estament has no doubt been;
largely also it prepared the way for the New. That its influence has
been wholly good cannot be said. It has furnished fanaticism with
aliment and excuse. It has found mottoes for the black flag of
religious war.

Is it possible to believe, in face of doubtful authenticity,
contradictions as to fact, and traces of local superstition, that the
New Testament any more than the Old was dictated by Deity? Inspired by
the creative power, in common with the other works of creative
beneficence, as a part of the general plan, the New Testament may have
been. Its morality is not tribal, but universal. "God is a Spirit;
and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth,"
this beside the well of Samaria by the Founder himself was proclaimed.
If there is any privilege it is in favour not of race, but of class,
the class being the poor, whose poverty seems counted to them as
virtue, perhaps rather to the disparagement of active goodness.

Had the New Testament been divinely inspired, would not its authority
have been clearly attested? Would not the authorship of its books have
been made known? Would the slightest error or self-contradiction have
been allowed to appear in it? What is the fact? The authenticity of a
large portion of the Epistles of St. Paul seems admitted by critics; of
other books of the New Testament the authorship is regarded as
doubtful. The three Synoptic Gospels have a large element common to
them all, and are evidently grafts upon a single document which is
lost, and which the critics generally seem inclined to place not
earlier than the latter part of the first century. The Synoptics all
tell us that when Jesus expired the veil of the Temple was rent. One
adds that there was preternatural darkness; a third that the earth
quaked, that the rocks were rent, that the graves opened, and many
bodies of the saints which slept arose, came out of the graves after
the resurrection of Jesus, went into the holy city, and appeared to
many. Such apparitions plainly must have produced an immense
sensation; such a sensation, it may be assumed, as would have brought
scepticism to its knees. This surely must be legendary, and the legend
must have had time to grow.

Though grafts on the same original stock, the Gospels are often at
variance with each other; as in the case of the genealogy of Jesus,
upon which the harmonists labor in vain; in that of the marvels
attend