To keep to the case of the Evangelists,--I appeal to your sense of fairness, whether it be not reasonable to assume, that until those blessed writers have been convicted of _one_ single inaccuracy of statement, their narratives ought to be accounted faultless, like Him whose Life they record;--like Him by whose Spirit they are inspired. I would to Heaven that men would have the decency to suspect themselves, and one another, rather than the Evangelists,--of mistake; or at least, before they venture publicly to impugn the Authors of the Everlasting Gospel, that they would be at the pains to weigh the evidence with the care _that_ evidence deserves, but which I am _sure_ that sermon-writers and essayists do not bestow. Let them spend the long summer days of many a Long Vacation--from early morning until twilight,--dissecting every syllable of the blessed pages; and then they will learn to adore instead of to cavil. They will deem them absolutely faultless, instead of daring to charge all their own pitiful misconceptions, and weak misapprehensions, and miserable blunders, upon _them_.--They will be inclined, rather, to challenge the world to establish one blot in what they love so well; and would gladly stake all upon the issue of a conflict before a fair tribunal,--if submission might follow upon defeat. As for mistakes of the paltry kind last noticed--(the days of Abiathar, the sixteenth of Tiberius, and so forth,)--I wonder the glaring absurdity of charging them against Evangelists, does not strike any modest man of sane mind. To suppose that St. Matthew quoted the wrong prophet, or that St. Luke did not know the regnal years of the reigning Emperor; that St. Stephen confused Abraham with Jacob, and Sychem with Hebron;--all this is really so _grossly_ absurd, that I can hardly condescend to discuss the question. It is like maintaining that Sir Isaac Newton, after discovering the Law of Gravitation, and calculating the pathway of a planet, persisted in saying that two and two make five: or that Columbus, after discovering America, despaired of finding the way to his own door. It is simply ridiculous!--Admirable as a subject for men to exercise their wits upon,--as instruments of _cavil_, objections like these are about as formidable as a child's sword of lathe in the day of battle.