he says, "I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne, and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the Elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain !”

Nothing will interest you like the Cross. Nothing can do for you what the Cross has done.

CHAPTER II.

THE TRUTH OF THE CROSS.

WHAT is truth? The poet well replies, ""Twas Pilate's question put to truth itself." Never was there but one individual who could stand forth before the world and say, “I AM THE TRUTH!" It was not Socrates, nor Confucius, nor Mahomet; nor yet Luther, nor Calvin, nor Edwards. Yet one there was, in whom all truth was so concentrated that he was truth itself. It was the child of Mary and the Son of God; it was he who was crucified on Calvary.

We may be interested in the narrative of the Cross; but what if it should turn out to be fiction? If it be a true narrative, what is its import, and what are the truths it embodies! Men need a religion which satisfies their intelligence. We affirm that the Cross furnishes such a religion; that it is the religion revealed from heaven; the only religion that possesses the attraction of truth and certainty, and in which the most sceptical may have immovable confidence. Religion may venture to more than chasten her faith with hope, and timidly trust that the word of the God of truth has not deceived her. She dwells by the well-spring of life, and draws from it the pure waters of salvation. If men may be certain of anything that is not the mere object of sense, they may put confidence in the truth of the Cross. The topics on which it treats are grand and awful, as well as inexpressibly interesting and tender; but it has nothing to

do with vague conjecture, studied mystery, profuse verbiage without meaning, or laborious trifling without intelligence and instruction. It is not a dim uncertainty that rests upon the views there acquired. They are clear and permanent convictions, because they are true. God approves them; and the Holy Spirit, the author of truth and peace, gives them a stability and power which delusion and error can never originate.

The NARRATIVE OF THE CROSS IS ITSELF A TRUE NARRATIVE. This is a simple question of fact. Was there, or was there not, such a person as Jesus Christ, who, under the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, was accused of treason and blasphemy, found guilty, and put to death? The most full and satisfactory account of this transaction is found in the writings of the four Evangelists; which, by the wonderful care of Divine Providence, after having been distinctly recognized from age to age as the works of those whose names they bear, and as the same uncorrupted works as when they came from the pen of their authors, and after having been circulated throughout the whole Christian world, have come down to us in all genuineness and authenticity. Their authors were either deceived or deceivers, or honest and true men. They were not deceived, because the events which they narrate never could have been the creatures of imagination. The wildest enthusiast in the world could not have been the subject of such delusion, as to have believed them real, when they were unreal. Nor were they deceivers. There is every consideration against such an hypothesis which can be furnished by the nature of the case, by their own character and history, and by their published writings. The events and circumstances of the crucifixion are such as never could have been got up by artful and designing men; much less by the illiterate fishermen

of the lakes of Judea, who quitted their nets to announce them to the world. To an impartial mind, their narrative carries the evidence of its verity on the face of it. No impostor ever penned such an account as that in the closing chapters of the four Evangelists-furnishing, as each of them does, in the minuteness of his details, so many continually recurring means of detecting deception if any were practiced. While each narrator speaks for himself, and the variations in his narrative show that each wrote independently, and without any preconcert with the others, each gives substantially the same account; and the seeming inconsistencies, just enough to test the ingenuousness and research of the reader, all disappear upon a careful inspection. Men do not act without a motive. What was the motive of the men who stood before the world as the persevering, unflinching witnesses of the crucifixion, if they were false witnesses? Was it wealth, pleasure, or fame? Was it the poor ambition of being the founders of a false religion, not only at the expense of that which all impostors have ever sought, but in the prospect of poverty, dishonor, suffering and death? Says the celebrated Rousseau, "The history of Jesus Christ has marks of truth so palpable, so striking, so perfectly immutable, that its inventor would excite our admiration more than its hero." Infidels themselves have not ventured to take refuge in the presumption that the narrative of the Cross is not a true history. The events themselves, and the narrators of them, have been canvassed with a severity to which no other facts and no other men have been subjected, for more than eighteen hundred years. It was, as we have already seen, so ordered in the wisdom of Divine Providence, that these events did not take place in a dark and illiterate age. If the

scenes of Calvary were a fable, it is to the last degree absurd to suppose that there was not light, and logical acumen, and learning enough in the Augustan age of Rome, to have demonstrated them to be fabulous. They profess to have taken place at a time and place where strangers of distinction, as well as the entire male population of Judea, were assembled; under the official direction of individuals whose names, character and history, are of sufficient notoriety to have furnished security against everything in the form of imposition. Never was greater opportunity given to the adversaries of Christianity to disprove the narrative, than was given at the time when the event professes to have taken place. The first spot where the apostles were directed to make their first public announcement of it was in Jerusalem itself, and in the presence of his murderers-the last place where, and the last men before whom, they would present themselves, if their testimony was not true. Hence the Jews, while they denied the resurrection of Christ, never thought of calling in question his crucifixion; but gloried in it, and triumphantly adhered to the imprecation, "His blood be on us, and on our children!" Nor have enlightened Pagans withheld from it their testimony. Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny all record it, as a matter of acknowledged history, and as impartial historians deemed it an event too important to suppress; while Celsus, Porphyry and Julian, learned and inveterate infidels as they were, confirm the testimony. Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea, as was his official duty to do, sent an account of the crucifixion to the Emperor Tiberius, and that account was deposited in the archives of the empire. The annals of the Pagan world, to this day, preserve this great fact, as well as the miraculous events that attended it, and also a minute account of the Saviour's