ould have forged such an answer.

John vi. The whole of the conversation recorded in this chapter is in
the highest degree unlikely to be fabricated, especially the part of our
Saviour's reply between the fiftieth and the fifty-eighth verse. I need
only put down the first sentence: "I am the living bread which came down
from heaven: if any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever: and
the bread that I will give him is my flesh, which I will give for the
life of the world." Without calling in question the expositions that
have been given of this passage, we may be permitted to say, that it
labours under an obscurity, in which it is impossible to believe that
any one, who made speeches for the persons of his narrative, would have
voluntarily involved them. That this discourse was obscure, even at the
time, is confessed by the writer who had preserved it, when he tells us,
at the conclusion, that many of our Lord's disciples, when they had
heard this, said, "This is a hard saying; who can hear it?"

Christ's taking of a young child, and placing it in the midst of his
contentious disciples (Matt. xviii. 2), though as decisive a proof as
any could be of the benignity of his temper, and very expressive of the
character of the religion which he wished to inculcate, was not by any
means an obvious thought. Nor am I acquainted with anything in any
ancient writing which resembles it.

The account of the institution of the eucharist bears strong internal
marks of genuineness. If it had been feigned, it would have been more
full; it would have come nearer to the actual mode of celebrating the
rite as that mode obtained very early in the Christian churches; and it
would have been more formal than it is. In the forged piece called the
Apostolic Constitutions, the apostles are made to enjoin many parts of
the ritual which was in use in the second and third centuries, with as
much particularity as a modern rubric could have done. Whereas, in the
history of the Lord's Supper, as we read it in Saint Matthew's Gospel,
there is not so much as the command to repeat it. This, surely, looks
like undesignedness. I think also that the difficulty arising from the
conciseness of Christ's expression, "This is my body," would have been
avoided in a made-up story. I allow that the explication of these words
given by Protestants is satisfactory; but it is deduced from a diligent
comparison of the words in question with forms of expression used i