In the Gospel of John you will find the metaphysics of the church. There you find the Second Birth. There you find the doctrine of the atonement clearly set forth. There you find that God died for the whole world, and that whosoever believeth not in him is to be damned. There is nothing of the kind in Matthew. Matthew makes Christ say that, if you will forgive others, God will forgive you. The Gospel "according to Mark" is the same. So is the Gospel "according to Luke." There is nothing about salvation through belief, nothing about the atonement. In Mark, in the last chapter, the apostles are told to go into all the world and preach the gospel, with the statement that whoever believed and was baptised should be saved, and whoever failed to believe should be damned. But we now know that that is an interpolation. Consequently, Matthew, Mark and Luke never had the faintest conception of the "Christian religion." They knew nothing of the atonement, nothing of salvation by faith--nothing. So that if a man had read only Matthew, Mark and Luke, and had strictly followed what he found, he would have found himself, after death, in perdition. Renan finds that certain portions of the Gospel "according to John" were added later; that the entire twenty-first chapter is an interpolation; also, that many places bear the traces of erasures and corrections. So he says that it would be "impossible for any one to compose a life of Jesus, with any meaning in it, from the discourses which John attributes to him, and he holds that this Gospel of John is full of preaching, Christ demonstrating himself; full of argumentation, full of stage effect, devoid of simplicity, with long arguments after each miracle, stiff and awkward discourses, the tone of which is often false and unequal." He also insists that there are evidently "artificial portions, variations like that of a musician improvising on a given theme." In spite of all this, Renan, willing to soothe the prejudice of his time, takes the ground that the four canonical gospels are authentic, that they date from the first century, that the authors were, generally speaking, those to whom they are attributed; but he insists that their historic value is very diverse. This is a back-handed stroke. Admitting, first, that they are authentic; second, that they were written about the end of the first century; third, that they are not of equal value, disposes, so far as he is concerned, of the dogma of inspiration. One is at a loss to understand why four gospels should have been written. As a matter of fact there can be only one true account of any occurrence, or of any number of occurrences. Now, it must be taken for granted, that an inspired account is true. Why then should there be four inspired accounts? It may be answered that all were not to write the entire story. To this the reply is that all attempted to cover substantially the same ground.