Further, the gospels contain the most solemn authentication of the commissions of the apostles, so that whoever rejects their teaching, brings upon himself guilt equal to that of rejecting Christ himself.
"Lo, I am with you alway"--"He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me"--"Whosoever will not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city."
It is, if possible, more absurd to attempt to dissect the morality of the gospel from its history, and to say, "We are willing to receive the Christian code of morals as a very excellent rule of life, and to regard Jesus as a rare example of almost superhuman virtue, but we must consider the narrative of supernatural events interwoven with it as mythological," _i. e._, false. Which is much the same as to say, "We will be very happy to receive your friend if he will only cut his head off." Of what possible use would the Christian code of morals be without the authority of Christ, the lawgiver? If he possessed no divine authority, what right has he to control your inclination or mine? And if he will never return to inquire whether men obey or disobey his law, who will regard it? Do you suppose the world will be turned upside down, and reformed, by a little good advice? Nay, verily, the world has had trial of that vanity long enough. "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in the body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. Knowing, therefore, _the terrors of the Lord_, we persuade men."
Take away the miraculous and supernatural from the gospel history, and there is nothing left for you to accept. There is no political economy nor worldly morality in it. It is wholly the history of a supernatural person, and every precept of his morality comes with a divine sanction.
Further, you know nothing of either his life or his morality but from the gospel history, and if the record of the miracles which occupy three-fourths of the gospels be false, what reason have you to give any credit to the remainder? For, as the German commentator, De Wette, well says, "The only means of acquaintance with a history is the narrative we possess concerning it, and beyond that narrative the interpreter can not go. In these Bible records, the narrative reports to us only a supernatural course of events, which we must either receive or reject.
If we reject the narrative, we know nothing at all about the event, and we are not justified in allowing ourselves to invent a natural course of events of which the narrative is totally silent." So, you see, you can not make a Christ to suit your taste, but must just take the Christ of the gospel, or reject him.
If you reject the testimony of Christ and his apostles as false, and say you can not believe them in matters of fact, how can you respect their morality? Of all the absurdities of modern Infidelity, the respectful language generally used by its advocates in speaking of Christ and his apostles is the most inconsistent. He claimed to be a Divine Person, and professed to work miracles. The Infidel says he was not a Divine Person, and wrought no miracles. The consequence is unavoidable--such a pretender is a blasphemous impostor. And yet they speak of him as a "model man," an "exemplar of every virtue." What! an impostor a model man? A blasphemer and liar an exemplar of every virtue? Is that the Infidel"s notion of virtue? Why, the devils were more consistent in their commendations of his character, "We know thee who thou art, THE HOLY ONE OF G.o.d." Let our modern enemies of Christ learn consistency from their ancient allies. We have also learned from our Master to refuse all hypocritical, half-way professions of respect for his character and teachings from those whose business is to prove him a deceiver, and whose object in speaking respectfully of such a One can only be to gain a larger audience, and a readier entrance for their blasphemy among his professed disciples. From every man who professes respect for Christ"s character, and for the morality which he and his apostles taught, we demand a straightforward answer to the questions: "When he declared himself the Son of G.o.d, the Judge of the living and the dead, did he tell the truth, or did he lie? When he promised to attest his divine commission by rising from the dead on the third day, had he any such power, or did he only mean to play a juggling imposture?
Is Jesus the Christ the Son of the Living G.o.d, or a deceiver?" There is no middle ground. He that is not with him is against him.
The case is just the same with regard to the witnesses of his miracles, death, and resurrection. They either give a true relation of these things, or they have manufactured a series of falsehoods. How can we believe anything from persons so habituated to lying as the narrators of the mighty works of Jesus must be, if those mighty works never were performed? How can we accept their code of morals if we refuse to believe them when they speak of matters of fact? Is it possible to respect men as moral teachers, whom we have convicted of forging stories of miracles that never occurred, and confederating together to impose a lying superst.i.tion on the world? For this is plainly the very point and center of the question about the truth of the Bible, and I am anxious you should see it clearly. A fair statement of this question is half the argument. The question then is simply this, Was Jesus really the Divine Person he claimed to be, or was he a blasphemous impostor? When the apostles unitedly and solemnly testified that they had seen him after he was risen from the dead, that they ate and drank with him, that their hands had handled his body, that they conversed with him for forty days, and that they saw him go up to heaven, did they tell the truth or were they a confederated band of liars? There is no reason for any other supposition. They could not possibly be deceived themselves in the matters they relate. They knew perfectly whether they were true or not.
We are not talking about matters of dogma, about which there might be room for difference of opinion, but about matters of fact--about what men say they saw, and heard, and felt--about which no man of common sense could possibly be mistaken. "That which we have seen with our eyes, which we have heard, 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." Such is their language. We must either take it as truth, or reject it as falsehood. It is utter nonsense to talk of the intense subjectivity of the Jewish mind, and the belief of the apostles that the Messiah would do wonders when he came, and the powerful impressions produced by the teaching of Jesus on their minds. We are not talking about impressions on their minds, but about impressions produced on their eyes, and ears, and hands. Did these men tell the truth when they told the world that they did eat and drink with Jesus after he rose from the dead, or did they lie? That is the question.
3. It is a hard matter to lie well. A liar has need of a good memory, else he will contradict himself before he writes far. And he needs to be very well posted up in the matters of names, dates, places, manners and customs, else he will contradict some well-known facts, and so expose his forgery to the world. Therefore writers of forgeries avoid all such things as much as possible, and as surely as they venture on specifications of that sort they are detected. A man who is conscious of writing a book of falsehoods does not begin on this wise: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being Governor of Judea, and Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip Tetrarch of Iturea and of the regions of Trachonitis, and Lysanias Tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiphas being high priests, the Word of G.o.d came unto John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness."
Here in one sentence are twenty historical, geographical, political, and genealogical references, every one of which we can confirm by references to secular historians. The enemies of the Lord have utterly failed in their attempts to disprove one out of the hundreds of such statements in the New Testament. The only instance of any _public political event_ recorded in the gospel, said not to be confirmed by the fragments of secular history we possess, is Luke"s account of a census of the Roman Empire, ordered by Augustus Caesar. Were it so that Luke stood alone in his mention of this, surely his credit as a historian would be as good for this fact, as the credit of Tacitus, when he states matters of which Suetonius makes no mention, or of Pliny, when he relates things not recorded by Tacitus. But we can account for the want of corroborative history in this instance, when we know that all the history of Dion Ca.s.sius, from the consulships of Antistius and Balbus to those of Messala and Cinna--that is, for five years before and five years after the birth of Christ--is lost; as also Livy"s history of the same period.
It is certain that some one did record the fact, for Suidas, in his lexicon upon the word _apographe_, says, "that Augustus sent twenty select men into all the provinces of the empire to take a census, both of men and property, and commanded that a just proportion of the latter should be brought into the imperial treasury. And this was the first census."
To object to the gospel history, that everything contained in it of the doings of Christ and his apostles in Judea, is not recorded by the historians of Greece and Italy, is much the same as to say that there are a mult.i.tude of facts recorded in D"Aubigne"s History of the Reformation in Germany, of which Hume and Macaulay make no mention in their histories of England. How should they?--treating of different countries, and for the most part of different periods, and writing civil and not church history? Does anybody go to Macaulay to look for the history of the Westminster a.s.sembly, or to Bancroft for an account of the Great Revival in New England? Or is the veracity of Baillie, or Edwards suspected, because political history does not concern itself much about religion? It is enough that not a single statement of the gospel history has ever been disproved.
I might give you quotations from the enemies of the Christian faith, from Josephus the Jew, and Celsus, and Porphyry, heathen philosophers, and from the Emperor Julian, the apostate--who, having been raised a Christian, became a heathen, and used all his ingenuity to overturn the religion of Christ--expressly admitting the princ.i.p.al miracles recorded in the gospel. But I attach no such importance to the testimony of this cla.s.s of persons as to suppose that it should be placed, for one moment, on a level with the testimony of the apostles, or that their testimony to the facts of the life and death of Christ needs any confirmation from such witnesses. We have such overwhelming evidence of the sincerity and truth of the witnesses chosen by G.o.d to bear testimony to the resurrection of Christ, as we never can have of the credibility of any secular historian whatever.
You will remember that these are the writers whose accounts of the existence, the faith and worship, the numbers and morals of the Christian Church, we have seen so strikingly confirmed by their enemies; and we now inquire, Can we believe the other part of their history to be as true? These are the men who taught the heathen a pure Christian morality, one princ.i.p.al article of which was, "Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds"--"All liars shall have their portion in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone"--and we are to inquire if they themselves lied; lied publicly, lied repeatedly, if the very business of their lives was to propagate falsehood, and if they died with a lie in their right hands.
You will remember that we proved conclusively that the belief of the death and resurrection of Jesus did turn immense mult.i.tudes of wicked men to a life of virtue, and now we are to inquire if the belief of a lie produced this blessed result, and whether, if so, there be any such thing as truth in the world, or any use in it?
4. Of no other series of events of ancient history do we possess the same number of records by contemporary historians, as of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We have four direct systematic memoirs of him by four of his companions; and we have a collection of letters by four others, in which the events of the memoirs are continually referred to. At the mouth of two or three witnesses any man"s property and life will be disposed of in a court of justice, but here we have the testimony of eight eye-witnesses of the facts they relate, and they refer to five hundred other persons, the greater part of whom were then alive, who had also seen and heard Christ after his resurrection. These eight persons give us their separate and independent statements of those things they deemed worthy of record in the life and death of Christ, and of the sayings and doings of several of his friends and enemies. Now every person knows that it is impossible to make two crooked boughs tally, or two false witnesses agree. You never saw two lying reports of any considerable number of transactions agree, unless the one was copied from the other.
It is evident that the gospels were not copied from each other, for they often relate different events, and when they relate the same occurrence, each man relates those parts of it which he saw himself, and which impressed him most. Yet the utmost ingenuity of infidelity has utterly failed to make them contradict each other in any particular. Here are eight witnesses to the truth of the same story, four of whom in their letters make occasional allusions to the facts of the history as being perfectly well known, and therefore needing only to be alluded to, yet these cursory references fit into the history with every mark of truthfulness. Does the history of Matthew, written at Jerusalem, tell us that Jesus took Peter, and James, and John up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them? Peter, in his letter, written from Babylon, says, "We were eye-witnesses of his majesty. We were with him in the holy mount."--2 Peter ii. 10. If the history tells how Paul was beaten and cast into prison at Philippi, and his feet made fast in the stocks, and that, nevertheless, he manfully defended his birthright as a Roman citizen, and made the tyrannical magistrates humble themselves, and apologize for their illegal conduct, we find Paul himself, in a letter to a neighboring church, appealing to their knowledge of the facts, "that after we had suffered before, and were shamefully entreated, as ye know, at Philippi, we were bold in our G.o.d to speak unto you the gospel of G.o.d with much contention. For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile. For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloak for covetousness."--1 Thessalonians ii. 2. Hundreds of such undesigned coincidences may be found in the New Testament, confirming the veracity of the several historians and letter writers, and giving that impression of the naturalness and truth of the story, which can neither be described nor disputed. The reader who desires to prosecute this interesting branch of the evidences of Christianity will find an ample collection of these coincidences in Paley"s Horae Paulinae.
This agreement of independent writers is the more remarkable, as the writers were persons of very various degrees of education, of different professions and ranks of life, born in different countries, and writing from various places in Italy, Greece, Palestine, and a.s.syria, without any communication with each other. Matthew was an officer of customs in Galilee; Mark a Hebrew citizen of Jerusalem; Luke a Greek physician of Antioch; James and John owned and sailed a fishing smack on Lake Tiberias; Jude left his thirty-nine acres of land, worth nine thousand denarii, to be farmed by his children when he went forth to preach the gospel; and college-bred Paul carried his st.u.r.dy independence in his breast, and his sail needles in his pocket, and dictated epistles, and cut out marquees and lug-sails in the tent factory of Aquila, Paul & Co., at Corinth. Several of his letters were written in a dungeon in Rome; the last of Peter"s is dated at Babylon; Matthew"s Gospel was penned at Jerusalem, and John"s Gospel and Epistles were written at Ephesus. The agreement of eight such witnesses, of such different pursuits, and so scattered over the world, in the relation of the same story, in all its leading particulars, together with their variety of style and manner, and their various relations of minor incidents, yet without a single contradiction, are most convincing proofs that they all tell truth. Nothing but truth could be thus told without contradiction.
The fact that some considerable difficulties and many minor obscurities in these brief though pregnant narratives, prevent the combination of eight accounts so independent in their sources, and various in their style, and design, and auditors, into a flowing historical novel, a h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s, rounded and squared to our ideas of mathematical precision, is only an additional proof of their truth to nature, which abhors mathematical, as much as truth does rhetorical figures. Like the variety of expression used by American, German, French, and Polish witnesses in our courts of justice, testifying the same facts in their native idioms, though in English words, the apparent discrepancy, but actual harmony, becomes the most decisive test of the absence of any collusion, and consequently of the verity of the facts which such various witnesses unite in testifying. Especially will any such apparent discrepancy resolve itself into our own unskillfulness or ignorance, when we remember that the mists of ages, and the drapery of a strange language, and world-wide removal of residence, and the turning of the world upside down by the progress of Christian civilization, and our consequent ignorance of the thousand little details of every-day life, well known to the writer and his immediate readers, and of the force of expressive idioms, perfectly familiar to them--have rendered us not near so capable of detecting inaccuracies, as those contemporary writers and opponents, who allowed them--if they existed--to pa.s.s unchallenged. Like those antique coins, whose rust-dimmed and abbreviated inscriptions exercise the patience and historic lore of the antiquarian, though neither are needed to declare the precious material, this very rust of antiquity, through which his patience has penetrated, becomes one of the inimitable marks of historic verity. Every year throws some new light on texts difficult to us from our ignorance of those manners, customs, names, and places, which Infidel malice and Christian piety have combined to explore; and from the ruins of Nineveh and the sepulchers of Egypt we receive unlooked-for testimonies to the minute accuracy of the penmen of the Bible.
5. The manner in which the apostles published their testimony to the world bears every mark of truthfulness. Deception and forgery skulk, and try to spread themselves at first in holes and corners, but he that doeth truth cometh to the light. Had the apostles been conscious of falsehood, would they have dared to a.s.sert that Jesus was risen from the dead in the very streets of the city where he was crucified? in the temple, the most public place of resort of the Jews who saw him crucified? and to the teeth of the very men who put him to death? If conscious of falsehood, would they have dared, before the chief priests, and the council, and all the senate of Israel, to a.s.sert that "The G.o.d of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath G.o.d exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. And we are his witnesses of these things, and so is also the Holy Ghost which G.o.d hath given to them that obey him."--Acts v. 30. Would Paul, had he been conscious that he was relating falsehood, have dared to appeal to the judge, before whom he was on trial for his life, as to one who knew the notoriety of these facts, "For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely; for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him: for this thing was not done in a corner."--Acts xxvi. 26. Would such appeals have been suffered to pa.s.s uncontradicted had the statements of the apostles been false?
The boldness of their manner, however, of telling their story, is little, compared with the boldness of the design which they had in view in telling it; which was nothing less than to convert the world. Now the idea of proselyting other nations to a new religion was absolutely unknown to the world at that time. The Greeks and Romans never dreamed of any such thing. They would sometimes add a new G.o.d to their old Pantheon, but the idea of turning a nation to the worship of new deities was never before heard of. The Jews were so indignant at the project, that when Paul hinted it to them, they cried, "Away with such a fellow from the earth, for it is not fit that he should live." And this new and strange idea, of conquering the world for a crucified man, is taken up by a few private citizens, who resolve to overturn the craft by which priests have their wealth, and to bring the kingdoms of the world to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.
Impostors would never have appealed to their power of working miracles as the apostles did; nor could enthusiasts have done so without instant exposure. It is remarkable, that while in addressing those who believed their divine commission, they rarely allude to it (fourteen of the epistles make no allusion to apostolic miracles), but dwell on a subject of far greater importance--a holy life--they never hesitate to confront a Simon Magus, or a schismatical church at Corinth, or a persecuting high priest and sanhedrim with this power of the Holy Ghost. "Tongues,"
says Paul, "are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not;" and this is true of all other miracles. This marks the difference between real miracles and those of pretenders; who have never attempted to establish a new religion by them, or to convert unbelievers hostile to their claims and able to examine them, without immediate exposure. But you never heard of an impostor standing up before the tribunal of his judges and alleging the miraculous cure of a well-known public beggar, lame from his mother"s womb, whom they had seen at the church gate every Sabbath for forty years, and bringing the man into court after such a fashion as this, "If we this day be examined of the good deed done unto the impotent man, by what means he is made whole, be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom G.o.d raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand before you whole."
Such an appeal was unanswerable. "Beholding the man that was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it." Nay, they were compelled to acknowledge "that indeed a notable miracle hath been done by them is manifest to all them that dwell in Jerusalem--we can not deny it."--Acts iv.
The denial of the miracles of the gospel is a modern invention of the enemy. The scribes, and priests, emperors, and philosophers of the first centuries, who had the best opportunity of proving their falsehood, were unable to do so. The persecutors and apostates, whose malice against the Church knew no bounds, never dared to utter a charge of deception against the apostles. Why, then, you ask, did they not all become Christians? Because miracles can not convert any man against his will.
Christianity is not merely a belief in miracles, but the love of Christ, and a life of holiness. There are many readers of this book who would not turn from their sins if all the dead in Spring Grove Cemetery would rise to-morrow to warn them from h.e.l.l. G.o.d does not intend to force any man to become a Christian. He just gives evidence enough to try you, whether you will deal honestly and fairly with your own soul and your G.o.d, and if you are determined to hate Christ and his holy religion, you shall never want a plausible excuse for unbelief; as it is written, "Unto them which are disobedient, Christ is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense." These ancient enemies of Christ acknowledged the reality of his miracles, but attributed them to magical power, or the help of Satan. The Jews said that he had acquired the power of miracles by learning to p.r.o.nounce the incommunicable name of G.o.d. Modern Infidels deny all his miracles save the greatest--the turning of men from their sins. They can not deny that; they can not ascribe it to the power of Satan or of magic, for they do not believe in either; but they follow as nearly in the footsteps of their fathers as possible, when they tell us that mult.i.tudes of men, in every age, and in every land, have been turned from falsehood to truth by the belief of a lie, and from vice to virtue by the example of an impostor!
6. But the strongest proof of the truth of the facts of the gospel is the existence, the labors and sufferings of the apostles themselves.
n.o.body denies that such men lived, and preached, and were persecuted on account of their preaching that Jesus died and rose again. Now, if this was a falsehood, what motive had they to tell it? It was very displeasing to their rulers who had crucified him, and who had every inclination to give them the same treatment. To preach another king, one Jesus, to the Romans, was to bring down the power of the empire upon them. Nothing could be more absurd in the eyes of the Grecian philosophers than to speak of the resurrection of the body. Nor could any plan be devised more certain to arouse the fury of the pagan priesthood, than to denounce the craft by which they had their wealth, and to preach that they are no G.o.ds which are made by hands. The most degraded wretch, who perishes by the hand of the hangman is not so contemptible in our eyes, as the crucified malefactor was in the eyes of the Roman people; nor could anything more disagreeable to the Jewish nation be invented than the declaration, that the Gentiles should become partakers of the kingdom of G.o.d. What then should induce any man in his senses to provoke such an opposition to a new religion, and to make it so contemptible and disagreeable to those whom he sought to convert, if he were manufacturing a lie to gain power and popularity?
The religion they preached was not adapted to please sensual men, nor to allow its preachers in sensual gratifications. "Our exhortation," says Paul--and every reader of the New Testament knows that he says truth--"Our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor of guile." Infidels admit that they preached a pure morality. But it is a long time since men learned the proverb, "Physician, heal thyself."
"Thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege?" It could not, then, be to obtain license for l.u.s.t that these men preached holiness.
There is only one other conceivable motive which should induce men to confederate together for the propagation of falsehood--the design of making money by it. But their new religion made no provision for any such thing. One of their first acts was to desire the church to elect deacons who might manage its money matters, and allow them to give themselves wholly to prayer and to the ministry of the word. Twenty-five years after that they could appeal to the world that "Even to this present hour, we" (the Apostles) "both hunger and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling-place, and labor working with our hands; being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it: we are counted as the filth of the world, and the offscouring of all things to this day." Their book opens with the story of their Master"s birth in a stable, with the manger for his cradle, and one of its last pictures is that of his venerable apostle chained in a dungeon, and begging his friend to bring his old cloak from Troas, and to do his diligence to come before winter.
Unpopular, pure, and penniless, if the gospel story were not true, how could it have had preachers? They at least believed it.
The last and most convincing testimony which any man can give to the truth of a statement of fact is to suffer rather than deny it. Many have wondered why G.o.d allowed his dear servants to suffer so much persecution in the first ages of the Church. One princ.i.p.al reason was to give future ages an irresistible proof of the sincerity and faithfulness of the witnesses for Christ. The apostles lived lives of persecution and suffering for the name of Jesus; sufferings which they might have avoided if they had only abstained from preaching any more in this name.
But, said they, "We can not but speak of the things which we have seen and heard." One who had no personal acquaintance with Jesus, and whose first interview with him was while he was breathing out threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, is converted and called to be an apostle; and behold the prospect Jesus presents to him, "I will show him _how great things he must suffer for my name_." "The Holy Ghost testifieth," says Paul, "that in every city bonds and afflictions abide me. Yet none of these things move me." That at least was a true prophecy. "Seven times," says Clement, "he was in bonds, he was whipt, he was stoned; he preached both in the East and West, leaving behind him the glorious report of his faith, and so having taught the whole world righteousness, and for that end traveled even to the utmost bounds of the West, he at last suffered martyrdom by the command of the governors, and went to his holy place, having become a most eminent pattern of patience to all ages."[80] Hear his own appeal to those who envied his authority in the church, "Are they ministers of Christ, I am more: in labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths often. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep: in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness."--1 Corinthians ii. 23.
Man can give no higher proof of his veracity, than a life such as this, unless it is to seal it with his blood; and this crowning testimony to the truth the apostles gave. Save the aged disciple, who, after torments worse than death, survived to address the persecuted church as, "Your companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ," they all suffered martyrdom for the truth of the gospel history.
Let me again remind you that the gospel is not a collection of dogmas, but a relation of facts; that these twelve men did not preach the death and resurrection of Jesus, because they had read them in a creed, but because they had seen them with their own eyes; that they lived holy lives of toil, and hardship, and poverty, and suffering, in preaching these facts to the world; and that they died painful and shameful deaths as martyrs for their truth. You admit these things. Then I demand of you, "What more could either G.o.d or man do to convince you of their truthfulness?"
The faithful and true witness himself has given you this last, undeniable test of veracity. With the certainty of an ignominious death before him, he solemnly swears to the truth of this fact, and dies for it. "And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living G.o.d, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of G.o.d? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said. Hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven."
Unbeliever, are you prepared to meet him there, and prove him a perjured impostor?
FOOTNOTES:
[80] Wake"s Trans. of Clement, Ep. ad Cor. v.
CHAPTER VIII.
PROPHECY.
"In fifty years all Europe will be either Cossack, or Republican." So prophesied the most sagacious of modern politicians, by the inspiration of genius, calculating the prospects of the future by the light of his past experience. This prediction of Napoleon"s is a very fair specimen of the oracles of human sagacity; which always overlooks the most stupendous facts--such as the conversion of an empire--and the commonest experiences--such as the birth of a brace of conflicting twins from the womb of the Rachel of revolution, when history happens to predict the failure of the self-elected conquering savior. Man learns to believe whatever he fondly desires, to expect what he believes, and to predict what he expects. His predictions are the mirrors which photograph his own moods of mind, rather than views through a telescope directed to the distant cloud-capped mountains of futurity.
But it is confidently a.s.serted that the science of party politics is simply the exercise of the gift of prophetic vision on the theater of civil life; and that a sagacious politician is, within his own sphere, a prophet. He applies the conditions of the past, so far as he knows them, to the calculation of the future. His success proves his sagacity, not his supernatural inspiration. Why should religious predictions be attributed to a different power?
For the very simple and satisfactory reason, that the great majority of the calculations of party politicians are failures, while the predictions of the Bible are verified by the event. Name a dozen leaders of American politics during the last half century, and you name half a score of disappointed presidential candidates, whose unfinished monuments prevent the kindly green sward of oblivion from vailing their disappointments, and check the prayer of the pa.s.sing pilgrim that they may rest in peace; while of the last half dozen who have occupied the presidential chair, and guided the destinies of the most progressive half of the world, not a single man had been suggested by the political leaders even ten years before his election. No wonder politicians become shy of prediction.
But it is alleged, that while on a field so contracted as to become the arena of mere personal partialities it is confessedly difficult to predict the future, on the wider field of the world"s great interests, the well-known uniformity of human pa.s.sions and interests render their results calculable to the sagacious statesman.
Thus Draper argues, that nations, like the individuals composing them, have fixed periods of growth, manhood, decay, decrepitude, and death--more or less rapid, according to the stock and situation. Those who accept that dogma argue that all that is necessary in order to predict the fate of a nation is a correct calculation of its present age; whether of childhood, manhood, or senility.
It is wonderful how rashly men will risk their reputation for common sense on the sound of a plausible a.n.a.logy, which, even were it valid, would not justify the inference drawn from it. For, suppose that there were as fixed laws of national as of individual life, can any man predict the period of the life of any individual, much less his destiny?
May not the life of the nation be as liable to accidents and diseases as that of the individual?
But the claim has been actually made, that the skillful statesman, or philosophic observer, is able to foresee, and foretell, even such accidents. Dean Stanley quotes Mill as suggesting an ordinary sign of statesmanship in modern times: "To have made predictions often verified by the event, seldom or never falsified by it."
Others give a still wider range to prophetic inspiration. They tell us that all genius is prophetic, inasmuch as it grasps general laws, universal in their range, and unvariable in their operation, the application of which to particular events const.i.tutes prediction. The Hebrew prophets were sagacious observers of human nature, and made very shrewd calculations of the future progress of events by a careful induction of the invariable laws of nature from the history of the past.
But there was nothing supernatural in that. Every poet, philosopher, and statesman is more or less of a prophet. Indeed foresight, like insight, is common to all men: a superior degree of this common possession const.i.tutes the prophet. Men of profound insight, or of extensive foresight, are equally rare in all departments of science. Ignorance ascribes to supernatural inspiration the sagacity derived from extensive observation of nature and history; while philosophy traces to the same source the inspiration of Moses and Mohammed, of Isaiah and Apollo, of the Principia, Paradise Lost, and the Apocalypse, of Rothschild, Napoleon, and Bismarck. Some geniuses expend themselves in poems, some in paintings, others in predictions. All are alike imperfect and fallible. Once in centuries, perhaps, we are astonished by the advent of a master, while occasional less perfect attempts and shrewd guesses keep the fires of ambition alive in the human breast.
But if this were a correct account of the case we should have our best prophets as the result of our widest observations of nature and history; the best should come last. The prophets of this nineteenth century should be far ahead of Moses in prophetic foresight, standing as they do on the summit of the observatory built by the experience of forty centuries. Whereas, as a matter of fact, the world knows nothing about these modern prophets, or their predictions. The instances alleged by Rationalists are contemptibly trivial when compared with the Bible predictions. Contrast, for instance, Cayotte"s alleged prediction, that the fate of Charles would befall Louis XVI., and that the rabble would fill Paris with anarchy--with Daniel"s grand historic outline of the four great empires; or with our Savior"s detailed prediction of the siege of Jerusalem. Cayotte"s guess commanded no respect, even while the coming event cast its shadow before it; nor did he profess to utter it in the name of the Great Disposer of all events as the seal and authentication of a revelation of moral duty to man; and so it was of no value to those threatened by the calamity. But our Lord"s predictions were so authoritative in their tone, and so definite in their details, that they enabled his disciples to escape the impending destruction at that time; and their fulfillment has furnished a decisive proof of his divine foresight to all generations.
We are told by men who could not read one of Apollo"s oracles to save their lives, nor recite one of Isaiah"s prophecies to save their souls, that Apollo"s oracles, no less than Isaiah"s, were inspired. Could such persons be prevailed upon to read carefully any single prophetic book of Scripture, with the historic facts to which it refers, or even the briefest abridgment of these facts, such as that contained in The Comprehensive Commentary, they would not thus expose their ignorance alike of heathen and Christian oracles.