PREFACE

I

Ir may be well to state the occasion from which this volume sprang and the object at which it aims.

In the summer of 1891 the author received a graceful letter from the Bishop of New York, inviting him to visit that city in the Lent of the following year. The Bishop wrote as the representative of the Trustees of Columbia College. It was their wish to give renewed effect to an old foundation of that celebrated school of science and learning, by endowing a series of Conferences or Discussions, primarily addressed to the students of the college, upon subjects connected with the Evidences of Christianity, to be delivered in some suitable and

convenient church.

The greater number of these Discussions were accordingly spoken in substance in the Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York, in March, 1892. They were preceded by brief services of prayer and praise -perhaps the sweetest and most spiritually harmonious at which the preacher ever assisted. No detail

seemed too irksome for the wise and loving care of the Rev. D. Parker Morgan, D.D. None who were present can ever forget the rapt appearance of the great congregations; or the harmony of purpose imparted by the preliminary devotion, which prepared the worshippers to become hearers and sustained the preacher in his arduous work. The addresses were delivered from notes; but the preacher often derived his inspiration from the moment, and he fears has been unable to recover some thoughts which seemed to awaken interest at the time.

It should be added that a few of the Discussions comprised in the present volume were not delivered in New York. Those upon "a literary evidence of the Resurrection of our Lord" and upon the Conversion of St. Paul in its evidential bearing were spoken in the Chapel of the Protestant Episcopal Theological School in Harvard University upon the invitation of the Rev. William Laurence, Dean of the School, for whose boundless hospitality these words are but a poor return. Two others are added for the sake of giving something like completeness to the course.* The last discourse is a

* The writer, of course, feels that there are still two large gaps in this volume-"The Church" and "The Forgiveness of Sins." He feels that he could not attempt them without another volume.

"Ramsden Sermon," preached before the University of Cambridge immediately after the writer's return from America. It is added mainly from a desire to show what his feelings were to the sister Church of America while the impression made upon him by contact with her Bishops, Clergy, and Laity was still fresh.

II

It is much more important to state precisely the object at which the author aimed.

When he considered seriously how he should best prepare to meet the wishes of the distant friends who had laid upon him so high a task, it appeared to him there were two departments of the field of Christian Evidences to one or other of which he might profitably turn.

The cumulative character of the Evidences of Christianity was a favorite topic with thoughtful Christians in the Oxford of his youth-rather more than forty years ago. It was derived from a pregnant sentence in the " Analogy"-"Probable proofs, by being added, not only increase, but multiply, the evidence." The meaning is this: If that which we are concerned to prove has one strong circumstance or principle of apparent truth, the reasoner succeeds in constituting one improbability of falsehood. But if he succeeds in exhibiting two or three or more such circumstances or principles, a process goes on

beyond simple addition of two or three or more improbabilities of falsehood. The improbability of the simultaneous co-existence of so many characters of truth is something quite different from the separate existence of one or more of these characters of truth.

Let us suppose that there are seven great heads of probable evidence for the truth of Christianity— prophecy, miracles, the morality of the Gospel, the propagation of the Gospel, the existence of the Church, the character of Jesus, the moral and intellectual character formed by Christianity. Certain great prophecies (e. g. the dispersion of the Jews) may, with some plausibility, be attributed to accidental coincidence or to anticipative sagacity; but, after all deductions, a great deal remains quite unaccountable on any hypothesis but that of a miracle in writing. The miracles, or certain of them, may be attributed to successful craft or to the excitement of the uncritical Oriental imagination. But the central miracle of the Resurrection has the obstinate tenacity of fact. It is a pearl which all the acids of criticism can never dissolve. Now, in the perfect and unblemished morality of the Gospel we have a performance of a totally different character. And it brings this difficulty to the objector: If the Resurrection were anything but a fact-whether the body were stolen, or the supposed death were but a swoon, or the alleged appearances were the