The case is not without a parallel. A few weeks since the papers noticed the death of a gentleman in one of our Western States. According to one account, he perished in a railroad disaster; according to another, he committed suicide--a contradiction almost exactly like that in the case of Judas. Yet there was no real discrepancy. With his wife and child he was on the fatal train that met its doom at Chatsworth. His child was killed; he and his wife were taken from the ruins terribly injured. The wife soon died; in despair, and with no hope of his own life, he drew his pistol and sent the ball through his own head. He perished in the Chatsworth disaster, and he committed suicide. The application of these principles of law--the admission of any reasonable hypothesis, or of an hypothesis that may seem _improbable_, if it removes the difficulty, the supposition of missing facts known at the time, but now lost--principles of constant application in our courts of justice,--releases at once the pressure from a large part of the objections to the inspired record. The accounts of the healing of the blind men at Jericho and the resurrection of Christ--two of the most difficult of full explanation in the New Testament--require no more than this. It is not hard to present reasonable hypotheses to meet the cases as they stand; and if all the facts were known to us we believe the harmony would be as complete and as simple as that of the histories of the siege and capture of Babylon. We draw the discussion to a close with the words of the eminent American jurist and legal authority, Professor Greenleaf: "All that Christianity [or the Bible] asks of men on this subject is that they would be consistent with themselves, that they would treat its evidence as they treat the evidence of other things, and that they would try and judge its actors and witnesses as they deal with their fellow-men when testifying to human affairs and actions in human tribunals." This, as we have said, is not the highest claim that we can make for the Bible; but if men will go as far as this, and deal with the alleged contradictions of the book honestly by the common rules of evidence, the vast majority of all the difficulties to which these rules apply will disappear. In the mean time, if there are those that do not yield to present knowledge, we can afford to wait. Many objections once supposed to be unanswerable have been answered, and the process is going on. God is very patient, but we may be assured that He who just as the occasion has demanded has summoned up the silent witnesses to his word from the valley of the Nile, from the stormy cliffs of Sinai, from the plains of Mesopotamia and from the sullen shores of the Dead Sea, will not fail in the future to give all the confirmation of his truth that the faith of his Church may need. WASHINGTON, D. C., 1888. THE END. * * * * * Transcriber's note: