78 



THE KEY. CHANCELLOR J. J. LIAS, M.A., ON 



themselves to the task of interpolatmg and fusing all the 

 histories in order to bring them into line with the forgeries of 

 their own time. The morality of these proceedings is on a level 

 with the probability that so shameless an imposture should ever 

 have led an undeniably great nation astray. We are in the habit 

 of reading the Scriptures in public at our worship. But can any 

 man with -a spark of honesty in his composition who believes in 

 these astounding theories, ever read these books in the congre- 

 gation witliout telling the poor deluded creatures who are 

 listening to him, that they must not for a moment imagine 

 these stories to be true ? 



Moreover, having got so far, critical science is compelled to go 

 further still. It now tells us that the Gospel of St. John, 

 composed, as the liberal critic Harnack has admitted, within ten 

 years of the period to which the Christian Church has for 

 eighteen centuries assigned it, does not, as it pretends to do, 

 contain the teaching of Christ ; that it was deliberately forged 

 in the name of the Apostle who leaned on His breast at the 

 Last Supper ; and that the Christian Church was tricked, no 

 one knows how, into acceptmg it, and handing it down as 

 genuine.* And yet Irenseus, who was the disciple of Polycarp, 

 who was the disciple and personal friend of St. John himself, 

 speaks of that Gospel as one of the four foundations on which 

 the Gospel message to the world is based. It is not likely that 

 I shall read another paper before the Victoria Institute ; but 

 the last words I am likely to speak here may well be a protest, 

 in the Name of the God of Truth, on the part of one who has 

 been a minister of Jesus Christ for 55 years, against such 

 theories of the composition and transmission of books which, 

 from at least three centuries B.C. to the twentieth century after 

 His Coming, have been acknowledged by the Christian Church 

 either to be authentic histories of the works and words of our 

 common Master, or of the preparation for that Coming. It is 

 a strange way of recommending Him to the present and to 

 future aojes, to contend that He, Who was the Truth as well as 



Criticism which boasts that it is "scientific" does not scruple to 

 ignore the fact that it must have been altogether impossible in the first 

 two centuries of the Christian era to launch forgeries upon so unique a 

 society as the Christian Church. Not only were the members of that 

 society drawn closely together by mutual offices of love, but, as the Acts 

 of the Apostles clearly shows, the constant miitaal communication 

 between its members in every part would make the detection of a forgery 

 immediate and inevitable. 



