180 RIGHT REV. THE BISHOP OF DOWN, D.D., ON 



transferred more and more from the phraseology of the written 

 scriptures to the living God. If, as we are convinced, He once 

 inspired the ancients, He is presumably also inspiring the moderns, 

 and gradually leading them into all truth. We have been driven 

 to go behind the written record of the revelation, to the Holy 

 Spirit Himself who inspired the writers of the record. 



One speaker said that he did not believe that the Gospels were 

 written by the authors, or at the time, ascril)ed to them by tradition. 

 But even the Rationalist Press Association, in spite of considerable 

 anti-Christian bias, recently published a book by a Rationalist who 

 has come to the conclusion, forced upon him by modern criticism, 

 that tradition was, after all, more or less right with regard to the 

 dates and authorship of the Gospels. The book I refer to is by 

 Mr. F. C. Conybeare, and represents an attack upon the essential 

 beliefs of Christianity, but in it the author shows that the 

 " difficulties of belief " in the Tiibingen school have become too 

 great for him. In his introduction Mr. Conybeare says : — 



" On the whole the traditional dating (of the Gospels) seems to 

 me to be the most satisfactory. Thus I should set the composition 

 of Mark's Gospel, as we have it, about a.d. 70, of Luke at any time 

 between 80 and 95, of Matthew's about 100, of John's about 110. 

 I see little difficulty in supposing that the John Mark mentioned in 

 Paul's Epistles drew up, some time after Peter's death, as Irenaeus 

 affirms, the Gospel named after him ; and I am inclined to think 

 that Luke, the companion of Paul, really wrote the third Gospel 

 and the Acts .... How far back the Aramaic traditions 

 exploited by Mark may go we do not know .... The sayings 

 of Jesus must have been written down at an earlier stage, because 

 they were wanted as a manual of moral teaching .... I 

 should not, therefore, be surprised to learn that the Aramaic text of 

 these sayings was current within a short period after the death of 

 Jesus." 



Some Christians are apt to give the erroneous impression to 

 outsiders that they are afraid of investigation, because they doubt 

 the conclusion, and that, in their opinion, faith is an act of violence 

 exercised by the will upon the intellect, a suppression of reason in 

 the interests of what happen to be their present opinions. 

 Genuine faith in God includes, surely, the conviction that the most 

 searching investigation can but result, under the inspiring and 



