J: JHALCOMBE, M.A.

RECTOR OF BALSHAM AND RURAL DEAN OF NORTH CAMPS

SECOND EDITION

LONDON

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE

1888

Havard College Library
July 1, 1914.
Bequest of

Georgina Lowell Putnam

"That ye may believe that JESUS is THE CHRIST, THE Son of GOD; and that believing ye may have life in HIS NAME."

S. JOHN XX. 31.

Deposited in
ANDOVER-HARVARD LIBRARY

(The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.)

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

MORE than one of my critics think that I have exaggerated the importance of what may be termed "the phenomena of order" in the Gospels. I submit to them the following considerations

1. There is a very real danger of our being confronted, in the near future, with the anomaly of a disestablished gospel coexisting with an established Church.

For years past every fresh attack upon the Gospels has been met by theologians with proposals of fresh terms of capitulation. As a necessary result, we are now told that not only are "all forms of Christianity identified with the miraculous doomed to fall to the ground," but that "within the last half-century they have been driving that way with continually accelerated velocity" (Professor Huxley, Nineteenth Century, November, 1887).

2. Both the defenders and impugners of the Gospels seem profoundly unconscious that they are basing all their arguments upon unproved assumptions.

The Gospels are studded with phenomena which the professed man of science has been as powerless to explain as the theologian. Both parties admit that, as literary documents, they are essentially sui generis. Yet, in spite of this, confounding, as I believe, the extreme of accuracy with the