1-4), and from that of the rest of the Gospel. The two chapters sound, even in English, like a bit out of the Old Testament; and any Greek scholar, accustomed to the LXX, would recognize that they were either a close translation from the Aramaic, or written by some one who wrote in Greek, modelling his style on the LXX. It is probable that they represent some traditions of Aramaic origin, the best that St. Luke could find when he began to write of the wonders that had happened more than sixty or seventy years ago. To those who can form the least conception of the extent to which Oriental tradition in the villages of Galilee might be transmuted after an interval of sixty or seventy years, it must seem quite beside the mark to assert the historical accuracy of the tradition concerning the Miraculous Conception which St. Luke has incorporated in his Gospel, on the ground that he was a physician; that he took pains to get at the truth; and that he has written a masterly and exact account of a shipwreck which he, or some friends of his, may have witnessed in person. The very sobriety of his own preface ought to put us on our guard against attaching to St. Luke’s history such weight, for example, as we attach to the history of Thucydides. He says, it is true, that he had “traced the course of all things accurately from the first, _i.e._ from the commencement of Christ’s life:” but this amounts to much less than the statement of Thucydides, who tells us that he had personally inquired from those who knew the facts, besides having seen some of the facts himself (Thuc. i. 22). He does not say that “the eye-witnesses and ministers of the word” had given _him_ any special information: on the contrary he mentions himself only as one of many who had received “traditions” from eye-witnesses, and he implies that a good many of the existing narratives, _based upon these very traditions_, were at least so far unsatisfactory that they did not dispense with an additional narrative from him. The emphasis which St. Luke lays on the fact that he has traced things “from the first,” and that he writes “in order,”—combined with the mention of “many” predecessors who have “taken in hand” the work which he intends to do over again—makes it almost certain that some of these Evangelists had omitted all account of our Lord’s birth; others had not regarded chronological order; others had not written “accurately.” All these deficiencies indicate a great and general difficulty in obtaining exact information; and the mere honesty of a new attempt, under circumstance so disadvantageous, cannot justify us in attaching a very high authority to a tradition in this new Gospel, of a miraculous character, and in a style that appears to be not St. Luke’s own, referring to an incident supposed to have occurred upwards of sixty years before. This digression about St. Luke’s Gospel will not be without its use if it leads you to perceive that history, and