concern in it, assuming all along and recognising the original story,
agitating the questions that arose out of it, pressing the obligations
which resulted from it, giving advice and directions to these who acted
upon it; I conceive that we should find, in every one of these, a still
further support to the conclusion we had formed. At present, the weight
of this successive confirmation is, in a great measure; unperceived by
us. The evidence does not appear to us what it is; for, being from our
infancy accustomed to regard the New Testament as one book, we see in it
only one testimony. The whole occurs to us as a single evidence; and its
different parts not as distinct attestations, but as different portions
only of the same. Yet in this conception of the subject we are certainly
mistaken; for the very discrepancies among the several documents which
form our volume prove, if all other proof were wanting, that in their
original composition they were separate, and most of them independent
productions.

If we dispose our ideas in a different order, the matter stands
thus:--Whilst the transaction was recent, and the original witnesses
were at hand to relate it; and whilst the apostles were busied in
preaching and travelling, in collecting disciples, in forming and
regulating societies of converts, in supporting themselves against
opposition; whilst they exercised their ministry under the harassings of
frequent persecutions, and in a state of almost continual alarm, it is
not probable that, in this engaged, anxious, and unsettled condition of
life, they would think immediately of writing histories for the
information of the public or of posterity.* But it is very probable,
that emergencies might draw from some of them occasional letters upon
the subject of their mission, to converts, or to societies of
converts, with which they were connected; or that they might address
written discourses and exhortations to the disciples of the institution