In obedience to this natural intellectual tendency and to the usual mode of legal procedure in reviewing and revising matters on appeal, the contents of Volume I have been divided into three parts, corresponding, in a general way, to the successive steps heretofore mentioned. In Part I, the Record of Fact in the trial of Jesus has been authenticated; not, indeed, according to the strict provisions of modern statutes which regulate the authentication of legal documents, but in the popular sense of the word "authentication." Nevertheless, the authenticity of the Gospel narratives, which form the record of fact in the trial of Jesus, and the credibility of the Evangelists who wrote and published these narratives, have been subjected to the rigorous tests of rules of evidence laid down by Greenleaf and by Starkie. Such an authentication has been deemed necessary in a treatise of this kind. Two main methods may be employed in investigating and proving the alleged occurrences of Sacred History: (1) The method which is based upon the evidence of spiritual consciousness and experience, derived from religious conversion and from communion with God; (2) the method that rests upon the application of historic facts and legal rules to the testimony of those who have asserted the existence of such occurrences. It has been contended by many that the first of these methods is the supreme test, and the only proper one, in solving religious problems and in reaching full and final assurance of the existence of spiritual truths. It is confidently asserted by such persons that the true Christian who has accepted Jesus as his personal Redeemer and has thereby found peace with God, needs no assurance from Matthew that the Christ was the Heaven-begotten and Virgin-born. Such a Christian, it is said, has positive proof from within that Jesus was divine. It is further contended that all forms of religious truth are susceptible of the same kind of proof. It is argued that from despairing hope, born of the longing and the tears of a mother who, grief-stricken and broken-hearted, kneels in prayer beside the coffin of her firstborn, springs stronger evidence of a future life and of an everlasting reunion with loved ones, than comes from all the assurances of immortality handed down by saints and sages. The advocates of this theory contend that the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus should be proved mainly by the method of spiritual consciousness and experience, and only incidentally by the historical testimony of the sacred writers. They boldly maintain that the Resurrection was a spiritual fact born of a spiritual truth; and that within the soul of each true believer is the image of the risen Jesus, reflected from Heaven in as perfect form as that seen by Paul while journeying to Damascus.