This completes the Gospel of the Infancy. Angels and shepherds, magi and prophets, even a Herod king of Judea-all have done their several parts, all prophecies are so far fulfilled, all the parallelisms of history are duly observed, all traditional types are realised in their antitype; expectation is satisfied; a glory is on the brow of the divine babe; and the child returns into Galilee, to Nazareth, there to grow, and wax strong in spirit, and be filled with wisdom and with grace.

After all, there is a truth in that idea or tendency of the Hebrew mind to which we owe these legends of the birth and infancy of the world's Saviour. It seems a strange conceit perhaps, on a first view, that of supposing that every prophet must needs be like every other prophet; coming into the world by the same sort of miracle, subjected in infancy to the same sort of peril, and delivered by prodigy and marvelnothing to be done without a fulfilment of some old prophecy. And so it is a strange conceit, when spun out in this way into detail and literality; but still there is a truth at the bottom of it. There are parallelisms of a very remarkable sort, in the comings and goings of reformers and their reforms. The great strife of the Two Principles, and of the men and the institutions respectively representative of them, goes on, in all ages and under all its forms, very much after one type. We may trace certain leading analogies in the ways of God with man, that will rarely deceive us. The history of moral truth very much the same in one age that it is in another age. Its nativity is commonly cast in poverty, neglect and storm, as

is

'It was the winter wild

While the heaven-born child

All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lay.'

It is born in an evil time; perhaps under some Herod of a king, in some Judea of priests, bigots and pharisees, all conspiring together to kill it; born before the world is ready for it; there is no room for it in this inn. Yet there is a Providence with it still: angels of God are over it, the sons of the morning shout over its cradle for joy, in music sweet

which wins some ears; and gentle hearts ponder what these things shall mean; and old hearts grow young again, and chant their Nunc dimittis; and it visibly grows in stature and in favour both with God and man. Its beginnings are ever small; when it comes, it comes not with observation ; men question, for a long time, of a new gospel, whether this be that which should come, or whether they are to look for another. And it gets persecuted, is a sign to be spoken against, and many a sword pierces the hearts that love it. And it gets disappointed too: the kingdom of heaven always seems to be coming, and coming, yet does not come. The hope that Time will run back and fetch the age of gold,' or run forward and fetch the millennium; that 'speckled vanity will sicken soon and die,' does not realise itself: for

wisest Fate says, No!

This must not yet be so.'

Things go on slowly in God's world; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. Yet it is growth, whether we see it or not with the naked eye; growth like that of the least of seeds into the greatest of trees; growth like that of this planet, from the early times which geological science alone chronicles, into our world; growth like that of Christ's six hours, or three hours, on the cross, into a divine worship of sorrow' that lasts eighteen centuries; growth calmly onward, as are all the vital forces of great wonder-working nature. Storms do their work, and pass away. Clouds come and go, but the Eternal Sunshine remains behind the clouds, just looking through from time to time to shew that it is there. Frauds, follies, vanities, ambitions pass away-they have no root in them—but Truth lives, the Immanuel, the eternal God-with-us.

LECTURE III.

I ADVERTED, in the first of these Lectures, to our want of any clear, decisive external evidence of what theologians call the genuineness of the gospel histories; that is, their authorship by men bearing the names, occupying the position, or even living in the age of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This genuineness is not a proved point. The advocates of Christianity are in the habit of assuming more largely, and inferring more promptly, in this matter, than the real state of the evidence at all warrants. The fact is, we cannot quite confidently trace our four gospels higher up into antiquity than somewhere past the middle of the second century; that is, we do not find in ecclesiastical literature, until that time, clear quotations from written gospels that we can certainly identify with the gospels in our canon. How long these books existed before that, we do not know. What the first oral tradition of the Life of Jesus was, we do not know. How that tradition might have got altered, in different localities and under different influences of opinion and feeling, what elements it may have taken up, and what it may have parted with, we do not know. How near our gospels come to the first tradition, and to the reality which that tradition more or less truly represented —in other words, to what extent they possess the true historic character, the eye-and-ear-witness character-we do not know. We know that there were a good many gospels in the early times of Christianity, and that, within about a century and a quarter after the death of Jesus, these four had come to be the gospels, known and read of all men, while the others gradually died out: but why these four, and only these, more than any other four-who wrote them-when, where, with what materials-all this belongs to the debatable ground of literary history.

Ꭰ

In the deficiency and ambiguousness of the external evidence on this matter, our recourse must be to the internal evidence. As nobody that we can trust distinctly tells us that these books possess the strictly historical character, we must judge of them by what they are in themselves—see if they look like histories. Do these unknown men, whom, for convenience-sake, we may still continue to call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John-do they write, on the whole, and taking one with another, like eye and ear witnesses recording facts which they have seen and heard? Do they write even like careful and favourably posited inquirers, recording fact and only fact -fact diligently and accurately sifted-fact unmixed with fable, undefaced by legendary additions or improvements?

I think not. Looking at the books in a broad, general way, comparing one with another, and judging all by the impression which all collectively make, it does not seem to me that they exhibit, with anything like constancy and thoroughness, the characteristics of legitimate history. Parts, here and there, have a wonderful air of naturalness and verisimilitude; but the books, taken as a whole, puzzle one. They are the most difficult books in the world to make anything of in the way of a history-a clearly developed succession of events that can be supposed to have actually occurred. The discrepancies are endless. And it is not true-what we have so often and so long been told—that these discrepancies are of such a kind as to enhance general credibility by excluding particular collusive agreement. They are not of that kind. The discrepancies of the gospels are not like those which arise between different witnesses, seeing and reporting different parts of one and the same thing: they are too marked and wide for that. It must have been a work of time to produce versions so different as we again and again have of one event; so that repeatedly it is a question with harmonists, whether we have two facts, or only two various readings of one fact. They seem to be not independent testimonies that we have, but independent traditions: the wide divergence of the rays indicates and measures remoteness from the centre.

I shall not go much into detail on a matter of this kind;

those who feel sufficient interest in it may investigate it for themselves; but just compare, in a rough, general way, those two versions of Christ and Christianity which we have—the one in the first three gospels taken collectively, and the other in the fourth gospel-and say which of these is historical. We have two distinctly different Christs, two different Christianities, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, on the one hand, and in John, on the other. The events are different, the localities are different, the tone and spirit of the Teacher, the mode of his teaching, the substance of it-all these things are different in the one exhibition from what they are in the other. On the one side of the comparison, we have Galilee for Christ's local centre of action; the interest of the whole revolves around Capernaum and the Lake; if he temporarily leaves Galilee, a special reason is commonly assigned for it; and he appears in Jerusalem but once, at the crucifixion-passover. On the other side, we have Jerusalem for Christ's local centre of action; he appears in Jerusalem five times; four times that he leaves Jerusalem or its neighbourhood, a reason is specially assigned for it; the interest of the whole revolves around Jerusalem and the Temple. The Galilean Christ is a great exorcist, a caster-out of demons: the Jerusalem Christ does not one of that description of wonderful works. Then the one Christ is in marked contrast to the other, as a Teacher. The Christ of the Galilean gospels is a moral reformer, popular and practical, a prophet, a preacher of righteousness, whom the common people hear gladly: the other Christ is a mystic, a theologian of the Alexandrine school, discoursing of his divine sonship, his coming down from heaven, the need of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and other things of that kind; he is perpetually mystifying and puzzling his auditors, and he really seems to do it on purpose. The Galilean Christ loves to speak in parables; the parable is the most characteristic feature of his way of teaching: the Christ of the fourth gospel never speaks in parables; there is not a parable in the whole book. The Galilean gospels (especially the first, which is perhaps the nearest, on the whole, to the earlier tradition) are all about the kingdom of heaven:' the fourth gospel has not