comment; and sometimes noticeable discrepancies arise, but this simply shows that the books are genuine and that they were not written in concert.

In the first place, I argue that the books themselves show incontestably that the writers simply meant to chronicle events somewhat in the order of their happening and that there is no evidence even tending to show that the authors of the books ever attempted to paint a picture of the Messiah to meet the expectations of the Jews or to meet their own expectations.

They at no time clothe him with kingly dignity. He was born in a manger. (Luke ii. 7.) He possessed nothing. There is no evidence that he ever earned or owned a penny, and he said of himself:

"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." (Luke ix. 58.)

He ignored social ties and even forbade one who expressed a desire to follow him to go home and bid his family good-by. (Luke ix. 61, 62.)

He paid absolutely no attention to matters of government, and even neglected to pay his taxes until they were demanded, and then performed a miracle to get the money. (Matt. xvii. 24-27.)

He ridiculed the leaders of the Jews, the scribes

and Pharisees, and denounced them as canting hypocrites. (Matt. xxiii. 13-36.) Matthew, the first evangelist called, was a hated tax collector at the Sea of Galilee, and his selection was an affront to all Jews who despised everything connected with the Roman government.

He accomplished nothing from a worldly standpoint. If he did not sow the seeds of his religion by his teaching and his miracles, then his biographers made the ridiculous blunder of fabricating the life of a hero who did absolutely nothing to commend him. As he ascended to heaven he could not have looked back upon anything accomplished by him if he had not performed the miracles and the other acts attributed to him indicating his divinity.

So those who deny the genuineness of the four Gospels would simply put the authors of those books in the ridiculous plight of presenting to the Jews and to the world the spurious claims of a Messiah who did nothing to better the condition of Jews or Gentiles and had no claim to their allegiance in any way whatever.

The argument that the four Gospels were not written at the time they purport to have been written, but that they first appeared a century or two later, is too ridiculous to merit consideration. Pro

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fane history shows that the Christians were persecuted in Jerusalem and in Rome within thirty years after the death of Christ, as recorded in the Gospels. So these Christians who then attested their faith in Christ by enduring persecution must have learned of Christ either by personal observation of him or through the four Gospels.

The character of the Christ as given in the four Gospels is so sublime that it staggers belief to think that such a divine picture could have been painted by human imagination. The human mind has its limitations. It is the most intensely human part of man. It is utterly impossible for it to throw off its shackles and divest itself of the human, and whatever it produces must necessarily partake of the human element. It may rise and explore the ethereal, but its wings will invariably have an earthly flap.

The human mind cannot invent the character of Deity. If it were possible for all the wisdom of the world to be concentrated and combined in one brain, the possessor of that brain could not create the character of Jesus Christ as portrayed in the four Gospels.

Blackstone, in his "Commentaries," speaking of the law of revelation as contained in the Holy Scrip

tures and of the insufficiency of the moral law as discovered in our own consciences as a guide to human conduct without revelation, says:

And if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and perfect, unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task would be pleasant and easy; we should need no other guide but this. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience: that his reason is corrupt and his understanding full of ignorance and error.

This has given manifold occasion for the benign interposition of Divine Providence, which in compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason hath been pleased at sundry times and in divers manners to discern and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation.

Again, Mr. Blackstone, in connection with the same subject, says:

Yet undoubtedly the revealed law is of infinitely more authenticity than that moral system which is framed by ethical writers and denominated the natural law. Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws.

The authors of the four Gospels, assuming for the sake of argument that they fabricated the story of the Christ, had before them as their guide this moral law of the human conscience and the divine law as it had been revealed at that time; but, without the aid of inspiration and without the aid of any

actual facts to guide them according to the claims of infidelity, these four unlearned men, none of whom had ever paid any attention to religious matters before, constructed a system of religion and morality infinitely superior to that inculcated in the Ten Commandments or in all the revelations of the divine will up to that time.

The superiority of the system of morals as interpreted by the Christ over the interpretation given by Moses is so well stated in an opinion of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, reported in No. 46, "West Virginia Reports," page 515, that I take the liberty to quote from it. The case was one in which a young prosecuting attorney was removed from office for immorality, and the defense was that he was not guilty of "gross immorality" within the meaning of the statute. The court, in an opinion delivered by Dent, P., said:

On page 65, Sharswood's "Blackstone's Commentaries," it is said that the illustrious King Alfred adopted the Ten Commandments as the foundation of the early laws of England, contained in his Doom Book. These commandments, which, like a collection of diamonds, bear testimony to their own intrinsic worth, in themselves appeal to us as coming from a superhuman or divine source, and no conscientious or reasonable man has yet been able to find a flaw in them. Absolutely flawless, negative in terms, but positive in meaning, they easily stand at the head of our whole moral system, and no na