intellectual profession. Does he think that it is a thousand times more important that he should know how to cook food than it is to understand any system of law in the world? And if he does not think that, then you must take this remark about theology for what it is worth, according to his standpoint.

He would have no forgiveness for any one, out absolute justice. He would have a gospel of intelligence. He would say: "Be honest, be forgiving, be merciful and stand upon those as rocks." Now I ask you where do you get an example and ground of good fellowship that is equal to that which we have in Jesus Christ? I ask you with regard to the gospel of intelligence where you have such teaching of principles of intelligence as in the teachings of Jesus Christ? Who is the teacher commanding honesty, pardon, and mercy, except Jesus Christ? And then, are we to refuse Him our allegiance who comes and proclaims Himself a ransom for us from the condemnation and power of some one through whom we can be forgiven and so redeemed that we go forth to sin no more, and turn around end contemptuously decline pardon, and discard the redemption which we so urgently need? Go and preach that gospel through the wide world—I mean the gospel he enunciated last Sunday afternoon-and see where you will have any hearts that will rise up and hate the evil that is in themselves, and not only that has brought trouble upon them by the evil that they have done toward other people, but hate the evil that is in themselves, and learn to believe in that God and Father who is the source of all piety, as He is the source of all holiness, and whose life shall testify to the reality of the change that has taken place in transforming them from all that is evil into all that is good, and all that is lovely, and all that is honest, and all that is of good report. Preach it, and see if you

will get any such result as that which we do get, and have got all the ages along from the preaching of the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

My dear brethren and sisters, I have detained you all this long time, merely with taking up some points of that long lecture last Sunday afternoon and endeavoring to show you how utterly untrustworthy the principles are upon which that lecture goes, and how little you have to fear, and I believe it in my soul you have but little to fear from any such attacks made upon the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, or the trustworthiness of the record of this holy book.

I must not so far trespass upon your patience as to keep you longer. I have been speaking for nearly an hour now, but I had hoped to have answered the question, must I do to be saved?" this morning. It has taken me longer than I expected. I will answer that question tonight. I will say what I have to say on the question, "What must I do to be saved?" and endeavor to show you that the answer which the Apostle gave to that question, asked by the trembling jailer of Philippi, in the midnight, is a true and a reasonable and a trustworthy answer, and I trust to show that it is so.

REPLY OF BISHOP FALLOWS.

The Bishop Believes the Colonel is Making "True Progress."

We have been treated quite recently to an exegesis of the New Testament by the well-known author of the lecture on "The Gods."

This congregation will acknowledge with me that there is almost an infinity of distance between that atheistic production and the last lecture of Col. Ingersoll. He is certainly moving forward with gigantic strides, and although the last lecture was full of the most objectionable sentences it was such an improvement over all his previous efforts in the recognition of certain Christian truths, and in his efforts to draw a distinction between Christ and His professed followers, that he ought to be taken by the hand and encouraged to go still further in the way of light and true progress.

I am glad Mr. Ingersoll is not lost in the treacherous quicksands of Straussian unbelief. He evidently does not believe that the Church created Christ. He does homage in his way to this central character of all history. He has too much common sense to believe that such men as the Apostles, or any other men, could invent this glorious personage. He knows that such a miracle would infinitely transcend all other miracles put together. I should greatly

enjoy hearing him turn his brilliant powers of banter and sarcasm upon Strauss and all his school, who endeavored to evolve all the stupendous facts of Christianity out of the subjective consciousness of Christians in succeeding centuries. I hope to have that pleasure yet.

* *

Mr. Ingersoll is in error when he says: "This Testament was not written for hundreds of years after the Apostles were dust. * They depended upon the inaccuracy of legend, and for centuries these doctrines were blown about by the inconstant winds."

The Facts in the Case.

Now what are the facts in the case? When the Church entered the second century, the year 101, or very near that period, she had the New Testament in her hands.

A friend has called my attention to a communication from an agnostic champion of Col. Ingersoll in the Chicago Tribune, which was intended to forestall any answers the Chicago clergymen might make. He says: "The orthodox ministers will say, no doubt, that there is an unbroken line of evidence running back to the Apostolic age as to the authenticity of the Gospels. This is not true." He then states that the Rev. Brooke Foss Wescott, D. D., in his "History of the Canon of the New Testament," page 11, says "that it is an error to suppose that there is such an unbroken chain of evidence; that a few letters of consolation and warning, two or three apologies addressed to heathen, a controversy with a Jew, a vision, and a scanty gleaming of fragments of lost works, comprise all Christian literature to the middle of the second century" (that is, to 150 A. D.).

This is simply another specimen of the special-pleading so marked in the treatment of these important questions.

Dr. Wescott in this quotation refers to the whole canon of the New Testament, and not to the four gospels. "The evidence of the earliest Christian writers is not only un

critical and casual, but also fragmentary," he says, in relation to the entire canon. The point he makes is, that it needed a more critical and literary period to gather together the records which had been made in the earliest times-the Apostolical times-and determine their canonicity. The whole aim of his book is to show just the opposite of what this agnostic defamer by a garbled extract makes him assert-viz.: that there is an unbroken line of evidence from the present time to the Apostolic age as to the authenticity of the gospels, and also of the other canonically received portions of the New Testament.

This uncritical, casual, and fragmentary evidence of these early writers, along with the critical, close, and full treatment of the subject in succeeding years, from a historic highway on which we may triumphantly march over all the centuries, first to the upper chamber where the Pentecostal spirit inaugurated the visible Church for the nations, to the Cross of Calvary, and to the Mount of Beatitudes. Our Divine Lord wrote no recorded word, but He wrote Himself upon the imperishable tablets of His disciples' hearts. They were His loving epistles. It was their sole supreme business to make known to the world what He had said, done, and suffered. Eye-witnesses and heart-witnesses, they went about preaching the facts and teaching the truths of Christianity. Their mode of communication was at first, perhaps, purely oral. Undoubtedly their words in some instances were taken down in writing by the hearers, as well as treasured up in their remembrance. These records, brief and fragmentary, multiplied. Churches began to multiply.. In the year 64 A. D., Tacitus says the Christians at Rome were a vast multitude. Pliny, in 112 A. D., in a letter to Trajan, refers to their great number in the remote province of Bithynia. Irenæus and Tertullian, 150180 A. D., state that the Christian brethren were thickly