ON THE HISTORICAL TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 215 



The speaker was struck with what the Professor had said as to 

 the fallacy of supposing that the intellectual progress of Humanity 

 had been one continued process of evolutionary grow^th ; and 

 thought people often forgot how greatly the intellectual night, 

 which settled upon Europe between the Fall of the Western Empire 

 and the Renaissance of Learning in the AYest, after the Fall of Con- 

 stantinople in the fifteenth century, was due to the wanton destruc- 

 tion in the fourth and seventh centuries of the libraries and museums of 

 Alexandria, which Mommsen had described as the great and unique 

 university of the Empire in the first three centuries. 



As to the widespread use of writin// of some sort in the time of 

 Moses and earlier, and the fashionable scepticism on this subject for 

 some thirty years after Ewald, he had hoped to hear some remarks 

 from a gentleman in the room, who, among other valua])le labours,, 

 had given us a translation of the Laws of Amraphel from the cunei- 

 form inscriptions on diorite at Susa. 



The abrupt ending of St. Luke's history, as contained in The AcUy 

 had often struck him as somewhat extraordinary ; and a new light 

 seemed to be thrown on what he might almost call the truncated 

 form of that document by Sir William's suggestion, that the dis- 

 appearance of St. Luke from the gospel history is to be probably 

 accounted for by his death from persecution or some other cause. 



It had always seemed to the speaker a remarkable fact, that St. 

 Luke should bring St. Paul to Kome and tell us that he spent two- 

 years there as a state-prisoner, with full liberty to receive his friends 

 and discuss w'ith them " things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ,"^ 

 without indicating any result to the Church and the world. Years 

 ago he read a paper on the Origin of the Epistle to the Hebrews to 

 the Wokingham Clerical Society, in which he propounded the 

 hypothesis (based on such glimpses as we have of the social and 

 intellectual life of the Hebrew colony then in Rome), that the said 

 Epistle might have been leased on the notes made at the time by 

 Luke (and perhaps Clement) of those discussions which St. Paul 

 carried on at that period with his own countrymen ; a hypothesis 

 which seemed strengthened l)y certain internal indications. That 

 might account for the Epistle l^eing Paulistic in matter, though not 

 Pauline in form and style ; and he now thought that the suggested 

 probability of Luke's unexpected death might go some way to explain 

 its anonymity. He would be glad to know if Sir William's intimate 



P 



