eference to some foregoing volumes--as one might read
Abbott's Life of Napoleon without needing at the same time to study the
History of the Crusades--but that you have taken up a continuation of
some former work--the last volume in fact of the Old Testament--and that
you can not understand even the first chapter without a careful reading
of the foregoing volumes. Before you have finished the first chapter you
meet with the most unequivocal assertion of the harmony of the gospels
and the prophecies, and of the divine authority of both--"_Now all this
was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the
prophet_," etc. The whole tenor of the New Testament corresponds to this
beginning, teaching that the birth, doctrine, miracles, life, death,
resurrection, ascension, and second coming of the Lord, are the
fulfillments of the Old Testament promises and prophecies; of which no
less than a hundred and thirty-nine are expressly quoted, beginning with
Moses and ending with Malachi.

We can not explain this by saying, with the mythical school of
interpreters, that this was merely the opinion of the writers of the
gospels and of the Jews of their age; whose longings for the Messiah led
them to imagine some curious coincidences between the events of Christ's
life and the utterances of these ancient oracles to be ready
fulfillments; and that Christ did not deem it needful in all cases to
undeceive them. For to suppose that Christ--the Truth--would sanction or
connive at any such sacrilegious deception, is at once to deprive him,
not only of his divine character, but of all claim to common honesty. So
far from the Jews longing for any such events as those which fulfilled
the prophecies, they despised the Messiah in whom they were fulfilled,
and refused to believe in him; and his disciples were as far from the
gospel ideal of the Messiah, when Jesus needed to reproach them with,
"_O fools, and slow of heart, to believe all that the prophets have
spoken._"[155] It was not the Jews, nor yet the disciples, but the Lord
himself who perpetually insisted on the divine authority of the Old
Testament as the _Word_ of his Father, and the sufficient attestation of
his own divine character, after this manner: "_Ye have not his word
abiding in you; for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not. Search the
Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they
which testify of me. * * * Had ye believed Moses, ye