Excerpt from Horae Evangelicae: Or, the International Evidence of the Gospel History; Being an Inquiry Into the Structure and Origin of the Four Gospels, Their Historical Consistency, and the Characteristic Design of Each Narrative Such a view of the gospels, to be tenable for a moment, implies that their composition must be referred to a date very considera bly removed from the events they profess to record. And hence it is maintained, by the patrons of this new theory, that they were not written until the fall of Jerusalem, or even the close of the first century, and that an interval of sixty or seventy years from the crucifixion is enough to account for the rise of such legends, and their reduction into that definite shape in which the history now appears. An hypothesis of this extreme kind, however it may startle by its novelty, or dazzle by its boldness, is too unnatural to last. In our own country at least, there is too much instinctive com mon sense to offer any favourable soil for its propagation. Yet the shew of learning and philosophy, in its chief advocates, may give them, among ourselves, some power to deceive. Even those who reject the theory, as a whole, may not entirely escape its poisonous influence. Admissions respecting errors and in consistency in the gospels, which abound in the replies of foreign critics to the mythical theory, are perhaps only one degree less dangerous than the system they are used to over throw. Some of the premises, on which the infidel scheme of explanation pretends to be founded, are received by many of its opponents in Germany as the certain results of critical inquiry. And no doubt, even if the gospels were as imperfect as these writers maintain, the substantial truth of the history would still be clear, and the essentials of Christianity might remain unim paired. But a closer search will prove how questionable are the claims of this negative criticism. The very parties who reject the plenary inspiration of the gospels, and charge them with anachronism, error, and contradiction, differ in their judgment on almost every particular question on which these charges are founded, and betray continually a looseness of conjecture, and a rashness of hasty inference, which may well destroy all faith in their most confident decisions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.