that the present writer would hardly have ventured upon an in dependent treatment of these particular themes if he had known beforehand of the existence of the volume, and of its expected publication. He cannot, however, refrain from expressing the gratification which he has felt in finding that the conclusions which he had reached, in his previous occasional studies of the subject, are in close accord with those presented, and confirmed by a wider range of references, in that excellent treatise: which has brought fresh honor to American scholarship, as well as to the mind and the spirit of its accomplished and diligent author.

R. S. STORRS.

BROOKLYN, N. Y., October 25, 1884.

LECTURE I.

EXTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR CHRISTIANITY AS DIVINE THE VALUE AND LIMITATIONS OF ITS PROBATIVE

FORCE.

LECTURE I.

A PARTICULAR and commanding scheme of religion, commonly known by the name Christianity, has for many centuries been in the world. The name is not one given to it in its own early books, but one which, by the common consent of its advo cates and its opponents, has come to describe it. It is primarily presented in a collection of writings, about the date of the authorship of which, or of some of which, there has been prolonged discussion among scholars, but which all now admit to have come from the earlier part of that era of time in which we live from a period not later, at the latest, than the age of Hadrian, or of the first Antoninus.

In these writings, familiarly known in the homes of all of us, are declarations purporting to set forth facts and truths concerning God, on the one hand, and Man, on the other, with the reciprocal relations between them. They include, also, distinctive rules for conduct and for character, which are intimately connected with these alleged declarations of fact. They present impressive warnings, with astonishing correlative promises, as offering incentives for obedience to these rules; both warnings and promises having reference in part to the present experience of man on earth, but in another and larger part to that which is affirmed to be waiting in reserve in realms of being beyond the grave. They all culminate, these Christian writings, in the assertion of the presence in the world at a certain great epoch, synchronizing closely with the historical age of Augustus and Tiberius, of an extraordinary Person: remarkable in power, yet more remarkable in wisdom and character; who lived in obscure circumstances, who attracted no wide immediate attention, who died before his middle manhood by a painful and shameful anticipated death, but who called himself "the Light of the World," who claimed a preeminent relationship with

God, and to whom his followers rendered an homage, with a voluntary service, as singular and transcendent as was his surpassing self-assertion.

The career of this Person, from his birth-place to his sepulchre, and even afterward, to the time of his alleged final disappearance from the eyes of his followers, is traced in these writings, with snch extraordinary grace, vividness, and felicity of narration, as seem to many to make the records quite unequalled in human literature; while, with this principal public career, and the por. trait of character conspicuous in it, are connected also biographical allusions which bring many others incidentally before us, with an account, brief but animated, of the stir which was made in Jewish, Greek, or Roman communities, even among semibarbarous peoples, by the teachings of him whom the narratives present, as those teachings were eagerly distributed by the men who had taken from him their lessons and law.

I am not now concerned to put any interpretation upon these ancient and memorable writings, or to declare what in my opinion is the system of religion which they include. I am not concerned, even, to ask to what precise date they should be ascribed, or by whose pens they were probably written. The only point to which I have occasion to call attention is the fact that they exist, and have long existed; and that there is a something in them, the exact extent and nature of which it is not now my province to indicate, which constitutes the religion known as Christianity. Before the time when these writings were traced upon the first papyrus or parchment, that religion had been declared to individual minds. The writings only seek clearly and permanently to present it to mankind. It is to be found to day in them, in its original meaning and scope, and not in any subsequent writings displacing them, or adding to them discordant elements. Whatever changes have since occurred in human opinion, whatever varieties of controlling interpretation have been sought to be imposed on the New Testament Scriptures, it is undeniable, certainly among Protestant disciples, that they hold Christianity, as nothing else does; and that in them, first and supremely, must be sought the religion whose impression upon history has been positive and enduring.