App. II.

TEST OF THEIR VERACITY.

121

theory of the strict inspiration of the Evangelists. Weisse himself has drawn very ably a distinction between juridical and historical truth, that is, the sort of legal truth which we should require in a court of justice, and that which we may expect from ordinary history. But in his own investigations he appears to me constantly to lose sight of this important distinction; no cross-examination in an English court of law was ever so severe as that to which every word and shade of expression in the Evangelists is submitted. Now this may be just in those who admit a rigid verbal inspiration; but those who reject it, and consider the Evangelists merely as ordinary historians, have no right to require more than ordinary historic acouracy. The Evangelists were, either—

I. Divinely inspired in their language and expressions as well as in the facts and doctrines which they relate. On this theory the inquirer may reasonably endeavour to harmonise discrepancies; but if he fails, he must submit in devout reverence, and suppose that there is some secret way of reconciling such contradictions, which he wants acuteness or knowledge to comprehend.

II. We may adopt a lower view of inspiration, whether of suggestion or superintendence, or even that which seems to have been generally received in the early ages, the inflexible love of truth, which, being inseparable from the spirit of Christianity, would of itself be a sufficient guarantee for fidelity and honesty. Under any of these notions of inspiration (the definition of which word is, in fact, the real difficulty), there would be much latitude for variety of expression, of detail, of chronological arrangement. Each narrative (as the form and the language would be uninspired) would hear marks of the individual character, the local circumstances, the education, the character of the writer.

III. We may consider the Evangelists as ordinary historians, credible merely in proportion to their means of obtaining accurate knowledge, their freedom from prejudice, and the abstract credibility of their statements. If, however, so considered (as is invariably the case in the German school of criticism), they should undoubtedly have all the privileges of ordinary historians, and indeed of historians of a singularly rude and inartificial class. They would be liable to all the mistakes into which such writers might fall; nor would trifling inaccuracies impeach the truth of their general narrative. Take, for instance, the introduction of Cyrenius, in relation to the census in the beginning of St. Luke's Gospel. In common historical

122

AUTHENTICITY OF THE EVANGELISTS.

BOOK L

inquiry, it would be concluded that the author had made a mistake. as to the name, his general truth would remain unshaken, nor would any one think of building up a hypothesis on so trivial and natural an inaccuracy. But there is scarcely a work of this school without some such hypothesis. I confess that I am constantly astonished at the elaborate conclusions which are drawn from trifling discrepancies or inaccuracies in those writers, from whom is exacted a precision of language, a minute and unerring knowledge of facts incident to, but by no means forming constituent parts of, their narrative, which is altogether inconsistent with the want of respect in other cases shown to their authority. The Evangelists must have been either entirely inspired, or inspired as to the material parts of their history, or altogether uninspired. In the latter, and indeed in the more moderate view of the second case, they would have a right to the ordinary latitude of honest narrators; they would, we may safely say, be read, as other historians of their inartificial and popular character always are; and so read, it would be impossible, I conceive, not to be surprised and convinced of their authenticity, by their general accordance with all the circumstances of their age, country, and personal character.

• Non nos debere arbitrari mentiri | clarandamque sententiam, nihil quiquemquam, si pluribus rem quam dem rerum, verborum tamen aliquid audierunt vel viderunt reminiscentibus, addat, cui auctoritas narrandi concessa non eodem modo atque eisdem verbis, est, sive rem bene tenens, non assequaeadem tamen res fuerit indicata: aut tur quamvis id conetur, memoriter sive mutetur ordo verborum, sive alia etiam verba quæ audivit ad integrum pro aliis, quæ tamen idem valeant, enuntiare. Augustin. De Consens. verba proferantur, sive aliquid vel Evangelist. ii. 28. Compare the whole quod recordanti non occurrit, vel quod passage, which coincides with the ex aliis quæ dicuntur possit intelligi general view of the Fathers as to this minus dicatur, sive aliorum quæ magis question, in c. 50. St. Augustine dicere statuit narrandorum gratiâ, ut seems to admit an inspiration of guidcongruus temporis modus sufficiat,ance or superintendence. In one passage aliquid sibi non totum explicandum, he seems to go farther, but to plunge sed ex parte tangendum quisque sus (with respect be it spoken) into inextri cipiat; sive ad illuminandam de- | cable nonsense, iii. 30; see also 48.

APP. III.

EARLY EVANGELIC HISTORY.

123

APPENDIX III.

INFLUENCE OF THE MORE IMAGINATIVE INCIDENTS OF THE EARLY EVANGELIC HISTORY ON THE PROPAGATION AND MAINTENANCE OF

TIIE RELIGION.

ances,

A CURIOUS fact occurs to those who trace the progress of religious opinion, not merely in the popular theology, but in the works of those, chiefly foreign writers, who indulge in bolder speculations on these subjects. Many of these are men of the profoundest learning, and it would be the worst insolence of uncharitableness to doubt, with the most sincere and ardent aspirations after truth. The fact is this:-Certain parts of the evangelic history, the angelic appearthe revelations of the Deity addressed to the senses of man (the Angelo-phaniai and Theophaniai, as they have been called)— with some, though not with all this class of writers, everything miraculous, appears totally inconsistent with historic truth. These incidents, being irreconcileable with our actual experience, and rendered suspicious by a multitude of later fictions, which are rejected in the mass by most Protestant Christians, cannot accord with the more subtle and fastidious intelligence of the present times. Some writers go so far as to assert that it is impossible that an inquiring and reasoning age should receive these supernatural facts as historical verities. But if we look back, we find that precisely these same parts of the sacred narrative were dearest to the believers of a more imaginative age; and they are still dwelt upon by the general mass of Christians, with that kind of ardent faith, which refuses to break its old alliance with the imagination. It was by this very supernatural agency, if I may so speak, that the doctrines, the sentiments, the moral and religious influence of Christianity, were implanted in the mind, on the first promulgation of the Gospel, and the reverential feeling thus excited, most powerfully contributed to maintain the efficacy of the religion for at least seventeen centuries. That which is now to many incredible, not merely commanded the belief, but made the purely moral and spiritual part of Christianity, to which few of these writers now refuse their assent, credible.

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LANGUAGE OF REVELATION.

BOOK 1.

An argument which appears to me of considerable weight arises out of these considerations. Admit, as even the rationalist and mythic interpreters seem to do, though in vague and metaphysical terms, the divine interposition, or at least the prearrangement, and effective though remote agency of the Deity, in the introduction of Christianity into the world. These passages in general are not the vital and essential truths of Christianity, but the vehicle by which these truths were communicated; a kind of language by which opinions were conveyed, and sentiments infused, and the general belief in Christianity implanted, confirmed, and strengthened. As we cannot but suppose that the state of the world, as well during, as subsequent to the introduction of Christianity, the comparative rebarbarisation of the human race, the long centuries in which mankind was governed by imagination, rather than by severe reason, were within the design, or at least the foreknowledge, of all-seeing Providence; so from the fact that this mode of communication with mankind was for so long a period so effective, we may not unreasonably infer its original adoption by Divine Wisdom. This language of poetic incident, and, if I may so speak, of imagery, interwoven as it was with the popular belief, infused into the hymns, the services, the ceremonial of the Church, embodied in material representation by painting or sculpture, was the vernacular tongue of Christianity, universally intelligible, and responded to by the human heart, throughout these many centuries. Revelation thus spoke the language, not merely of its own, but of succeeding times; because its design was the perpetuation as well as the first propagation of the Christian religion.

Whether then these were actual appearances or impressions produced on the mind of those who witnessed them, is of slight importance. In either case they are real historical facts; they partake of poetry in their form, and, in a certain sense, in their groundwork, but they are imaginative, not fictitious; true, as relating that which appeared to the minds of the relators exactly as it did appear.

This, of course, does not apply to facts which must have been either historical events or direct fictions, such as the resurrection of Jesus. The reappearance of an actual and well-known bodily form, cannot be refined into

one of those airy and unsubstantial appearances which may be represented to, or may exist solely through, the imaginative faculty. I would strictly maintain this important distinction.

APP. III.

THE "ACCOMMODATION" THEORY.

125

Poetry, meaning by poetry such an imaginative form, and not merely the form, but the subject-matter of the narrative, as, for instance, in the first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke, was the appropriate and perhaps necessary intelligible dialect; the vehicle for the more important truths of the Gospel to later generations. The incidents, therefore, were so ordered, that they should thus live in the thoughts of men; the revelation itself was so adjusted and arranged in order that it might insure its continued existence throughout this period. Could, it may be inquired, a purely rational or metaphysical creed have survived for any length of time during such stages of human civilisation?

I am aware that this may be considered as carrying out what is called accommodation to an unprecedented extent; and that the whole system of what is called accommodation is looked upon with great jealousy. It is supposed to compromise, as it were, the truth of the Deity, or at least of the revelation; a deception, it is said, or at least an illusion, is practised upon the belief of man.

I cannot assent to this view.

From the necessity of the case there must be some departure from the pure and essential spirituality of the Deity, in order to communicate with the human race,-some kind of condescension from the infinite and inconceivable state of Godhead, to become cognisable, or to enter into any kind of relation with material and dimly-mental All this is in fact accommodation; and the adaptation of any appropriate means of addressing, for his benefit, man in any peculiar state of intelligence, is but the wise contrivance, the indispensable condition, which renders that communication either possible,

man.

is precisely the case: the very marvellousness of the few circumstances thus preserved accounts in some degree for their preservation, and at the same time for the kind of dimness and poetic character with which they are clothed. They are too slight and wanting in particularity to give the idea of invention: they seem like a few scattered fragments preserved from oral tradition.

b By all those who consider the ❘ served by different Evangelists. Thi knowledge of these circumstances to have reached the Evangelists (by whatever notion of inspiration they may be guaranteed) through the ordinary sources of information, from the reminiscences of Mary herself, or from those of other contemporaries, it would be expected that these remote incidents would be related with the greatest indistinctness, without mutual connexion or chronological arrangement, and different incidents be pre