apostle had his requirements complied with —he saw, he touched, and he believed. The great merit is to believe without any evidence—“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, he that believeth not shall be damned.” How it was that Thomas the apostle did not know Jesus when he saw him shortly after near the sea of Tiberias, is another of the mysteries of the Holy Christian religion. The acts of the apostles after the death of Jesus deserve treatment in a separate paper; the present essay is issued to aid the members of the Church Congress in their endeavors to stem the rising tide of infidelity. THE ATONEMENT “_Quel est donc ce Dieu qui fait mourir Dieu pour apaiser Dieu?_” THE chief feature of the Christian religion is that Jesus, the Son of God, “very God of very God,” sacrificed himself, or was sacrificed by God the Father, to atone for Adam’s transgression, some 4,000 years before, against a divine command. It is declared in the New Testament, in clear and emphatic language, that in consequence of the one man Adam’s sin, death entered into the world, and judgment and condemnation came upon all men. It is also declared that “Christ died for the ungodly;” “that he died for our sins,” and “was delivered for our offences.” On the one hand it is urged that Adam, the sole source of the human family, offended deity, and that the consequence of this offence was the condemnation to death, after a life of sorrow, of the entire race. On the other side of the picture is portrayed the love of God, who sent his only beloved son to die—and by his death procuring for all eternal life—to save the remnant of humanity from the further vengeance of their all-merciful heavenly father. The religion of Christ finds its source in the forbidden fruit of the yet undiscovered Garden of Eden. Adam’s sin is the corner-stone of Christianity, the keystone of the arch. Without the fall there is no redeemer, for there is no fallen one to be redeemed. It is, then, to the history of Adam that the critical examinant of the Atonement theory should first direct his attention. But to try the doctrine of the Atonement by the aid of science would be fatal to religion. As for the one man Adam, 6,000 years ago the first of the human race, his existence is not only unvouched for by science, but is actually questioned by the timid, and repudiated by the bolder, exponents of modern ethnology. The human race is traced back far beyond the period fixed for Adam’s sin. Egypt and India speak for humanity busy with wars, rival dynasties, and religions, long prior to the date given for the garden scene in Eden. The fall of Adam could not have brought sin upon mankind, and death by sin, if hosts of men and women so lived and died ages before the words “thou shalt surely die” were spoken by God to man. Nor could all men inherit Adam’s misfortune if it be true that it is not to one but to many centres of origin that we ought to trace back the various races of mankind.