than
thousands of ordinary volumes could set forth in detail.

Mark the providence that has guarded the book.

Kings and potentates have sought to destroy it. It has been thrown
into the flames. Volume after volume has been burned. But always,
and at the critical moment, some copy has been preserved--here in
the cottage of a devoted peasant at the risk of his life, hidden in
the crevice of a rock from the inquisitor's search, or cast aside by
a careless hand and forgotten amid a pile of swept up dust in a
neglected corner of some impregnable castle; from whence it has come
forth to be copied by slow and painful, yet loving, toil, passed
from house to house secretly as a priceless treasure, then printed
on concealed presses and at last cast forth as living and fruitful
seed.

Men have denounced it and demonstrated that it is false both in
history and science; then, unexpectedly, the stroke of a pick or the
turn of a shovel uncovers some startling witness of its exact truth
and the excuseless folly of those who deny it.

The fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been set aside by the critics
as historically worthless. The excavations in Babylon have brought
to light a tablet with the name of Arioch, the fourth king mentioned
in that chapter, stamped upon it.

The statement in Exodus that Pharaoh forced the Children of Israel
while building his treasure cities to make bricks without straw, has
been treated as a fable. The treasure chambers themselves have been
found, the rooms divided by brick partitions eight to ten feet
thick--and great quantities of these bricks _made without straw_.

Luke says that Sergius Paulus was pro-consul of Cyprus. The critics
denied it and proved thereby the fallibility of the New Testament.

The homely but truth-telling spade, and without consulting the
critic, dug up some coins in the island of Cyprus itself, and on the
coins were stamped both the image and the name of Sergius Paulus.

Luke declares that Lysannius was tetrarch of Abilene; and again the
critics denied it and more than ever discounted Luke as an
historian.

Renan, the plausible and analytical infidel, read the record carved
on the stones of Baalbeck, and announced, openly, that Luke is
correct.

From the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, Tyre and Sidon; from the
trenches of Tel el Armana; by the key words of the Rosetta stone and
the black but speaking face of the Moabite stone; from newly
discovered papyri and parchment