Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/367

* EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 819 character of Jesus, as depicted in the four Gos- pels df the Church, is one of unrivaled excellence, of genuine and unqualified perfection. As a manly character it is surpassingly great, combin- ing strength and gentleness in perfect harmony. It has universally obtained the consent of men to its ideal excellence. But its chief peculiarity re- moves it from the category of the natural, for it is without the stain of sin and possessed of posi- tive holiness in the supreme degree. There is no self-reproach on the part of Christ, no successful accusation against Him by His enemies. On the contrary. He professes sinlessness, and no man refutes Him. Such a character is miraculous, if genuine; and it is genuine, because the disciples could never have invented it. It is not only too lofty for them to invent, but it is of a unique kind, setting forth by example a new kind of excellence which men were not prepared for, the excellence, that is, of perfect gentleness and self- gacrificing love. To produce that character Chris- tianity must be divine. Another branch of this argument is gained from the doctrines of Christianity. The doctrine of Cod. as a personal cause, source, and sustainer of all things, whose character is love, is the confessed acme of human thought, but histor- ically it has not come from human thinking, but from the Jewish-Christian religion. That re- ligion claims to have it from God Himself by revelation ; and no other satisfactory source has appeared or shows any likelihood of appearing. The Christian system of ethics, so contradictory of other systems at its fundamental point, that the root of ethical conduct is love, is now con- fessedly the highest which the mind of man has elaborated. And all the rest of the great doc- trines of Christianity commend themselves as true. Christianity is the only system which fair- ly faces the facts. It is the only system which recognizes and fully defines sin. It is equally unique in giving full recognition to human per- sonality as it is in recognizing the divine person- ality. These facts exhibit the truth of Chris- tianity: and its truth is an evidence of its divinity. (4) Corroborative of these arguments is an- other argument derived from the successes and the extension of Christianity. Abraham was a solitary wanderer, but Israel became a great nation. It survived slavery and exodus, wars and captivity. Its religion gained steadily in control of the people and in purity and exaltation in its view of truth. Christianity was rejected by the nation from which it sprang, but it found new nations in which to become the controlling power. It fell into corruptions, but it recovered from them. It gradually extended its system of truth. It engaged in missionary enterprises from age to age, and is to-day advancing to the conver- sion of all the remaining heathen nations with more system and success than it ever has dis- played. It is the chief influential power in the chief nations of the earth to-day. Its practical power does not appear to have been much diminished by the special antagonism which has been called forth against it by the new thought of our day. This success in extending and main- taining itself affords a strong presumption that its claims to divine origin are correct. (5) When we come to the miracles which are recorded in the Bible, we come to an evidence in behalf of Christianity which itself needs first. EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. a thoroughgoing establishment, in& it is the most controverted element of Christianity in tins age. The progress of natural science, -.villi its emphasis upon the univei a) reign oi law in the world, lias pi oduced i in' com icl ion, in la i eles of just, that unbelieving world to which Christian apologetic are addressed, that a miracle is an impossibility. The miracles of Christianity arc, therefore, now an objection to Christianity, and must first be defended them- selves before they can afford any evidence in behalf of the system. The defense of miracli starts out with the fact of the personality of God. He has made tie world and given it, the laws which are operative within it. He is su- perior to them. If lie wills. He can act in ways above them. His personality gives the oppor- tunity for this, and establishes the possibility of occurrences which the laws of nature, left to themselves, could never produce. The next stage of the argument is the exhibition of a sufficient reason for the occurrence of miracles; and it finds this in the sin and ruin of man, and in the necessity of divine intervention for his saK.il ion. The final stage is the appeal to the testimony that miracles actually did take place. This ap- peal is rendered the easier because Christianity has already established the character and mis- sion of Jesus Christ. If He was what He pro- fessed to be, and what Christianity receives Him as being, God manifest in the flesh, then miracles are natural in a high sense, that is, it would be highly inexplicable if they did not occur. Could a being having the love i'or man that Jesus had pass through the suffering crowds in Caper- naum's streets and not dispense gifts of healing on every side? To us, then, in this day, Chris- tianity, taken as a whole, attests the biblical miracles. They did occur. And that they oc- curred comes in as a subordinate confirmation of Christianity, for we should expect them, since men needed to have the divine manifestly among them for their own comfort and conviction of the truth. The main brunt of the argument, therefore, comes on the biblical testimony to the actuality of the miracles, and hence the character of the documents of primitive Christianity, that is, of the New Testament, becomes of the utmost im- portance; and here the opponents of Christianity have expended no small part of their strength. But it is certain that all four of our Gospels were well known throughout the Church by a.d. 175. for Irena?us, writing not long after that date, has become so used to thinking of them as four that he regards this number as a self-evident propriety, as there are four quarters of the earth, etc. The first three Gospels are very plainly traceable hack through the series of post-New Testament writers to the decade a.d. 00-100, and are pronounced by the Iates! authorities as writ- ten between the years 65 and 93. The fourth Gospel is not so plainly traceable. Justin Martyr has an evident citation of a passage from it. and the Teaching has phrases which have the same ring as the Gospel. The period about the year 100 is 'saturated with .Tohannine thought.' Its contents must have come from the Apostle John in substance at least, though other hands may have had a share in bringing the document to its present form, and may have disarranged a little its true order. It is also substantially Apostolic. Equally certain is it that Paul wrote