down what was said and done in the short remaining period of mundane history. We have four brief sketches claiming to be biographies of Jesus, which the Church claims as authentic, from which we must draw all our information regarding Jesus. It is not necessary here to assign the reasons of learned critics for their conclusion that the Gospel “according to” Mark is the older of the four. But it is worthy of note that there is not in it _one word_ of _the miraculous conception story_, and not a _hint_ of the bodily resurrection and ascension of Jesus, as the critics have a way of proving that the last chapter of Mark was added by a later hand. Then we are embarrassed by the testimony of Irenæus, Origen, Jerome, and other Christian Fathers that the Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew, while there are indubitable internal evidences that this Gospel, as we have it, was written in Greek and by a Greek, and not a Jew, and that it is really a _theological_ treatise written by some partisan for ecclesiastical reasons, and that if Matthew ever wrote a Gospel, it has been unfortunately lost or purposely destroyed. An early Christian sect, called in derision Ebionites, are supposed to have had the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, and they were persecuted and stamped out for denying the miraculous conception and divinity of Christ, and with them, some critics suppose, perished the only genuine Gospel of Matthew. There is little if any doubt that the first and second chapters of our Matthew, giving an account of the miraculous birth and genealogy of Jesus, were added when this fiction was incorporated into Christianity as necessary to a divine Church establishment which should almost deify a hierarchy and bring the common people into subjection. In reading Matthew’s Gospel we should undoubtedly begin at chapter 3, and especially as the first two chapters are absurd, contradictory, and inconsistent. If Jesus was begotten by the Holy Ghost, it was not consistent or necessary to notice the genealogy of Joseph, and there is nothing more bungling than the genealogies of Mary and Joseph as given in Matthew and Luke. Indeed, the name Matthew is not Jewish, and there are those who doubt if there ever was such a man. It is a suggestive fact that the Egyptians had a _Matthu_, and that he was the _registrar_, or keeper of their records. The Gospel ascribed to Luke he himself admits to be a résumé or compilation of what had been written by others and was the prevalent belief (Luke, chapter 1). In making a close analysis of this little tract a learned German critic Schleiermacher, shows that it was probably compiled from thirty-three different manuscripts. But since Luke himself claims nothing more than the office of a collector, his work is a mere digest of what others had written and a summary of what was then believed by some persons.