junior soph
all his life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war!
Ib.
Serm. II. Luke ii. 8.
Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the other gods which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was a god not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention.
, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and Suetonius — above all, of Tacitus and Pliny — outweigh in my mind the positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by Tertullian
.
Ib.