rnal evidence is
too strong to be broken, while the Jewish nation exists.

But yet this historical and internal evidence of the authority of the
Old Testament is but the smallest part of that which we possess, who
have the testimony of Christ on this subject. For this testimony removes
the question from the mists of antiquity, and even from the debatable
ground of historic certainty, and resolves the whole process of
searching for, and comparing and examining a host of second-hand
witnesses, into the easy and certain one of hearing the Author himself
say, whether he acknowledges this Book to be his or not. Christians
receive the Old Testament as the Word of God, because Jesus says so.

Now, reader, it is of the utmost importance that you should stop just
here, and give a plain, confident answer to these questions: Dost thou
believe upon the Son of God? Is Jesus the Messiah of whom Moses in the
law, and the prophets, did write? Are you perfectly satisfied of the
truth of the New Testament, and willing to venture your eternal
salvation upon the words of Christ contained in it?

For, if not, of what use is it for you to trouble yourself about the Old
Testament? You might as well waste your time in examining the
genuineness of the bills of a broken bank; they may be genuine or they
may be forgeries; but who cares? They will never be paid. If the first
promises of the bank of heaven, to send the Messiah eighteen hundred
years ago, have been fulfilled, its other paper may be also valuable; if
not, it must be equally worthless. If the New Testament be not of divine
authority, you may place the prophets on the same shelf with the Poems
of Ossian; and then follows the serious consequence, that there is not a
grain of hope left for you or for any man on earth. If Jesus be indeed
an Almighty Savior, and if he has indeed risen from the dead, then,
through the power of his mighty love, your filthy soul may be washed
from its sins, and your mortal body may be raised from the rottenness of
the grave. But if Christ be not risen, you are yet in your sins. You
have no notion that any of the gods of the heathen, or the precepts of
the Koran, can purify your heart. You know well that Infidelity never
sanctified any of your comrades. Conscience tells you that you are not
any better now than you were a year ago, but worse. You are yet in your
sins; and in them you must live and die! Aye, while your immortal soul
lives, while the laws of hu