CHRISTIANITY AND AGNOSTICISM. 335 



as St. Mark's. As St. John says at the end of his Gospel, " There 

 are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they 

 should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself 

 could not contain the books that should be written." So St. John, 

 like St. Mark, had to make his selection, and selection involves 

 omission. 



But, after all, I venture to ask whether anything can be more 

 preposterous than this supposition that because a certain tradition 

 is the oldest authority, therefore every other authority is discred- 

 ited ? Boswell writes a life of Johnson ; therefore every record of 

 Johnson's acts or words which is not in Boswell is to be suspected. 

 Carlyle writes a life of Sterling first, and Archdeacon Hare writes 

 one afterward ; therefore nothing in the archdeacon's life is to be 

 trusted which was not also in Carlyle's. What seems to me so 

 astonishing about Prof. Huxley's articles is not the wildness of 

 their conclusions, but the rottenness of their ratiocination. To 

 take another instance : 



Luke either knew the collection of loosely connected and aphoristic utterances 

 which appear under the name of the " Sermon on the Mount" in "Matthew," or 

 he did not. If he did not, he must have been ignorant of the existence of such a 

 document as our canonical " Matthew," a fact which does not make for the genu- 

 ineness or the authority of that book. If he did, he has shown that he does not 

 care for its authority on a matter of fact of no small importance ; and that does 

 not permit us to conceive that he believed the first Gospel to be the work of an 

 authority to whom he ought to defer, let alone that of an apostolic eye-witness. 



I pass by the description of the Sermon on the Mount as a 

 " collection of loosely connected utterances," though it is a kind 

 of begging of a very important question. But supposing St. Luke 

 to have been ignorant of the existence of St. Matthew's Gospel, 

 how does this reflect on the genuineness of that book unless we 

 know, as no one does, that St. Matthew's Gospel was written 

 before St. Luke's, and sufficiently long before it to have become 

 known to him ? Or, if he did know it, where is the disrespect to 

 its authority in his having given for his own purposes an abridg- 

 ment of that which St. Matthew gave more fully ? Prof. Huxley 

 might almost seem dominated by the mechanical theory of inspi- 

 ration which he denounces in his antagonists. He writes as if 

 there were something absolutely sacred, neither to be altered nor 

 added to, in the mere words of some old authority of which he 

 conceives himself to be in possession. Dr. Abbott, with admirable 

 labor, has had printed for him, in clear type, the words or bits of 

 words which are common to the first three Gospels, and he seems 

 immediately to adopt the anathema of the book of Revelation, and 

 to proclaim to every man, evangelists and apostles included, " if 

 any man shall add unto these things, . . . and if any man shall 

 take away from the words " of this " common tradition " of Dr. 



