Prefatory

It is frequently asserted that the old reasoning on the evidences of Christianity, or of such a fact as that of the resurrection, will no longer answer in view of modern objections. It might have done, they say, fifty years ago, but the higher criticism has given a new aspect to the whole matter. Paley and Lardner did very well against the more shallow infidels of their day, but there has arisen a race of unbelieving Anakim far surpassing Hume and Voltaire. The defender of the Scriptures needs new armor to meet them. German rationalism has rendered all the old arguments obsolete. This is repeated continually. By sheer reiteration, often without the attempt to give a particle of evidence, the impression is produced, especially on the minds of the young, that there has somehow arisen some new and terrible form of doubt, some most formidable difficulty unknown to other times and unassailable by any former arguments. It is an undefined specter. It is everywhere haunting our modern literature, though taking no precise form. It is the shadowy presence of some new enemy never clearly seen, but who has rendered unavailing, it is said, all former tactics, whether of assault or defense. In defending Christianity, if it can be defended, we must take a new start and succeed on grounds differing altogether from the old.

Now this is all an impudent falsehood. We say it unhesitatingly. There is no new difficulty, or any so surpassing former difficulties as to be entitled to the name. There is no substantial objection to the Gospels, or to the Bible generally, that has not been known to scholarly and thinking men for more than a thousand years. Some aspects of Bible authorship have been changed; some ecclesiastical writings have been pronounced spurious, though very few that had not always been suspected; some new various readings have been discovered, but

in no respects, except in the most unessential points, have they changed the general aspect even of the critical field, much less that great argument, remaining the same from age to age because built on the unchanging foundations of our deeply investigated human nature. There is, in short, no vital, no essential difficulty, no one going to the root of the great debate, that was not as familiar to the learned men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as it is to the best scholars now.

Equally unfounded are the ignorant assertions, so often and so flippantly made, in respect to what science has done or is going to do. Owe modern investigations have furnished no stronger objections to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body than such as were familiar to Celsus, or even to the Corinthian sophist whom Paul seems to have had in view and who so confidently asked: “With what body do they come?” All that need be contended for is that it remains just where it was. The modern infidel has here no advantage over the ancient unbeliever. We may safely defy any man to show wherein the position of the argument has, in this respect, undergone any essential change.

Tayler Lewis.

Introduction to Nott’s “Sermons on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”