nce in his
breast, and his sail needles in his pocket, and dictated epistles, and
cut out marquees and lug-sails in the tent factory of Aquila, Paul &
Co., at Corinth. Several of his letters were written in a dungeon in
Rome; the last of Peter's is dated at Babylon; Matthew's Gospel was
penned at Jerusalem, and John's Gospel and Epistles were written at
Ephesus. The agreement of eight such witnesses, of such different
pursuits, and so scattered over the world, in the relation of the same
story, in all its leading particulars, together with their variety of
style and manner, and their various relations of minor incidents, yet
without a single contradiction, are most convincing proofs that they all
tell truth. Nothing but truth could be thus told without contradiction.

The fact that some considerable difficulties and many minor obscurities
in these brief though pregnant narratives, prevent the combination of
eight accounts so independent in their sources, and various in their
style, and design, and auditors, into a flowing historical novel, a
homogeneous mass, rounded and squared to our ideas of mathematical
precision, is only an additional proof of their truth to nature, which
abhors mathematical, as much as truth does rhetorical figures. Like the
variety of expression used by American, German, French, and Polish
witnesses in our courts of justice, testifying the same facts in their
native idioms, though in English words, the apparent discrepancy, but
actual harmony, becomes the most decisive test of the absence of any
collusion, and consequently of the verity of the facts which such
various witnesses unite in testifying. Especially will any such apparent
discrepancy resolve itself into our own unskillfulness or ignorance,
when we remember that the mists of ages, and the drapery of a strange
language, and world-wide removal of residence, and the turning of the
world upside down by the progress of Christian civilization, and our
consequent ignorance of the thousand little details of every-day life,
well known to the writer and his immediate readers, and of the force of
expressive idioms, perfectly familiar to them--have rendered us not near
so capable of detecting inaccuracies, as those contemporary writers and
opponents, who allowed them--if they existed--to pass unchallenged. Like
those antique coins, whose rust-dimmed and abbreviated inscriptions
exercise the patience and historic lore of the antiquarian, though
neith