Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

III. THAT THE THINGS WHICH THEY DID NOT SEE, THEY DERIVED FROM THE MOST CERTAIN EVIDENCES, AND DREW FROM THE PUREST SOURCES.

If a man be incompetent to record any thing but that which he sees, history is altogether useless. But a satisfactory degree of certainty is attainable on events of which we were not eyewitnesses; and no one in this assembly doubts the signing of Magna Charta, or the battle of Agincourt, any more than if he had stood by, and seen the one fought, and the seals affixed to the other. We owe much to the integrity of others; and the mutual confidence on which society is founded, requires with justice our assent to thousands of events, which transpired long before we were born, or which, if contemporary with ourselves, were transacted at some remote spot on the face of the globe. Who will affirm that Hume or Rapin, were incompetent to produce an history, which, making some allowances for human prejudices, is worthy the confidence and credit of our countrymen? Yet neither the one nor the other was an eye-witness of more than an insignificant portion of his voluminous production. But if, by drawing from pure sources, a man is to be deemed com

petent to relate facts of which he was not an eye-witness: then, the writers of the Bible, in those particular events of which confessedly they were not eye-witnesses, but which they affirm with confidence, are entitled to our credit. Moses, for instance, on these principles, is competent to the relation of every event recorded in the book of Genesis; although it is admitted that they took place before his birth, and although he goes back to the beginning of all things. From Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Joseph, and from Joseph to Moses, but four persons are necessary to transmit events as they transpired; and these four persons were Methuselah, Shem, Isaac, and Amram, the grandfather of Moses. Those things of which the apostle Paul was not an eye-witness he most surely believed, because he lived with those who were the companions of our Lord through all his ministry, and were present during those very events which he received upon their testimony. There can be no question that he found them men of unshaken veracity. The disciple of Gamaliel was not likely to become the dupe of the designing. He must have had something like evidence to lead him to relinquish the fair prospect of worldly emolument for certain and inevitable suffering: he must have felt something like conviction to destroy the prejudices

which he openly avowed, and which were sufficiently powerful to make him sanction the murder of Stephen. In every instance in which the writers of the Old and the New Testament were not eye-witnesses of the events which they recorded, it will be found, upon the closest scrutiny, that they derived their evidence from the most authentic sources. We shall prove,

[ocr errors]

IV. THAT THEY WERE MEN OF INTEGRITY, IMPARTIALITY, AND CANDOUR.

That they were men of INTEGRITY we gather from the tacit concessions of their most inveterate enemies. A thousand accusations were alledged against them equally cruel, injurious, and unfounded. Every possible effort was made to terrify and to silence them; and scourgings, and imprisonments, and death itself, were added to menaces. They were charged with sedition, while their writings, their preaching, and their conduct, equally and powerfully enjoined, that their followers should "submit to every ordi

nance of man, for the Lord's sake." They were unjustly accused of polluting the temple. It was said that they despised the law, the purity of which they exemplified in their lives, But their integrity was never questioned, and

their statement of facts was never denied. That which they affirmed, they affirmed openly: they affirmed on the spot stained with the Saviour's blood, and on which the facts which they asserted were transacted: they affirmed before a whole people, who were capable of detecting imposition and exposing falsehood, if there had been either the one or the other, and whose determined enmity impelled them to seize every occasion against them: yet amid all this their integrity could not be disputed, and their veracity stood unimpeached. Nay, on all these occasions they boldly dared the trial, they challenged their adversaries to disprove their words, they defied their malice, and openly, and constantly, asserted-" We are witnesses of these "things!"

Their IMPARTIALITY appears in every page of their writings. Their own failings are recorded with singular and unexampled fidelity. They offer no palliation of their conduct--they conceal nothing they alter nothing-they plead nothing. They sacrifice private feelings to the cause of truth. And with the same impartiality with which they record their own shame, they relate the weakness of their friends and fellowdisciples. We will not say, that no tear fell upon the line which consigned to everlasting re

membrance every humiliating circumstance, but that tear was not suffered to erase the narrative; we will not say, that their hand did not tremble as it wrote the sad history, but that hand firmly inscribed the truth, and gave it's faithful evidence against the weakness of it's master. Neither do they conceal a single circumstance of ignominy attending either their Lord or themselves. They relate all the shame of his death, and the degradation to which their conscience compelled them to submit for his sake.

Their CANDOUR is seen in this, that they never magnified the rage of their enemies: never represented their characters more deformed and sanguinary than they really were: never imputed to them motives which they did not avow: never reviled, never reproached them. When they wrote the life of their Lord, it was without eulogy: when they recorded his death, there is no attempt to inflame the mind of the reader : not a single remark is made throughout the whole narrative: if they wept (and surely they did weep) they wept in silence, and no complaint escaped from their pen. A plain, unvarnished tale, is told throughout, and is left to make it's way, unassisted, to the heart and to the conscience. Where shall we find such historians? Even scepticism must admit their integrity, their impartiality, and their candour. We advance,

« AnteriorContinuar »