtius throwing himself into it clad in full armor. No one can be required, it would be said, in this sharp, keen, searching, scientific age, to believe what men readily believed in the fabulous periods of history, when the belief in the supernatural prevailed every where; when eclipses were portents and prodigies; when, in ignorance of the laws of nature, it was believed that the heavenly bodies were moved by angels; that all atmospheric changes were effected by angels; that a special angel was assigned to every star and

every element; when it was believed that comets were precursors of calamity, and that a special comet, ominous of evil, preceded the death of such men as Cæsar or Constantine, or that such a comet appeared before the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, before the Peloponnesian War, before the civil wars of Cæsar and Pompey, before the fall of Jerusalem, before the invasion of Attila, and before the coming of famine and pestilence.* A more relentless criticism by far has been applied to the New Testament than was applied by Wolff to the Iliad, or by Niebuhr to the History of Rome. And what strange, unhistorical theories are held in regard to the four Evangelists! Those Evangelists contain indeed fragments of truth. There is enough of truth in them to account for the origin of Christianity. But they are without order or arrangement. They are of uncertain date or authorship. They are to be rearranged and reconstructed. The portions added are to be eliminated; the deficiencies are to be made up by sagacity; the improbable parts are to be discarded; all that is miraculous is to be regarded as fabulous and legendary. The system of Christianity is a.“myth,” having for its basis a very uncertain personage, of sufficient reality to suggest the mythical actions ascribed to him, as in Strauss; or Jesus was a real personage, the real founder of Christianity, a young man of vast originality, of wonderful genius, slowly made conscious of his own powers, wrought up to enthusiasm unexpectedly to himself, to believe that he was to change and reform the world, and acting on the borders of insanity, as in the romance of Renan.

What, then, is to be believed ? What are the principles, as matters of history, which are to guide us ?

Christianity, as we shall see in a subsequent Lecture, has a history as marked and definite as any other; an origin, a development, a progress, an array of facts that belong to it alone. England has a history: its institutions; its judicial arrangements; its trial by jury; its

* Lecky, IIistory of Rationalism, i., 289, 290.

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