17 
arguments could be drawn from tlio marvellous agreement of 
one part of Scripture with another. In short, the sceptical 
mind seems to have been possessed with the extraordinary 
fancy, — a fancy which has not altogether disappeared even at 
the present time, — that from the year 100 downwards, Chris- 
tians habitually devoted their time to interpolation and forgery, 
and evinced an astonishing amount of cleverness in their per- 
formances ; that no sooner was any important work produced 
and brought to the knowledge of the Church, than Christian 
intellect was brought at once to bear on it, and all flew to 
insert in it passages which might tell in favour of their pecu- 
liar doctrines and practices : so that, instead of those virtues 
which we are, groundlessly, in the habit of attributing to our 
predecessors in the faith, their excellence consisted in an 
extraordinary power of successful forgery, and the monastic 
scriptorium and the student's cell were both alike devoted to 
the corruption of the text of the Scriptures, and the dissemi- 
nation of interpolated manuscripts. The science of textual 
criticism was in its infancy, and could scarcely then be used 
on the side either of sceptics or believers. Sometimes the 
charge of interpolation was dispensed with, and a sweeping 
accusation of utter falsehood was brought, with a rude refusal 
to listen to argument or evidence. The scientific unbeliever 
did not and could not exist ; lie was to be the production of a 
later age, the positivist and secularist man of the nineteenth 
century, developed by a process of unnatural selection out of 
the gorilla sceptic of the seventeenth. There was no geology 
in those days, and no chemistry. Philology was not, when 
Sanskrit was unknown, and Arabic looked upon as a strange, 
barbarous dialect ; when people commonly believed that 
English was derived from Latin, Latin from Greek, and Greek 
from Hebrew, the primeval and original tongue. Nor could 
there be any scientific history, when Livy was credited and 
Herodotus disbelieved. Towards the close of the period, 
perhaps, some intimations of a coming alteration in the cha- 
racter of the warfare were given in a bombastic imitation of 
Lucretius, containing his Atheism without his philosophy, and 
in kindred works, now quietly mouldering in that limbo of 
decay which is reserved for useless and unfounded negations. 
Here and there appeared, no doubt, some works — few and far 
between, though not at all angelic — of a more dangerous because 
moi’e enlightened character ; more subtle, and more thorough- 
going. But as a whole the scepticism of the eighteenth century 
did not require, and indeed did not afford a place for, such an 
Institute as ours : it was met and combated by treatises on the 
Christian evidences, which we still value, though their iinme- 
vol. ix. e 
