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THE CLOSE OF HIS HISTORY.

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disappearance. Mark says, "so then, after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God." We might with as much reason infer from this language that they saw him seated on the right hand of God as that they saw him received up into heaven. When he bade them farewell, they concluded of course that he had gone to heaven, and that he was placed at the right hand of the eternal throne, and they express themselves agreeably to this impression. And so Luke says, "and it came to pass while he blessed them, he was parted from them and carried up into heaven." That he was separated from them is clear. They would so naturally conclude that he was carried up to heaven, that we cannot determine from this language whether they mean to say that they saw him carried up, or whether it was only their inference. I can only say that I am deeply struck with the silence of these accounts as to the mode in which Jesus came and went on the various occasions on which he presented himself to his disciples. That he did appear again and again to different individuals, and to large numbers, they fearlessly declare. They are not deterred from stating the fact of his appearance at different times by any apprehension of the doubts that might be started as to the manner in which he appeared and disappeared. If they were conscious of any difficulty on this point, they still do not hesitate to say that he did appear. But I imagine they were unconscious of difficulty. When he was present, they were too much filled with awe, too tremblingly impressed, too anxious to catch every word

that fell from his lips, to speculate about the way in which he came and went. There is to my mind a sublimity in the darkness which wraps the close of this history, analogous to what we perceive in the ways of Providence and nature.

CHAPTER XIII.

CONCLUSION.

"If thou ask to what height man has carried it in this matter, look on our divinest symbol; on Jesus of Nazareth, and his life, and his biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human thought not yet reached. This is Christianity and Christendom; a symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest."

IN works upon the Evidences of Christianity, the question commonly discussed concerning the Four Gospels is, were they written by the persons whose names they bear?' as if the settlement of this point were the strongest possible confirmation of our faith. But, I confess, all that I can learn of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, does not give me so lively a confidence in the authors of these histories as is created in me by the histories themselves. To say merely that they are honest and impartial, appears to me most inadequate praise. By studying them in the manner which I have now attempted, I find my conceptions of the honest, the true, the candid, en

THE CHARACTER OF THE EVENTS RELATED.

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larged and enlightened. The character of Jesus is not more truly a revelation of moral greatness than these wonderful writings are, in their style and structure, of the quality of truth. That this is strong language I am aware; and perhaps there is little in the foregoing pages that seems to justify it. Still I do not wholly despair of having given the candid and intelligent reader some idea of the grounds upon which rests the conviction I have already expressed, that nowhere in the writings of the dead, or in the characters of the living, do I discern evidences of integrity and singleness of mind so luminous and affecting as those presented in the Four Gospels.

I beg the reader to pause for one moment, and consider the character of the events which constitute the sum and substance of these narratives. How tremendously exciting must they have been! The blind seeing, the lame walking, the dead raised, the wretched and the profligate collected in crowds, listening to words of mercy and hope, multitudes thronging the highways bringing their sick, and pressing upon one another like the billows of a heaving sea! If Jesus of Nazareth spoke and acted and suffered as he is here represented, how must the minds of men have boiled around him! How closely and with what power must he have approached their passions, prejudices, sentiments! How must he, as with a giant's hand, have broken up all the fountains of wonder and fear and awe and hope, and made all hearts overflow with one or another passion!

Could you have been present, and by some strong philosophic effort, could you have torn off your atten

tion from the absorbing interest of those scenes, and asked yourself the simple question, how can any idea of these things ever be communicated to those who do not see them, you would have exclaimed at once and aloud, "It is impossible!" It is impossible!" You might have glanced around upon those eager multitudes, but where would you have discovered a single calm observer? Where would you have seen a single eye that was not like a burning coal, a single bosom that was not heaving in tumultuous and overpowering sympathy with the unprecedented spectacle? You would indeed have seen One there, all calm and collected, the producer of all this emotion; but the dovelike serenity of his demeanour would only have tended to deepen in your eyes the mystery and excitement of the scene. I repeat it, you would have felt that it was impossible that any accounts could ever be given of events so exciting, save such as were wretchedly inadequate, or so coloured and exaggerated as to convey no just conception of the truth. When we witness anything that stirs up our feelings-any uncommon burst of eloquence, for instance-we either give up in despair every attempt to describe what we have witnessed, or, in the attempt to describe it, the reality is most sadly marred and dwarfed, and we take that single step which separates the sublime from the ridiculous.

Look now at the accounts which have come down to us of the wonderful words, works, and sufferings, of that unrivalled being who appeared some ages since in Judea. Perhaps they give us but a faint idea of the strange and stirring events of which they treat,

CREATED HIS BIOGRAPHERS.

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and with all our efforts, our impressions, in distinctness and intensity, must fall far, very far short of those which were made upon the actual witnesses of the life of Jesus. The power of language was not equal to so great a subject. Still from these records, such as they are, we derive ideas of moral beauty and greatness, to which no page in the world's history furnishes anything that we can compare. An instance of moral life is disclosed to us which stands alone and unapproached in its wholeness and symmetry. At the same time, abundant evidence is afforded in the course of these narratives that all around Jesus were more or less the creatures of feeling, ignorance, and prejudice, fettered by superstition, beguiled by coarse hopes and dreams of outward splendour. Who were they, our curiosity is immediately aroused to ask,who were they that, among those excitable and excited crowds, were able to observe so calmly, and report so correctly; to look on and listen with eyes and ears and hearts so true, that, with a slight effort, we are able, in some few instances at least, to feel almost as if we were present on the spot, and the things related were passing visibly before us? To this question there is only one answer. The character of Jesus must have created his biographers. Whoever they were, whatever were their names, they must have been persons who by intimate association with him had imbibed some measure of his spirit, and that spirit, calm and true, had wrought upon their minds, to subdue the tumults of feeling, to chasten their imaginations, to subordinate their sensibility to the Wonderful to their sensibility to the True; in fine, to

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