undred and fifty languages spoken by nine hundred
millions of men, carried by ten thousand heralds to every corner of the
globe, sustained by the cheerful contributions and fervent prayers of
hundreds of thousands of ardent disciples, it is still going forth
conquering and to conquer. Is there any other book so generally read, so
greatly loved, so zealously propagated, so widely diffused, so uniform
in its results, and so powerful and blessed in its influences? Do you
know any? If you can not name any book, no, nor any thousand books,
which in these respects equal the Bible--then it stands out clear and
distinct, and separate from all other authorship; and with an increased
emphasis comes our question, Who wrote it?

With all these palpable facts in view, to come to the examination of
this question as if we knew nothing about them, or as if knowing them
well, we cared nothing at all about them, and were determined to deny
them their natural influence in begetting within us a very strong
presumption in favor of its divine origin, were to declare that our
heads and hearts were alike closed against light and love. But to enter
on this inquiry into the origin of the Book which has produced such
results, with a preconceived opinion that it must be a forgery, and an
imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies
so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a
prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum
of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's
being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could
be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the
happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and
savageness, so will his prejudices be for or against the Bible.

On looking at the Bible, we find it composed of a number of separate
treatises, written by different writers, at various times; some parts
fifteen hundred years before the others. We find, also, that it treats
of the very beginning of the world, before man was made, and of other
matters of which we have no other authentic history to compare with it.
Again, we find portions which treat of events connected in a thousand
places with the affairs of the Roman Empire, of which we have several
credible histories. Now, there are two modes of investigation open to
us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct