THE CHEQUE AND THE COUNTERFOIL. A LESSON IN THE CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE. COMING home a ship's company describes a remarkable scene which it has witnessed in the course of its wanderings. Discredited by some and believed by others, the deponents adhere to their statement with wonderful tenacity; nor can imprisonment and torture induce them to alter a single iota. After they are dead, and when all evidence is converging towards the truth of their story, many regret that they can no longer see and cross-question the original narrators. However, it turns out that in a public collection are sundry pictures containing an elaborate representation of the controverted incident, and believed to be the work of some of the spectators, or exact fac-similes from their originals. In settling the dispute, it is obvious that great interest will attach to these drawings, and it will be a matter of the utmost moment to ascertain their trustworthiness. Are they not modern forgeries? Do they contain no fatal incongruities? no anachronism in costume? no solecism in the landscape, or the objects which people it? and are they not flagrant copies the one from the other, all four the same cunning fable in so many different disguises? They are as No, says the artist: they are not modern. old as the time they profess. Their transmission is straightforward and abundantly established; and, even though there were no other proof, I know their antiquity from their style, and from the pigments and vehicles employed in their production. No, say the physical geographer and the antiquary: they are true to the given time and place. That is the exact aspect of the country, and those are its characteristic birds and flowers. And this is the dress of the period, and some of the personages introduced I can recognise as contemporaries, and very correctly represented they are. No, says the critic: they do not copy one another. Some of them may have used pre-existing sketches, or they may have had access to certain materials in common. But they are all distinct and independent; and some of them, at least, have drawn from the life. They give traits and details which would never occur to any but an actual observer. So says the scholar: The Gospels are as old as the commencement of the Christian era. For the professed antiquity of no books is the documentary evidence so abundant but even though all manuscripts and versions were destroyed, their very speech bewrayeth them. Their language is the Greek of Galileans. After the first centuries that Hellenistic dialect ceased to be spoken by any people; and, after it became a dead language, to write in it such books as we now possess would have required a scholarship almost supernatural. We can have no more pictures the same as these; for the very pigment which makes them so peculiar has perished. Yes, say the naturalist and the archæologist: they are true to the region they represent. The Gospels are still written on the face of Palestine. To return to your comparison, they remind me of a picture where, in representing some remarkable coloured strata, that there might be no dispute as to the truth of the tinting, the artist had actually painted with specimens of the several rocks finely pounded. In these Hebrew sketches I recognise the very dust and stones of Zion; and I have no manner of doubt that they are the work of Jews anterior to the destruction of Jerusalem. And asked to pronounce on these old pictures, how does the critic proceed? - Setting them side by side, he is first of all struck by the different style of all the four. Each artist has his own affinities, an eye for something which another overlooks,his own touch and impasto and finish. This first, with his careful draughtmanship and scientific exactitude, is a manifest systematist, and gives every object as a philosopher would see it. That other more eclectic, is withal more picturesque; and his pencil everywhere scatters the expressive minutia and the happy hits of the descriptive poet. In the masterly perspective, the wavy flow, and the skilful grouping of the third, you recognise the practised strokes and pleasing effects of the accomplished limner. Whilst in the flaming fragments of the fourth,-in the empyrean background, and in the warm air and summer joy of the nearer distances, as also in the divine animation with which the canvas heaves and palpitates, you perceive a soul which had life abundantly, and which labours to convey a glimpse of its own glorious vision, only grudging the imperfection of all material vehicles. Each is distinct and independent. Each could repeat himself in manifold variety; but not one of all the four could pass for his neighbour. Laying the four Gospels alongside of one another, you observe the Hebrew instincts of St. Matthew. With heraldic accuracy the commencement of his narrative is a long genealogy, supremely interesting to a nation compared with whose youngest family our British Percies and Howards are men of yesterday. Then with a sort of black-letter fondness for precedent, or rather with a believing Israelite's reverence for prophetic Scripture, ever and anon he is repeating, “As it is written," "That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet." And in the large collection of parables, so pleasing to Eastern readers; in the recital of those miracles which especially attested the Messiahship of Jesus; and in the prominence given to incidents and discourses which throw light on the "Root and Offspring of David," you discern the Hebrew of the Hebrews,--the Jewish historian, so systematic, so scriptural, so conscious of his country. Almost as Western as Matthew is Eastern, Mark gives the Syriac Abbas, and Ephphathas, and Talitha-cumis, along with their translation; and "centurions," "speculators," "quadrantes," or farthings, are set down or explained just as they would have been by a Greek or Roman Jew returning to Palestine. But still more characteristic are his selection of striking incidents and the vivid precision of his picturesque language. The shortest of all the evangelists, he is nevertheless the most graphic; and his work may be compared to the cabinet picture of a true master of the old Netherlands school,-sharp in its outline, full without crowding, and clear in its lucid compactness. And like such a master, too, a touch will often add another feature ; an expressive dot will light up a wide surface with new significance. It was green grass" on which the multitude was made to sit down; it was at a "place where two ways met" that the colt would be found which the disciples were to bring to their Master; not only did a young ruler come to ask a question at Jesus, but he came "running and kneeling down;" not only was our Lord forty days in the wilderness, but He was "there with the wild beasts;" not only did He slumber in the tempest-tossed vessel, but He lay "in the hinder part of the ship asleep upon a pillow ;" not only did He suffer the little children to come to Him, but He was "much displeased" with those who forbade them, "and He took them up in His arms, put His hand upon them, and blessed them."* 66 Then, with his elegant exordium, comes a fluent and skilful biographer, whose orderly sequence aids the memory, as much as his graceful periods charm the ear. Not pro * The Literary History of the New Testament. P. 41. THE FOUR BIOGRAPHERS. 387 fessing to be autoptical, but claiming a "perfect understanding of all the incidents from the very first," from the materials which "eye-witnesses" supplied he has compiled a narrative continuous and lively, and worthy of an accomplished historian-though ever and anon professional allusions and the recurrence of medical terms remind us of "Luke, the beloved physician." Need we can we characterise the picture with which the series ends? Omitting every parable, and recording those miracles only in which the heart as well as the power of his Master was exhibited; detailing at length His conversations and His confidential addresses to His followers, as well as the various traits of majesty or tenderness which had most deeply impressed the narrator's own mind, from its transcendent commencement to its touching close, it is a mighty effort to perpetuate the grace and truth which came in Jesus Christ: whilst over the whole there hovers an atmosphere of "joyful solemnity" and seraphic benevolence, itself sufficient to show that the author was once in contact with the Heavenly Original. Such is the first inference which we draw from this comparison of the Four Gospels. They are not four productions of one biographer, but each is the work of a distinct individual. In other words, there are four evangelists as well as four Gospels. To say nothing of external evidence, but judging entirely from their intrinsic style and manner, especially when read in the original, these four memoirs are the work of four separate biographers. Looking at them again, we are struck with their circumstantial minuteness. One canvas may be more crowded than another; but each of them contains, perhaps, a hundred heads, and many of them with very decided and definite features. Not only is the great central object carefully Da Costa. |