fies these speculations with
the recent writers who have adopted them, he is not to be
understood as allowing that these writers have originated
any novel speculations, or excelled the sceptics of former
times in acuteness, or plausibility, or success in urging their
cause. He adopts the method of the Platonic dialogue, and
exhibits a dialectic skill in confounding by objections when
objections can be made to do service as arguments. His frank
admission that he leaves insurmountable objections and
unfathomable mysteries still involved in the theme, a portion
of whose range alone he traverses, should secure him from the
imputation of having attempted too much, or of boastfulness for
what he considers that he has accomplished.

The truculent notice of this book in the Westminster Review
for July is wholly unworthy of the reputation and the claims
of that journal. Probably a careful perusal of the book is an
essential condition for enlightening the mind of the writer,
and for rectifying his judgment, so far as information has
power to promote candor.

The Prospective Review for August, in an article on the work,
for the most part commendatory, though certainly without any
warmth of praise, makes the prominent stricture upon it to be,
a charge against the author of having evaded "the gravest, and
in one sense the only serious difficulty, with which the
evidences he supports have to contend." This difficulty is
defined to be in the question as to whether our four Gospels
are essentially and substantially documents from the pens of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, actual companions and
contemporaries of Him whose life and lessons are therein recorded.
The Reviewer professes to have satisfied his own mind
by an affirmative conclusion on this point. But regarding the
question as the very turning-point, the paramount and vital element
of the existing issue between faith and unbelief, and not finding
it to be dealt with in this volume, the Reviewer considers that
it is evaded. It might be urged in reply, that this question is not
to other minds of such paramount importance, and that its
affirmative answer would not be conclusive, as it would still
leave open other questions; such, for instance, as those which
enter into the theories of Paulus and other Rationalists, and
such as are not even excluded from the incidental adjuncts
of Strauss's mythical theory. It might also be urged, that,
allowing the question to be paramount i