Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE WEIGHT OF THE DIRECT EVIDENCE OF THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL HISTOR Y. LECTURE III. STjOHN I. 14. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the onlv begotten of the Father, ) full of grace and truth. OUR Christian hope claims to be a new life, having its root in the life of a divine Person, who once revealed Himself on earth as man; first living the divine life in our nature; then dying and rising again; now living in heaven, as the divine yet human Son of God. We want to ascertain whether the belief on which this hope depends, practically as well as theoretically, is a reasonable one. To do this, we have been tracing backward the story of the Christian Church, as far as unquestionable evidence willenable us; that so we may connect the life as it is now seen and felt, both in the Christian Society and in the individual believer of our own day, with the history in which it claims to have had its origin. The process is surely a legitimate one. The existing fact is evidently the outgrowth of a past history, which must explain a great deal of it. We know that history well, and on abundant evidence, as far back as (we will say) the last few years of the second century of our era. We find in the history of the centuries between that point and our own day, a great deal which has modified the fact with which we are concerned, but nothing which can have created it. At the furthest point to which direct and undisputed evidence will carry us, the twofold fact which we are tracing, namely, that of the Christian Society and the Christian life lived in that Society, exists, the same essentially which we see it now. Its causes then must lie yet further back. We know, from pagan historians and statesmen, t…