Church, we have seen so strikingly confirmed by their enemies;
and we now inquire, Can we believe the other part of their history to be
as true? These are the men who taught the heathen a pure Christian
morality, one principal article of which was, "Lie not one to another,
seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds"--"All liars shall
have their portion in the lake that burneth with fire and
brimstone"--and we are to inquire if they themselves lied; lied
publicly, lied repeatedly, if the very business of their lives was to
propagate falsehood, and if they died with a lie in their right hands.
You will remember that we proved conclusively that the belief of the
death and resurrection of Jesus did turn immense multitudes of wicked
men to a life of virtue, and now we are to inquire if the belief of a
lie produced this blessed result, and whether, if so, there be any such
thing as truth in the world, or any use in it?

4. Of no other series of events of ancient history do we possess the
same number of records by contemporary historians, as of the life,
death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We have four direct
systematic memoirs of him by four of his companions; and we have a
collection of letters by four others, in which the events of the memoirs
are continually referred to. At the mouth of two or three witnesses any
man's property and life will be disposed of in a court of justice, but
here we have the testimony of eight eye-witnesses of the facts they
relate, and they refer to five hundred other persons, the greater part
of whom were then alive, who had also seen and heard Christ after his
resurrection. These eight persons give us their separate and independent
statements of those things they deemed worthy of record in the life and
death of Christ, and of the sayings and doings of several of his friends
and enemies. Now every person knows that it is impossible to make two
crooked boughs tally, or two false witnesses agree. You never saw two
lying reports of any considerable number of transactions agree, unless
the one was copied from the other.

It is evident that the gospels were not copied from each other, for they
often relate different events, and when they relate the same occurrence,
each man relates those parts of it which he saw himself, and which
impressed him most. Yet the utmost ingenuity of infidelity has utterly
failed to make them contradict each other in any particular. Here are
eight witnesses t