Chapter 3

Origen was born in the year one hundred and eighty-five of the Christian dispensation, and lived sixty-eight years. He gives in his writings five thousand seven hundred and sixty-five quotations from the New Testament. Tertullian gives eighteen hundred and two quotations from the New Testament. Clemens, of Alexandria, labored in the year one hundred and ninety-four. He gives us three hundred and eighty-four quotations from the New Testament. Ireneus lived in the year one hundred and seventy-eight. He gives us seven hundred and sixty-seven quotations from the New Testament, making a grand total of eight thousand seven hundred and twenty-three quotations, given by four ancient writers.

If all the copies of the New Testament in the world were destroyed, the whole, with the exception of eleven verses, could be reproduced from the writings of men who lived prior to the Nicene Council. Unbelievers quote from all ancient heathen authors as though they were books of yesterday, without manifesting the least doubt in reference to their authenticity or authorship. The evidences necessary to establish genuineness of authorship are ten-fold greater in the case of the New Testament Scriptures than in the case of the histories of Alexander, Julius Cæsar and Cyrus, as given by ancient writers.

The notoriety of the New Testament writings during the first centuries is without a parallel among all ancient writings. Their effect upon society during those centuries can never be explained in harmony with unbelief. But this is not all that is to be considered. Their notoriety extends over the centuries between us and the times of the apostles. Such notoriety is the grand support upon which the New Testament stands. All other ancient writings stand upon the same kind of evidence, but this kind of evidence is more than ten-fold greater in the support of our religion than it is in the support of any other ancient documents.

We may obtain some idea of the influence of the New Testament Scriptures during the first centuries from the statements of Gibbon. He says there were "six millions of Christians in existence in the year three hundred and thirteen." It is reasonable to allow that there were three millions in the year one hundred and seventy-five. Under the best emperors of the second century books were cheap. Thousands of persons engaged in writing histories for a livelihood. It is allowed that there were as many as fifteen thousand copies of the four gospels in circulation among the people in the last quarter of the second century. This state of things seems to convey the idea that it would be hard work to introduce successfully any corruption into the text after this period of time. It would be too easily detected.

There is also a grand argument in favor of the genuineness of our religion, which is in the fact that it was in deathly opposition to both Judaism and Paganism, its success being the destruction of both. If Christianity was an imposition, its success during the first three centuries of our era is utterly inexplicable.

WHAT PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AND DONE WITHOUT THE BIBLE.

Our ancestors complained of the reign of wickedness; we complain of it and our posterity will complain of it. I sometimes think we are all a set of complainers and grumblers.

Of ancient pagans it is said: "They worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator." Of their idols Persius, who was a Roman satirical poet, born A.D. 34, said:

"O, cares of men! O, world all fraught With vanities! O, minds inclined Towards earth, all void of heavenly thought!"

Sedulius, an ancient Christian poet, and by nativity a Scotchman, says of the same:

"Ah! wretched they that worship vanities, And consecrate dumb idols in their heart-- Who their own Maker, God on high, despise, And fear the works of their own hands and art! What fury, what great madness doth beguile Men's minds that man should ugly shapes adore Of birds, or bulls, or dragons, or the vile Half-dog, half-man, on knees for aid implore."

One of their own poets jests them thus:

"Even now I was the stock of an old fig tree, The workman doubting what I then should be, A bench or god, at last a god made me."

The Romans, for a time, were without images for any religious use, but afterwards they received into their city the idols of all the nations they conquered; and as they became the lords of the whole earth, they became slaves to the idols of all the world. Seneca says: "The images of the gods they worship, those they pray unto with bended knees, _those_ they admire and adore, and contemn the artificers who made them."

The character and condition of their gods was worse than their own. The common opinion touching their god of gods, _Jupiter_, was that he was entombed in Crete, and his monument was there to be seen. Lactantius _wittily_ says: "Tell me, I beseech you, how can the same god be alive in one place and dead in another; have a temple dedicated to him in one place and a tomb erected in another?" Callimachus, in his hymn on _Jupiter_, calls the Cretians liars in this very respect. He says:

"The Cretians always lyars are, who raised unto thy name A sepulchre, that never dyest, but ever art the same."

Lactantius informs us in book 10, chapter 20, that they gave divine honor to notorious common prostitutes, as unto _goddesses_, to _Venus_, or _Faula_, to _Lapa_, the nurse of _Romulus_, so called among the shepherds for her common prostitution, and to Flora, who enriched herself by her crime, and then, by will, made the people of Rome her heir, and, also left a sum of money by which her birthday was yearly celebrated with games, which, in memory of her, they called _Floralia_. They claimed that their great goddess, _Juno_, was both the wife and sister of Jupiter; and Jupiter, and the other gods, they held, were no better that adulterers, sodomites, murderers and thieves. Such was not held in private but published to the world. They were described by their painters in their tables, by their poets in their verses, and acted by their players upon their stages. (Lactantius, b. 5, ch. 21.)

As respects the manner in which they worshiped their gods, Alexander, in his Dierum Genialium, b. 6, ch. 26, insists that the most odious thing in their history was the effusion of human blood in the service of their gods. This same author says, "This unnatural, barbarous practice spread itself well nigh over the known world; it was in use among the Trojans, as it seems from Virgil's lines touching Æneas:

"Their hands behind their backs he bound whom he had destined A sacrifice unto the ghosts, and on whose flames to shed Their blood he purposed."--_Ænead._

Some ignorant infidels seem at a great loss to understand why the Lord should order the groves and altars of the heathen destroyed. (Again and again their groves were cut down.) The children of Israel were to make no offerings in the groves. If infidels will only exercise common sense inside of the history of the worship of Priapus and Berecynthia, they will cease fretting over the destruction of those beautiful forests. Those groves were the most corrupt places upon the earth, places of retirement from the altar into prostitution, carried on as a matter of worship pleasing to Priapus. Here, on account of becoming modesty, the half can not be told. The removal of nuisances in our own country is conducted upon the same principles upon which groves were destroyed by the Israelites.

Lycurgus dedicated an image to laughter, to be worshiped as a god, and this is said to be "the only law he ever made pertaining to religion." While his great object was to make warriors, he ordained some things noted for the education of youth. He ordained other laws so much in favor of lust and all carnality of the worst kind, that it might justly be said he made his entire commonwealth ludicrous. He instituted wrestlings, dances and other exercises of boys and girls naked, to be done in public at divers times of the year, in the presence both of young and old men. Adultery was also approved and permitted by the laws of Lycurgus. Plato and Aristotle advocated community of women, of goods and possessions, to the end that no man should have anything peculiar to himself, or know his own children. This was ordained by Plato, in order to establish in the commonwealth such a perfect unity that no man might be able to say, that is thine, or this is mine.

Aristotle, in the second book of his "_Politiques_," sets forth many other detestable things. Lactantius, in the third of his Divine Institutions, shows that Plato's community of property and women took away frugality, abstinence, shamefacedness, modesty and justice itself.

Plato, like Lycurgus, ordained that young men should, for the increase of their physical strength and agility of body, at certain times exercise themselves naked; that girls and servant-maids should dance naked among the young men; that women in the flower of their youth should dance, run, wrestle and ride with young men naked as well as they, which, says Plato, "whosoever misliketh understandeth not how profitable it is for the commonwealth."

The morality of ancient times may be clearly seen in the fact that all manner of debasing things were brought to the front. How could men be persuaded that adultery should be punished when they were taught from infancy that it was a virtue among the gods? _Lucian_ gives his experience thus, "When I was yet a boy, and heard out of _Homer_ and _Hesiod_ of the adulteries, fornications, rapes and seditions of the gods, truly I thought that those things were very excellent, and began even then to be greatly affected towards them, for I could not imagine that the gods themselves would ever have committed adultery if they had not esteemed the same lawful and good." To all this it may be added that the opinions of the ancient philosophers concerning virtue, vice, the final happiness, and the state of the spirit after death, were diverse and contradictory. The Epicurean doctrine was, that sovereign happiness consisted in pleasure. They granted a God, but denied his Providence; so virtue was without a spur, and vice without a bridle.

The Stoics also granted a Divine Providence, but they maintained such a fatal necessity that they blunted the edge of all virtuous efforts and excused themselves in vicious conduct. Both Stoics and Epicureans doubted the immortality of the human spirit, and thereby opened the way to all manner of licentiousness.

I am persuaded that eternity alone will fully reveal the consequences of a denial of a future life and retribution; it is a physical leprosy which removes all the most powerful incentives to virtue and loosens up the soul to all manner of lustful gratifications.

A man once remarked: "I have lived four years an avowed infidel. I have boasted that I would live a good man and die an infidel. I have formed the acquaintance of all the leading infidels of my country, and I am now prepared to candidly confess that I do not believe any man can keep a good heart without the fear of God. Such is my observation and experience."

THE LATEST EVOLUTIONARY CONFLICT.

THEY FIRST WISH IT TO BE SO, THEN SOON, WITHOUT PROOF, THEY ASSERT THAT IT IS SO!

(_From the Cincinnati Gazette, of June 26, 1880._)

"Prof. Huxley is assured that the doctrine of evolution, so far as the animal world is concerned, is no longer a speculation, but a statement of historical fact, taking its place along side of those accepted truths which must be taken into account by philosophers of all schools."

This statement was the summing up of an address delivered at the Royal Institution on the 19th of March. The address was specifically an account of "The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species"--it being nearly twenty-one years since Darwin's work bearing that name was first published.

The lecturer glanced at the general replacement of the catastrophic theory of geology by the uniformitarian hypothesis, claimed that many of the most important breaks in the line of the descent of plants and animals had been filled, noticed the great advance made in the science of embryology, and held that the amount of our knowledge respecting the mammalia of the Tertiary epoch had increased fifty-fold since Darwin's work appeared, and in some directions even approaches completeness. The lecture closed with these words: "Thus when, on the first of October next, 'The Origin of Species' comes of age, the promise of its youth will be amply fulfilled and we shall be prepared to congratulate the venerated author of the book, not only that the greatness of his achievement and its enduring influence upon the progress of knowledge have won him a place beside Harvey, but, still more, that, like Harvey, he has lived long enough to outlast detraction and opposition, and to see the stone that the builders rejected become the head-stone of the corner."

This is plain and emphatic speaking, but it has not been suffered to pass unchallenged.

Dr. Charles Elam, a writer who has already more than once measured swords with the school of naturalists of which Professor Huxley is a foremost champion, has been moved to respond to this latest utterance. He has contributed to the _Contemporary Review_ a paper entitled "The Gospel of Evolution," which, whatever may be its conclusiveness, is one of the sharpest attacks recently sustained by the opposing party. Acknowledging at the start Mr. Darwin's pre-eminence as a naturalist, and Prof. Huxley's equal accomplishments in the department of biology, he yet ventures to continue his doubt regarding the evidence of their peculiar doctrines. He first cites Darwin's admissions that it would be fatal to his theory if any organs existed which could not have been evolved by minute selective modifications, and his further concession that "man, as well as every other animal, presents structures which, as far as we can judge, are not now of any service to him, nor have been so during any former part of his existence. Such structures can not be accounted for by any form of selection or by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts."

Having contrasted Darwinism proper with its exaggerations, in the system of Haeckel, who regards Darwin's admissions of an original creation as contemptible, and recognizes only one force in the universe--the mechanical, Dr. Elam compares Huxley's statement in his American addresses that belief which is not based upon evidence is not only illogical but immoral, with his last assertion that evolution is a fact, doubted only by persons "who have not reached the stage of emergence from ignorance." In 1862 Huxley also said--republishing the statements as late as 1874:

"Obviously, if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are coeval with the commencement of life, and if their contents give us any just conception of the nature and the extent of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in any one group of animals or plants is quite incompatible with the hypothesis that all living forms are the results of a necessary process of a progressive development, entirely comprised within the time represented by the fossiliferous rocks."

Since this confession was uttered, whatever discoveries may have been made, there has not been the faintest indication of the development of any new species by artificial selection, the individuals of which are fertile among themselves and infertile with the parent stock. It may properly be alleged that there has not been time enough for such a slow process, but it yet remains as true as ever that there is no direct evidence in nature of what the Darwinians call _favorable variation_. It is the unwritten law of nature that one race must die that another may live, this other, in its turn, subserving the same end. Without this law nature would be a chaotic impossibility. If natural selection were a real agency, we ought to meet with frequent, if not constant, evidences of transition, and a slow and gradual, but perceptible improvement in species, especially marked in those whose generations succeed each other rapidly. But we see nothing of the kind. But did selection really exist, it would be incompetent to account for a multitude of structures and functions to which any efficient cause should be applicable, notably to the earliest rudiments of useful organs. Such organs as the eye and the internal ear are quite out of reach of any explanation by natural selection. Since the development of the eyes, due to the simultaneous growth of parts from within and without, the organ itself would be absolutely useless until it had attained such a degree of development as to admit of these separate parts meeting, and so the principle of preserving any useful variety would be quite inapplicable. The same is true of the internal ear.

Dr. Elam next passes in review Haeckel's Geneology of Man from the Lowest Monera to his Present Station as Lord of Creation. What the Germans call invention of species to fill troublesome gaps is illustrated in many ways, but we have room only for a single example:

"The vertebrata must be developed from something, and as yet there has been no smallest indication of anything like a spine or a rudiment of anything that could represent or be converted into one. It costs our author nothing but a stroke of his pen to invent the 'Chordonia,' and whence did they come? They were developed from the worms by the formation of a spinal marrow and a _chorda dorsulis_. Nothing more--the most trifling modification!--and we are at once provided with the root and stem of the whole vertebrata divisions. It is scarcely any drawback to this stroke of genius to say that there is no evidence whatever that such an order of living beings ever existed; that no one has the least conception of what they were like, or of any of their attributes. Prof. Huxley's responsibility for this imaginative science is evidenced by his declaration that the conception of geological time is the only point upon which he fundamentally and entirely disagrees with Haeckel."

It still remains true that all our positive and direct knowledge as to species contradicts the evolution hypothesis. Its evidence is purely inferential, and, as Dr. Elam quietly says, "As a psychological study it is interesting to observe how many things are deemed impossible to the infinite wisdom and power (which by the terms of the supposition, presided over the arrangements of our world) which are perfectly clear and comprehensible when considered as the result of blind chance and the operation of mechanical causes only." Omitting for lack of space his keen analysis of Huxley's claim of the evidence of evolution from the orchippus to the modern horse, we follow our author from his array of what is not proved to what is actually taught by geology. We quote:

"THE SUCCESSION OF FORMS OF LIFE ON OUR GLOBE IS DEMONSTRABLY NOT SUCH AS OUGHT TO BE THE CASE ON THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION." It was not the small and feeble species or most generalized forms that first appeared, either among mollusks, fish, reptiles or mammalia. We look in vain now for the representatives of the gigantic fishes of the Old Red Sandstone. And where are the mighty reptile tyrants of air, earth and water of the Oolite? * * * These races appeared in the plenitude of their development and power; and, as their dynasty grew old, it was not that the race was improved or preserved in consequence, but they dwindled, and were, so to speak, degraded, as if to make room in the economy of nature for their successors.

Next follows a closely linked argument that will not bear abridgement, showing the physical improbability that man, a walking animal, was descended from a climbing one, and the deplorable consequences which obliterate free will and necessitate the secularization of morals, as elaborated by Prof. Huxley's friend, Mr. Herbert Spencer. This part of the subject has a special interest to Americans, since the work in which Mr. Spencer's views are inculcated has been introduced as a manual in one of our oldest colleges, but its reproduction would widely lengthen our article. It is sufficient to say that Dr. Elam concludes that Mr. Spencer's doctrine, that "actions are completely right only when, besides being conducive to future happiness, they are immediately pleasurable," would justify him in concealing any injury done by him to a friend's scientific apparatus, provided he could attribute it to the weather, or the intrusion of a dog.

Such, in brief, are the points of an essay which, as a whole, is one of the most brilliant responses that the declarations of leading evolutionists have called forth. Of course, all its points are not new, but old objections have been skillfully refurbished and new ones brought into play.

* * * * *

To mourn for the dead, is to mourn for the lost casket when you still retain the jewel it held. The memories of the dead one's virtues are the jewels, and the cold clay but the casket.

AUTHORSHIPS OF THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

I have a few questions to put to every man who says Christianity is not true. They are these: If Christianity is not true, where did it come from? How came it into the world? What is its origin? These questions are not trifling ones. Infidels have given as many different answers to them as there are days in the week. There is no agreement among them that amounts to a settlement of the questions among themselves. The Scriptures are ancient. Porphyry, born at Tyre in 233, wrote a book against them, which was burned by order of Theodosius the Great, in the year 304. (Zell's Encyclopedia.)

The Emperor Julian, born in the year 331, and Hierocles, who lived in the fourth century, both wrote against Christianity, against the Scriptures, but did not call in question the existence of Christ, nor the fact that he wrought miracles.

Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher who lived in the second century, was the author of a work written against Christianity, entitled "Logos Aleethees," that is, "Word of Truth." To this work Origen replied. Celsus, in this work, quotes from the gospels by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and does this over and over, and shows that the Christians valued the books very highly; they suffered death rather than repudiate them.

A TABLE OF THE ANCIENT TIMES OF TRIAL AND OF PEACE.

DATE--

A.D. 64 to 68--Persecution under Nero. 95 to 96--Persecution under Domitian. Banishment of John. 96 to 104--Time of peace. 104 to 117--Persecution under Trajan. Martyrdom of Ignatius. 117 to 161--Time of peace. Apologies of Aristides, Quadratus and Justin Martyr were written. 161 to 180--Persecution under Marcus Aurelius. Martyrdom of Polycarp and the martyrs of Lyons. 164--Justin Martyr was put to death.

Statistics concerning the sufferings of the first Christians show that they were in great earnest. Eternity alone will reveal the true number of the martyrs. They all suffered and died just as we would expect, in case they knew the facts of our religion. Twenty-two books of the New Testament were written before the martyrdom of the Apostles Paul and Peter. Infidels often boast, in their ignorance, that the books of the gospels were not written by those whose names they bear.