who were ministers of the word, and eye-witnesses of the facts. I do not
know what information can be more satisfactory than this. We may,
perhaps, perceive the force and value of it more sensibly if we reflect
how requiring we should have been if we had wanted it. Supposing it to
be sufficiently proved, that the religion now professed among us owed
its original to the preaching and ministry of a number of men, who,
about eighteen centuries ago, set forth in the world a new system of
religious opinions, founded upon certain extraordinary things which they
related of a wonderful person who had appeared in Judea; suppose it to
be also sufficiently proved, that, in the course and prosecution of
their ministry, these men had subjected themselves to extreme hardships,
fatigue, and peril; but suppose the accounts which they published had
not been committed to writing till some ages after their times, or at
least that no histories but what had been composed some ages afterwards
had reached our hands; we should have said, and with reason, that we
were willing to believe these under the circumstances in which they
delivered their testimony, but that we did not, at this day, know with
sufficient evidence what their testimony was. Had we received the
particulars of it from any of their own number, from any of those who
lived and conversed with them, from any of their hearers, or even from
any of their contemporaries, we should have had something to rely upon.
Now, if our books be genuine, we have all these. We have the very
species of information which, as it appears to me, our imagination would
have carved out for us, if it had been wanting.

But I have said that if any one of the four Gospels be genuine, we have
not only direct historical testimony to the point we contend for, but
testimony which, so far as that point is concerned, cannot reasonably be
rejected. If the first Gospel was really written by Matthew, we have the
narrative of one of the number, from which to judge what were the