pointed for thee to do." To do, be it again observed,—not to believe. In the third passage, Acts xxvi. 20, it is stated that Paul "shewed first unto them of Damascus, .. that they

should repent and turn to God and do works meet for repentance." But here is no distinguishing doctrine of the Christian system; and if there were, it is not said that he was taught it by the disciples at Damascus.

CHAPTER III.

THE MYTHICAL THEORY.

SOME, who are accustomed to seize upon everything in the gospel histories which may admit of being pressed into a questionable shape, have remarked upon the strong infusion of Hebrew prejudices with which these histories are tinctured. They would have a medium as little colored as possible by any tint of its own, through which to view the life and actions of a divine teacher. And suppose we looked in vain in the gospel relations for any mark of the national or religious education of the writers. What would the infidel have said? Unlettered men the authors of these productions, and yet not a trace to be detected in them, from which the country, age, or early associations of the writers could be inferred! -pure, abstract historians, maintaining always the severest exactitude of philosophical narrative, and free from all those biases by which facts are so often discolored and distorted by the most honest! We need not resort to con

jecture to judge how far this would have been considered a moral coincidence by those never at a loss for an occasion to put the Christian records upon their defence.

Among the views which have been taken of the simple annals of our faith by those who have no propensity for agreeing with common minds is the singular hypothesis, that a large portion of the history of Jesus is a kind of myth, in which the writers have embodied the then existing ideas of the Messianic office in a form patterned after the stories of the Old Testament and adapted to the prevalent taste of that period. What is meant by the term myth I cannot very confidently undertake to say. As employed by Strauss, it seems to be a sort of involuntary fiction, woven around some Scriptural fact, by which the fact itself is magnified or symbolized beyond the original reality. We have an example, as he tells us, in the Four Gospels, whose principal contents he supposes to be ideal, combined with some scanty materials from the actual life of the Saviour, and where the mythical part consists of various superexalted conceptions of the Messiah, produced by natural exaggeration in the progress of time. "We distinguish by the name of evangelical myth," he observes, "a narrative relating directly or indirectly to Jesus, which may be considered, not as the expression of a fact, but

as the product of an idea of his earliest followers."

Were it not for the skepticism Strauss has expressed in regard to the miraculous part of the gospel history, from which many of the coincidences noticed in these volumes are gathered, and for the new coincidences he has unintentionally suggested to me, I should not have deemed his speculations to be properly a subject for consideration here. I propose only a few general observations on them.

He commences with rejecting, as antiquated, obsolete, inconceivable, the idea of the historical reality of the gospel miracles.

What there is so very incredible in the idea of a messenger from heaven being attended by something supernatural in his mission to earth I must confess I do not perceive. Having acknowledged a divine revelation, I have no wonder left for mere sequential and subordinate incidents, however extraordinary, provided they are manifestly adapted to the main object of the revelation itself. As is the principal, so, I am prepared to suppose, would naturally be the concomitants. Some persons, however, seem to overlook this consideration. While they speak as believers of the sublime and solemn message from heaven communicated by Jesus Christ, they appear to have lost sight of the supernatural element involved in the very fact of

his mission, in professing to be shocked by those deviations from the common and familiar processes of Nature which they read of as exhibited in his wonderful works.

Dr. Strauss admits that "it would most unquestionably be an argument of decisive weight in favor of the credibility of the Biblical history, could it indeed be shown that it was written by eye-witnesses, or even by persons nearly contemporaneous with the events narrated." He regards the Gospels as having been compiled from traditionary sources, in which many of the traces of the historical Jesus had become effaced, and the pleasing visions of an imaginative faith substituted in their stead.

All the Gospels, with the exception of John's, are supposed by the great body of Biblical critics to have been written somewhere about thirty or forty years after the death of Jesus.* This date admits of their apostolical authorship, but has a less favorable aspect looking to the Straussian scheme of a traditionary origin. Facts must have spoken with their own voice over so narrow an interval. At the close of this short period, as the learned have gen

* Strauss himself supposes that the greater part of the myths or fictions, which, according to him, were interwoven with the true history of Jesus, and which he regards as forming the great body of our present Gospels, were incorporated into these narratives in the period between the death of Christ and the destruction of Jerusalem, not forty years.