Secondly. A great majority of these objections are founded on a view of the Gospels which their writers expressly repudiate. It is taken for granted that the Gospels are histories in the strictest sense of that word. By a strict history I mean a narrative in which the events are connected together in accordance with the sequences of time and place. This is the arrangement which is generally adopted in modern histories and biographies. But the Gospels expressly assert that they belong to a different class of writings. They are not _histories_, but _memoirs_. In a memoir, the arrangement of events in the strict sequence of time and place is not the predominant idea. The Gospels are not only memoirs, but memoirs of a peculiar character. They are details of the actions and teachings of Jesus Christ written for the express purpose of teaching the Christian religion. In works of this kind the arrangement and grouping of events are formed on very different principles from those adopted in the composition of pure histories. As this is a most important point, I must adduce proof of it which is beyond all contradiction. St. John's Gospel asserts, in as many words, that it was the purpose of its author to write such a memoir, and not a strict history. At chap. xx., ver. 30, 31, he says, "And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life through His name." Again, in the last verse of the Gospel it is expressly stated that Jesus did many things which the writer has not recorded. The author therefore clearly asserts that he has made a selection of certain events in the life of Jesus Christ, from a very much larger number, with which he was acquainted, and that the principle which guided him, both in the selection and arrangement, was a religious one. "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ," etc. It is impossible more distinctly to assert that the Gospel is a religious memoir. No less clear is the statement of St. Luke. He says "that he wrote in order to the most excellent Theophilus, that he might know the certainty of the things in which he had been instructed." The original shows that the instruction was given with a definite religious purpose. The Gospel is "a declaration of those things most surely believed among Christians." In one word, the work is a memoir, and not a history. If it be replied that Luke says that he wrote "in order," εν ταξει [Greek: en taxei], I answer that there are other orderly arrangements besides those of time and place; and that if a work is a religious memoir, the arrangement would be regulated, though not exclusively, by the reference of the facts to the religious end in view.