invention--the cry upon the gibbet, when he died, and the earthquake and the darkness?"[12] The Christians systematically edited and altered the Gospels to meet the needs of the moment;[13] but Jesus did not fulfil the prophecies of the Messiah--"the prophets say he shall be great, a dynast, lord of all the earth and all its nations and armies."[14] There are ten thousand other men to whom the prophecies are more applicable than to Jesus,[15] and as many who in frenzy claim to "come from God."[16] In short the whole story of the Christians rests on no evidence that will stand investigation. Even men who would refrain from the hot-tempered method of controversy, which these quotations reflect, might well feel the contrast between the historic Jesus and the expected Messiah--between the proved failure of the cross and the world-empire of a purified and glorious Israel. And when it was suggested further that Jesus was God, an effluence coming from God, as light is lit by light--even if this were true, it would seem that the Jew was asked to give up the worship of the One God, which he had learnt of his fathers, and to turn to a being not unlike the pagan gods around him in every land, who also, their apologists said, came from the {174} Supreme, and were his emanations and ministers and might therefore be worshipped. Thus everything that was distinctive of their race and their religion--the past of Israel, the Messiah and the glorious future, the beautiful symbols of family religion, and the One God Himself--all was to be surrendered by the man who became a Christian. We realize the extraordinary and compelling force of the new religion, when we remember that, in spite of all to hold them back, there were those who made the surrender and "suffered the loss of all things to win Christ and be found in him." Paul however rested, as he said, on revelation, and ordinary men, who were not conscious of any such distinction, who mistrusted themselves and their emotions, and who rested most naturally upon the cumulative religious experience of their race, might well ask whether after all they were right in breaking with a sacred past--whether, apart from subjective grounds, there were any clear warrant from outside to enable them to go forward. The Jew had of course oracles of God given by inspiration (_theopneustos_[17]), written by "holy men of God, moved by the holy spirit." These were his warrant. Here circumcision, the Sabbath, the Passover, and all his religious life was definitely and minutely prescribed in what was almost, like the original two tables, the autograph of the One God. The law had its own history bound up with that of the race, and the experience and associations of every new generation made it more deeply awful and mysterious. Had the Christian any law? had he any oracles, apart from the unintelligible glossolalies of men possessed (_enthousiontes_)? When Justin spoke of the gifts of the Spirit,