These words, signs, wonders, and mighty deeds (onμɛia, και τέρατα, και δυνάμεις) are the specific appropriate terms throughout the New Testament, employed when public sensible miracles are intended to be expressed. This will appear by consulting, amongst other places, the texts referred to in the note ;* and it cannot be known that they are ever employed to express anything else.

Secondly, these words not only denote miracles as opposed to natural effects, but they denote visible, and what may be called external, miracles, as distinguished,

First, from inspiration. If St. Paul had meant to refer only to secret illuminations of his understanding, or secret influences upon his will or affections, he could not, with truth, have represented them as signs and wonders wrought by him," of "signs and wonders and mighty deeds wrought amongst them."

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Secondly, from visions. These would not, by any means, satisfy the force of the terms, signs, wonders, and mighty deeds;" still less could they be said to be "wrought by him," or, "wrought amongst them:" nor are these terms and expressions any where applied to visions. When our author alludes to the supernatural communications which he had received, either by vision or otherwise, he uses expressions suited to the nature of the subject, but very different from the words which we have quoted. He calls them revelations, but never signs, wonders, or mighty deeds. "I will come," says he, "to visions and revelations of the Lord;" and then proceeds to describe a particular instance, and afterwards adds, "lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given me a thorn in the flesh."

Upon the whole, the matter admits of no softening qualification, or ambiguity whatever. If St. Paul did not work actual, sensible, public miracles, he has knowingly, in these letters, borne his testimony to a falsehood. I need not add, that, in two also of the quotations, he has advanced his assertion in the face of those persons amongst whom he declares the miracles to have been wrought.

Let it be remembered that the Acts of the Apostles de

* Mark xvi. 20. Luke xxiii. 8. John ii. 11-23; iii. 2; iv. 48-54, xi. 49. Acts ii. 22; iv. 3; v. 12; vi. 8; vii. 16; xiv. 3; xv. 12. Heb. ii. 4.

scribed various particular miracles wrought by St. Paul, which in their nature answer to the terms and expressions which we have seen to be used by St. Paul himself.

Here, then, we have a man of liberal attainments, and in other points of sound judgment, who had addicted his life to the service of the gospel. We see him, in the prosecution of his purpose, travelling from country to country, enduring every species of hardship, encountering every extremity of danger, assaulted by the populace, punished by the magistrates, scourged, beat, stoned, left for dead; expecting, wherever he came, a renewal of the same treatment and the same dangers, yet, when driven from one city, preaching in the next; spending his whole time in the employment, sacrificing to it his pleasures, his ease, his safety; persisting in this course to old age, unaltered by the experience of perverseness, ingratitude, prejudice, desertion; unsubdued by anxiety, want, labour, persecutions; unwearied by long confinement, undismayed by the prospect of death. Such was St. Paul. We have his letters in our hands; we have also a history purporting to be written by one of his fellowtravellers, and appearing, by a comparison with these letters, certainly to have been written by some person well acquainted with the transactions of his life. From the letters, as well as from the history, we gather not only the account which we have stated of him, but that he was one out of many who acted and suffered in the same manner; and that of those who did so, several had been the companions of Christ's ministry, the ocular witnesses, or pretending to be such, of his miracles, and of his resurrection. We moreover find this same person referring in his letters to his supernatural conversion, the particulars and accompanying circumstances of which are related in the history, and which accompanying circumstances, if all or any of them be true, render it impossible to have been a delusion. We also find him positively, and in appropriate terms, asserting that he himself worked miracles, strictly and properly so called, in support of the mission which he executed; the history, meanwhile, recording various passages of his ministry, which come up to the extent of this assertion. The question is, whether falsehood

was ever attested by evidence like this. Falsehoods, we know, have found their way into reports, into tradition, into books; but is an example to be met with, of a man voluntarily undertaking a life of want and pain, of incessant fatigue, of continual peril; submitting to the loss of his home and country, to stripes and stoning, to tedious imprisonment, and the constant expectation of a violent death, for the sake of carrying about a story of what was false, and of what, if false, he must have known to be so?

HORE APOSTOLICE;

OR,

THE INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

INTRODUCTION.

THE external evidence, which proves the genuineness of nearly all the books of the New Testament, is far superior to that which attests almost every other work of the same antiquity. A chain of witnesses is continued from the first century down to the present day; while the publicity of the writings, the high importance attached to them, and their wide diffusion, have no parallel in the works of heathen literature. When the Son of God had come down from heaven, assumed our nature, and made atonement by his death for the sins of the world, it was fitting that the records of so stupendous a fact, the title deeds of eternal life to those who believe, should have their authenticity confirmed by ample evidence. Accordingly, no other books, transmitted through so many ages, can offer such full proofs of their genuineness, as the writings of the New Testament.

But the faith of the Christian does not rest simply on this external testimony, however full and conclusive it may be. The word of God contains its own evidence. It exhibits, to the thoughtful and candid inquirer, internal proof that it reveals to us a genuine history, and that this history is the record of a Divine revelation.

In the Hora Paulinæ, Dr. Paley has clearly explained the nature of that argument, to establish the genuineness of two or more separate works, which results from the undesigned coincidences between them, and has then applied it to the Book of Acts and St. Paul's Epistles. The work is perhaps

the most valuable of his writings, at once for the acuteness of observation which it displays, and the remarkable felicity of its reasoning. No one can read it, unless enslaved by some invincible prejudice, and not feel convinced that the letters are genuine, and the history, so far as it runs parallel with them, a true and faithful narrative.

It seems desirable that the same mode of reasoning should be extended still further, and applied, as far as the case will allow, to the whole of the New Testament. No argument is perhaps better adapted to convince gainsayers, or to establish the faith of plain and unlearned Christians. It is true that the Catholic Epistles, and even the book of Revelation, do not lend themselves easily to its application; since they proceed from four different writers, and are brief in extent, or nearly devoid of local and personal allusions. Even the four Gospels themselves present some difficulty if the argument is to retain a simple and popular form. Their resemblances and differences are so peculiar, and have been accounted for so variously, as to complicate and embarrass every argument, which rests on examples of undesigned agreement. It is certain that St. John would have seen the earlier gospels, and highly probable, at least, that St. Mark and St. Luke had seen that of St. Matthew. And hence it plainly becomes a delicate question, how far any particular coincidence can be shown to be, in the full sense of the word, unintentional and undesigned. In the present supplementary work, this branch of the subject is therefore confined, of necessity, within narrow limits; since its complete investigation would demand a distinct treatise, and the prosecution of some deep and difficult inquiries.

The argument, however, is by no means exhausted, within the limits thus assigned. The book of Acts, and the Epistles of St. Paul, yield a variety of additional evidence, besides those coincidences which the Horæ Paulina has developed with such ability. The genuineness and veracity of these books, thus doubly confirmed, supplies a clear and simple proof of several main particulars in the gospel history; while other coincidences in the Gospels themselves, even independent of those which would require a more profound investigation to complete this branch of the argument, and must carry a full conviction of their veracity and historical reality to any thoughtful mind.

The work of Paley conducts the argument to this point,