HERE then is the issue which the wavering disciple is bound seriously to consider. Taking into account the various questions, whose answers, on the one side or the other, form the sum total of evidences for or against the claims of Christian faith; the genuineness and authenticity of the documents; the judgment and good faith of the writers; the testimony to the actual occurrence of prophecies and miracles, and their relation to the religious teaching with which they are connected; the character of the teacher himself, that one portrait, which, in its perfect purity and holiness and beauty, stands alone and unapproached in human history or human fiction; those rights and ceremonies of the elder law, so significant as typical of Christ, so strange and meaningless without him; these predictions of the promised Messiah, whose obvious meaning is rendered still more manifest by the futile ingenuity which strives to pervert them; the history of the rise and progress of Christianity, and its comparison with that of other religions; the ability or inability of human means to bring about the results which it actually accomplished; its antagonism to current ideas of the age and country of its origin; its effects as a system on the moral and social condition of subsequent generations of mankind; its fitness to satisfy the wants and console the sufferings of human nature; the character of those by whom it was first promulgated and received; the sufferings which attested the sincerity of their convictions; the comparative trustworthiness of ancient testimony and modern conjecture; the mutual contradictions of conflicting theories of unbelief, and the inadequacy of all of them to explain the facts for which they are bound to account;—taking all these and similar questions into full consideration, are you prepared to affirm as the result of the whole inquiry, that Jesus of Nazareth was an imposter, or an enthusiast, or a mythical figment; and his disciples crafty and designing, or well meaning, but deluded men? For be assured that nothing short of this is the conclusion which you must maintain, if you reject one jot or tittle of the whole doctrine of Christ. Either he was what he proclaimed himself to be,—the incarnate Son of God, the divine Saviour of a fallen world—and if so, we may not divide God’s Revelation and dare to put asunder what he has joined together,—or the civilized world for eighteen centuries has been deluded by a cunningly devised fable; and he from whom that fable came has turned that world from darkness to light, from Satan to God, with a lie in his right hand.