The reader will be unwise if he allow himself to be impressed by the multiplicity of selected witnesses from a selected period, other evidence being unappealed to. If a hundred of witnesses are, in a court of justice, produced to swear to the identity of a man, the impression is created that it cannot but be established. We have lately seen how from being inevitable is such an outside verdict. The special pleading of authorship, like that of the Queen's Bench, startles and impresses for a moment; but after the investigation of all the facts and circumstances of the case is complete, and the judge has dissected the evidence, the sophistry is found not to have helped the side which used it, but has tended to strengthen the other. I remark, before following our author in his references to the witnesses he has selected for cross-examination, it is not conceded to him the right to draw a line where it best suits him in Church history, and decide the case in the absence of the evidence of witnesses on the outside of it. He draws such a line in specifying "_the first century and a half after the death of Christ_." If the probable date of Christ's birth be the third year before the commencement of the Christian era, we have this line drawn at A.D. 180, at which point the second generation of Christians had only just passed away, when direct tradition had not lost its freshness. While men and women were living who had heard from eye-witnesses of the events of Christ's life on earth, the story of His advent, death, resurrection, and ascension, the books recording the facts for future ages were in a less prominent position in the Church than immediately afterwards. They were then read in all the Churches, but commentaries on them and written references to them were not very numerous; therefore what we can trace of such before that time is comparatively scanty. But, immediately afterwards, in the third and fourth generation of Christians, when there were no men living who could say, My grandfather or my venerable teacher told me so and so of Christ, and he saw Christ in Galilee after His resurrection, when there were not less than five hundred of His disciples assembled, and he was present when He ascended in a cloud--while such persons were living, the testimony of a book was to them of lesser weight and importance, for they could say that they had the truth, not from the written words of a disciple, but from his own lips. As Irenæus well remembered Polycarp, so might persons living about the middle of the second century remember the teaching of the Apostle John. The argument from "silence," applied to the early period restricted to the year 180, is for this and other reasons far from being conclusive, while the evidence furnished by such writings as those of Irenæus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Theophilus of Antioch, Tatian, Hippolytus, and Origen, who belong to the subsequent years of the first and the opening of the second century, is much more