essential condition for enlightening the mind of the writer,
and for rectifying his judgment, so far as information has
power to promote candor.

The Prospective Review for August, in an article on the work,
for the most part commendatory, though certainly without any
warmth of praise, makes the prominent stricture upon it to be,
a charge against the author of having evaded "the gravest, and
in one sense the only serious difficulty, with which the
evidences he supports have to contend." This difficulty is
defined to be in the question as to whether our four Gospels
are essentially and substantially documents from the pens of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, actual companions and
contemporaries of Him whose life and lessons are therein recorded.
The Reviewer professes to have satisfied his own mind
by an affirmative conclusion on this point. But regarding the
question as the very turning-point, the paramount and vital element
of the existing issue between faith and unbelief, and not finding
it to be dealt with in this volume, the Reviewer considers that
it is evaded. It might be urged in reply, that this question is not
to other minds of such paramount importance, and that its
affirmative answer would not be conclusive, as it would still
leave open other questions; such, for instance, as those which
enter into the theories of Paulus and other Rationalists, and
such as are not even excluded from the incidental adjuncts
of Strauss's mythical theory. It might also be urged, that,
allowing the question to be paramount in its relation to the
whole issue, it is one which is not so judiciously dealt with
in the discursiveness of dialogues after dinner, as in the
solitary study, with piles of huge tomes, lexicons, and