been, not far from the middle of the first century. How do you account for these documents? They take for granted that a great. character existed, wrought miracles, founded a society, and that His teachings were of a certain order. The Christian Church is tangible in the first centuries; she leaves her track of blood on all the records of Rome; she buries her sainted dead in catacombs. We go back along the historical adamant with as firm a tread, I hold, as we go back to Webster's oration on Bunker's Hill. Infidelity must face. the outcome of historical investigation, and it is that the mythical theory cannot be maintained.

What is that theory? It is that between the date of Paul's. Epistles, and the assumed date of the birth of our Lord, myths. grew up and added a supernatural element to the Gospel narrative, and that this element was taken for history. The most important. parts of the New Testament literature grew up between the beginning of the second third of the first century and the close of that century, that is in about seventy years. Have myths grown up anywhere else in history in so short a time? Investigations conducted by the acutest experts in ecclesiastical history, rationalists, and infidels, have carried back the date of the earliest New Testament literature to about the last third of the first century, and the disputed facts to which that literature refers, are supposed to have occurred in the second third of the same century. It is a question whether between the upper blade of these shears and the lower, there is room for the mythical theory. When that precious explanation was first put forth by Strauss, its author, it was supposed that there were two or three hundred years for the myths to grow up in. But the shears. have been shut little by little upon this audacious scheme of scepticism. The shears close upon the mythical theory until it has left to it only the years between A.D. 34 and A.D. 60 to account for the growing up of these myths and legends! Serious men have given up the theory for reasons which I gave to you in detail, when Mr. Frothingham came to Boston to teach that out-grown dream of infidelity.* Strauss himself, in his last book, said that the critical mythical theory had all run to leaves. He himself changed the shape of it, and finally abandoned it for a materialistic and substantially atheistic view of the world. He never pretended for an instant that the New Testament literature could be explained by the Old.

It is the delusion of careless minds that we can never come to. historic certainty as to what happened in the first century; and * See "Boston Monday Lectures," Vol. ii., Prelude to Lecture 2,

although that opinion is widespread among those who do not make the subject a special study, a month's serious reading on the historical argument of the Christian evidences would drive all that vapour out of the thoughts. It would be well worth the while of any sceptic here to devote a month to the discussion of the question whether the mythical theory has been exploded or not.

Webster's oration at the dedication of Bunker Hill monument was further off from the battle than the acknowledged date of Paul's Epistles is distant from the chief facts they assume. The New Testament literature came into existence just before and after the end of the first century, and those who wrote it asserted that they had been eye-witnesses of the things which they recorded. They founded a church on their testimony. They sealed their testimony with their lives. The now notorious truth is that documents of indisputable genuineness, the evidence from the existence of a Christian Church, the proof gathered from various profane authors of antiquity, may be put under a man's feet, flag-stone after flag-stone and over the highway thus constructed you may drive back into the first century and take up your position there, nearer to the coming into existence of Christianity than Webster was to the battle fought where now stands yonder historic obelisk.

How are you to account for the coming into existence of the great Christian wave sweeping over Greek and Roman culture, toppling down the throne of the Cæsars, spreading itself over barbaric tribes, and across the Balkans and the Alps and the Rhine and the howling North Sea and England, rolling across the Atlantic itself, and advancing from side to side of this New World, and beyond it to the islands of the western sea and again into Asia, accumulating force all the way? This wave seems likely to end its course only by the enswathement of the entire planet. You are to explain how that wave was started. It is going past you; you hear the surge of its tremendous torrents. What force heaved this earthquake wave out of the first century? The fishermen of Galilee! Myths! That is the best infidelity has ever said on the subject. If I were a lawyer, if I were simply a teacher of the legal profession, like Professor Norton,* who years ago wrote at Harvard University a book on the Christian evidences, wholly from a legal point of view, I should be obliged to walk backward on this old pavement. But the historical evidence he employed has grown brighter under research since his day. You say that this topic is worn. Well, it is worn by battle, and by victories. I placed my hand in old Pompeii in the ruts See his volume on the "Authenticity of the Gospels."

worn by chariot wheels; ruts so deep that my whole hand went out of sight in one of them. I can lie down bodily on these historic flagstones and find the ruts deep enough indeed to cover my whole person; but the deeper they are, the more I trust them. The law of the survival of the fittest has application here. Under eighteen

centuries of the most malignant battle, under the fiercest attack, Christianity has maintained the integrity of these lines of historical defence; and I suppose that the historical attack on Christianity is more hopeless to-day than in any previous age of the world since the second century. You go to Dorner of Berlin. You go to the successors of Julius Müller and Tholuck, and you will find them asserting most emphatically and unqualifiedly that the mythical theory has gone to the wall. There is no longer any important leaning toward it among German scholars, who are experts in the history of the origin of Christianity. There is infidelity in Germany, I know; with the average shopmen there is a bold rationalism of speculation in fashion; but with the experts familiar with the facts which the latest research has brought to the front, you cannot find a single strong man who leans for support on this mythical theory. The only explanation of the New Testament that infidelity has ever made half probable, has been cut into shreds by the shutting of the shears of chronology until only thirty years are between their blades. There is where your mythical theory lies. You have closed the great chronological shears until the mythical theory is so severed that infidelity cannot cover itself by wearing this theory as a wardrobe. It is too short at the top; it is too short at the bottom; it can no longer be worn by any man who is not shameless enough to go dressed in fig-leaves.

16. The historical character of the Christian literature has been vindicated by a mass of evidence more overwhelming than can be adduced in support of the claims of any other mass of documents of equal extent and age.

17. The adequate explanation of the coming into existence of the Christian literature and the Church, is found only in the historical reality of the character represented by the picture of Christ in the Gospels.

The revered preacher to Harvard University I once heard exclaim: "The coming into existence of such a picture as this under the unskilled pencils of such limners is sufficient proof of its reality; and its reality is sufficient proof of its divinity." By divinity he did not mean Deity, but divinity in the sense of Channing's Arianism; and Channing used to treat with the most lofty disdain those who cannot.

see in Christ our Lord more than a man. So, too, doês Thomas Hill, the profoundest mind now representing Unitarianism on this continent. Even Theodore Parker said, "It would require a Jesus to forge a Jesus."

18. Christ's character was more than human in that it was sinless. Christ never repents.

He teaches a religion based on repentance, but Himself never feels the need of repentance. Who convinces Him of sin? This picture! What was it drawn from?

*

19. His teaching was more than human, in that it satisfied, and it only has satisfied, the deepest human wants.

20. His character was more than human, in that He made astounding claims of unity with the Deity, and yet showed no want of humility or balance of soul.

21. If Christ's character was more than human, it is natural to expect something more than human in His works.

22. The miracles He is said to have performed were to be expected from one whose own character is itself the supreme miracle.

* See in Bushnell's "Nature and the Supernatural," the famous chapter entitled, “The Character of Jesus forbids His possible classification with men." See also Ullmann's classical treatise on the "Sinlessness of Jesus ;" and especially Dorner's unsurpassed volumes on the "Person of Christ."

MODERN EVIDENCE OF THE SUPERNATURAL; OR, SPIRITUALISM AS AN "IF."

PRELUDE.

"WHY IS IRELAND STARVING?" THE CAUSES OF HER DISTRESS, AND THE REMEDIES TO BE APPLIED.

DANIEL O'CONNELL, who was a student in France in his youth, left that kingdom on the very day when Louis XVI. lost his head by the guillotine. The young Irishman, as soon as he reached the deck of the packet boat at Cala's, tore from his hat the French tri-coloured cockade, trampled it under his fect, and cast it into the sea. He was governed through his whole life by his well-known saying, that he would accept no social amelioration at the cost of a single drop of blood. If Ireland, through half or quarter of her territory, is really starving, what ought America to send to her? Tons and ship-loads of food, it may be, but not a feather's weight of Fenianism. There were collected in the United States, in little more than twelve years, by the Fenian organization, 626,000 dols.; and of this sum, 425,000 dols., according to the report of the Fenian brotherhood itself, were expended exclusively for Irish revolutionary purposes. America, so far as she is not Irish, is not proud of that record. General Meade, in 1866, drove the Fenians back very briskly when they entered Canada. I believe that if his spirit were with us to-day, and Daniel O'Connell here also, the two would shake hands in repressing the revolutionary spirit of Ireland.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to answer the questions which are in all hearts, as to Ireland's distress, without touching upon the complicated and blazing topic of land tenure in the British Islands. Philanthropy and politics cannot be very well -separated on this theme; but you will remember that I am putting before you no -appeal for American governmental interference. The United States do not interfere in the politics of their neighbours; but philanthropic discussion here may very well concern itself with the woes of any people on the planet. In this house, and at this hour, it is proper for us to ask how far the distresses of Ireland are to be accounted for by a mischievous system of land tenure; and we must raise this question with distinctness, even if we are obliged to ask, also, whether an aristocratic organization of society can long endure in the world, if once the laws of primogeniture and entail are abolished.

Why is Ireland starving? On account of at least twelve causes: the laws of primogeniture and entail, foreign ownership of Irish land, absenteeism of her landlords, the draining of her money into other countries, a system of tenancy-at-will, over-population, exhaustion of the soil, diseases of crops, lack of diversification of industry, Romanism, and American competition.

1. The law of primogeniture accumulates landed property in Ireland and England in the hands of a few persons.