Our author produces such a mass of evidence from the early writers, confirmatory of the truths of the Gospel, that his criticism tends to opposite conclusions. Supposing he can prove that the canon of Scripture is not unassailable, he has not accomplished much. It is of more value to have confirmation of the facts and principles of Divine truth, than to be assured that the authorship, construction, compilation, or arrangement of the Scriptures, are just what the Church of Rome authoritatively pronounced. Because we cannot positively settle certain questions of little comparative importance, are we to surrender our faith in essentials? Are we to let the conjectures and queries of German cavillers, with their "Yea, hath God said," destroy our cherished faith and hope? God forbid! It is not the preservation or infallibility of the apostolic writings which makes His incarnation, death, and resurrection, facts in the history of our race. The facts make the history, not the history the facts. Europe was saved from Oriental despotism by Leonidas at Thermopylæ, and the valour and patriotism of the Greeks; by Charles Martel in the eighth century; and again by Prince Eugene in the seventeenth century; but it is not because history has truly or imperfectly recorded these facts that we enjoy to this day the great benefits resulting to civilisation from their heroism.
The truth of Christianity does not, at all events, rest on the quotations of the early Fathers, and our author would have accomplished but little had he proved that there were none found. In the first ages of the Church, when the events were fresh, the voice of the preacher was the channel which conveyed the saving gospel to the souls of men, and there was not the same necessity for reference to the written records as in after times. When a century had elapsed after the death of Christ, then the records of the first disciples became of importance. They then came into prominence, and were abundantly quoted, as our author acknowledges. As time went on that importance increased, and about three hundred years after the events the Emperor Constantine ordered Eusebius to have fifty copies of the Holy Scriptures fairly inscribed on parchment, the use whereof he tells Eusebius he "knew to be absolutely necessary to the Church." Eusebius gives us the emperor's entire letter. They were not so absolutely necessary when most of the Fathers wrote whom our author has referred to. I do not want any written record to prove to me that the Spaniards in the Peninsular War, seventy years ago, poisoned the bread of the British troops. I lived in my youth with an old Christian soldier and his wife who were in the campaign, and used to amuse me with their experience of such facts, as we sat round the fire on a winter's evening. Nor of the American War of Independence do the people of the present generation depend entirely on writings or books for the proof that it took place. Two lives reach from date to date, and no evidence can be stronger than such.
Until we have better reason than our author has adduced for altering our estimate of these sacred writings, so often assailed, but maintaining serenely, century after century, their high pretensions as a message from heaven to culture our moral and spiritual nature, and guide us thither, we should be foolish, oh, how foolish! to question their authority or neglect their guidance. Because we cannot be sure that the Bible is in every detail the perfect transcript of Divine revelation, we are to abandon the only solace that humanity possesses, the only theory which accounts for the wickedness which, without its teaching, is such an anomaly to all else in creation, the only bond which binds society in brotherhood, and makes social existence capable of including happiness here, or the hope of life hereafter. Better a misunderstood revelation than none at all. Better a glimpse of immortality, than the negation which is utter darkness, and makes the issue of existence only death.