llected in the fourth
volume of Lardner's Credibility of the Gospel History; abstracts of
them, with ample references, in Mosheim and Neander's Ecclesiastical
Histories, and in Stanley's Eastern Church.

[69] Rawlinson's _Historical Evidences_, page 227.

[70] Origen Contra Celsum, passim.

[71] Lardner, Vol. IX. page 358.

[72] In fact, some persons were trying to impose a letter, "as from us,"
containing declarations, that the day of Christ was upon them.

CHAPTER VI.

IS THE GOSPEL FACT OR FABLE?

"For they themselves show of us what manner of entering in we
had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols, to serve
the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us
from the wrath to come."--1 Thess. i. 9, 10.

In the last chapter we ascertained that the Gospels and Epistles were
not forgeries of some nameless monks of the third century--that the
shopkeepers, silversmiths, tent-makers, coppersmiths, tanners,
physicians, senators, town councilors, officers of customs, city
treasurers, and nobles of Caesar's household, in Rome, Antioch, Ephesus,
Corinth, Athens, and Alexandria, could no more be imposed upon in the
matter of documents, attested by the well-known signatures of their
beloved ministers, than you could by forged letters or sermons
purporting to come from your own pastor--and that the documents which
they believed to contain the directory of their lives, and the charter
of that salvation which they valued more than their lives, which they
read in their churches, recited at their tables, quoted in their
writings, appealed to in their controversies, translated into many
languages, and dispersed into every part of the known world, they
neither would, nor could, corrupt or falsify.

The genuineness of the copies of the New Testament, which we now
possess, is abundantly proved by the comparison of over two thousand
manuscripts, from all parts of the world; scrutinized during a period of
nearly a hundred years, by the most critical scholars, so accurately
that the variations of such things as would correspond to the crossing
of a t, or the dotting of an i, in English, have been carefully
enumerated; yet the result of the whole of this searching scrutiny has
been merely the suggestion of a score of unimportant alterations in the
received text of the seven thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine verses