Every _real_ transaction, especially those which flow on through a course of time, touches this web-work of small events at many points, and is woven into its very substance. Fiction may indeed paint its personages so as for a moment to deceive the eye, but it has never succeeded in the attempt to foist its factitious embroideries upon the tapestry of truth. We might take as an instance that irresistible book in which Paley has established the truth of the personal history of St. Paul (“The Horæ Paulinæ”). It is throughout a tracing of the thousand fibres by which a long series of events connects itself with the warp and woof of human affairs. To apply to evidence of this sort, the besom of skepticism, and sweepingly to remove it as consisting only in _moral evidence_, is an amazing instance of confusion of mind. It is often loosely affirmed that history rests mainly upon moral evidence. Is then a Roman camp moral evidence? Or is a Roman road moral evidence? Or are these and many other facts, when appealed to as proof of the assertion that, in a remote age, the Romans held military occupation of Britain, moral evidence? If they be, then we affirm that, when complete in its kind, it falls not a whit behind mathematical demonstration, as to its certainty. Although it is not true that Christianity rests mainly upon moral evidence, yet it is true that it might rest on that ground with perfect security. It is to this species of evidence that we have now appealed; not as establishing the heavenly origin of Christianity, which it _does_ establish, but simply as it attests the historic reality of the person of Christ, and here we must ask an ingenuous confession from whoever may be bound _in foro conscientiæ_ to give it, that the notion of Christianity, and the habitual feelings toward it of many in this Christian country, are such as if brought to the test of severe reasoning could by no ingenuity be made to consist either with the supposition that Christianity is historically false, or that it is historically true! This ambiguous faith of the cultured, less reasonable than the superstitions of the vulgar (for they are consistent, which this is not,) could never hold a place in a disciplined mind but by an act, repeated from day to day, and similar to that of a man who should refuse to have the shutters removed from the windows on that side of his house whence he might descry the residence of his enemy.