JESUS' PROTEST ONLY PARTIAL.

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ten commandments as accords with natural religion. He very wisely rejected all that does not teach the two great duties, love to God and love to man. "If thou wilt enter into life," said he to one who already professed to be performing this part of his duty, "keep the commandments: Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; honor thy father and thy mother; and, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." as thyself." To the lawyer also who asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus replied, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." He thus reduced the detail of the code, leaving in it all that he considered essential, and summing it up in the two general duties pertaining to God and man. may be noticed in passing, that he struck out altogether the commandment that pertains to the Sabbath day, the violation of which Moses, with a bloodthirstiness peculiar to the early Jews, considered more of a crime against God than any other. In fact, he considered it the great crime of all others, and visited upon him who should dare to break it, the penalty of death. In this matter, the Christian Church of our day sets Moses above Christ, since notwithstanding the abrogation of the law by Jesus, his professed disciples still adhere to it, and look upon the breach of it as one of the most heinous sins that can be committed.

It

The result of the enlightened protestantism of Jesus was his death upon the cross. He became a martyr to divine truth. But he left a noble legacy to his Apostles,

and to the world, in his advocacy of the sublime teachings of natural religion. In discarding all theology and all dogmas, he cleared away much of the mist and fog that enshrouded religion, and made himself a benefactor to his race. But, unfortunately, his disciples were not only Jews, they were prejudiced in favor of Jewish observances. The leaven of their original faith fermented in their minds, and was too strongly at work to permit them to follow their Master in the divine simplicity of his early teaching. They accepted the historic and scientific record of Moses, erroneous as it was, because nothing in disproof had been brought to bear against it—whereas the Church of our day maintains its dogmas, in the face of scientifically established truths. The ancient religion was miraculous; so also should that be which was advocated by Jesus. And therefore, by And therefore, by degrees, they and their successors engrafted a mythology upon the religion which Jesus advocated, having no warrant whatever, in the words or deeds of their Master. We cannot tell at what exact period after his death were concocted the many marvellous stories related of him, such as that of his supernatural birth; of the visit of the wise men from the East, led to his cradle by a star; of his having been begotten by the Holy Ghost, and of the consequent abandonment of the pretension set up as to his royal descent from David and Solomon; of his miracles; and of his resurrection on the third day after his crucifixion. It is, we say, difficult, and all but impossible, to discover when these fables were intermingled with the ordinary human portion of the narrative of his life and teachings. As to their being found in the four Gospels now held to be canonical, that is no warrant of their authenticity. These four Gospels form but a small portion of the "Gospels"

COUNCILS ASSUME INFALLIBLE POWER.

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that were in possession of the Christians of the third and fourth centuries; nor is there any absolute and satisfactory proof that they were ever written by the persons whose names they bear, and that they passed, unaltered, from generation to generation through the hands of honest custodians and faithful transcribers. Indeed it appears that at the Council of Laodicea, A. D. 363, there were two hundred varied versions of the adopted Evangelists, and fifty-four several Gospels, all differing essentially from each other, and each purporting to be a true account of Jesus. From these our four Gospels were selected. But it must be borne in mind, that the present Gospels are not originals, but taken from copies of the sixth century, which in turn were taken from some other unknown copies. There are no copies in existence, bearing a date nearer than five hundred years to the time of Jesus.

And this question of the origin and authenticity of the Scriptures appears to have been a grave matter of doubt in the Christian Church. Nearly twelve hundred years after the meeting of the Council at Laodicea, that is A. D. 1545, another Council assembled at Trent and decided and ordered what was and what was not genuine. It is not pretended, we believe, that the prelates who composed this Council were themselves inspired by the Holy Ghost. Nevertheless, being fallible men, they dealt in summary fashion with spiritual affairs, and declared that their own infallibility was beyond doubt. The first named conclave having made its selection of the four Gospels, this one picked out a special version of the Bible, termed the Vulgate, and pronounced it the only true one; made the Apocrypha an integral part of it; proclaimed that the Church alone was at liberty to interpret whatever might be doubtful; and added the extraor

dinary edict, that tradition was to be, equally with the Bible, a rule of faith. Under this rule was comprised that incomprehensible and much-disputed doctrine of the Trinity, which is now held to be essential to man's salvation, although no warrant for it can be found in the Christian's text book, the Bible. Its reception as an indispensable part of the creed had been disputed with the acrimony that distinguishes all combatants for faith of man's invention, as the records of other famous ecclesiastical Councils show-notably that of Nice, A. D. 325. Its worth, however, and its binding character, ought not to be much enhanced, even in the view of Christians themselves, by remembrance of the fact, that at least three centuries elapsed after Jesus' death, before the Trinity obtained a hold upon the worshippers of his name. But Councils were omnipotent as witness the second one at Nice, A. D. 787, that declared the worship of images and of the cross to be sanctioned by the Holy Scriptures.

These astounding assumptions of irresponsible and infallible power, by men pretending to deal with divine things, would be deemed impious and disgusting, if time and habit and the artful management of the priesthood had not tended to make men impervious to historical truth and logical argument. We ask then with reference to the Scriptures, whether, if a similar claim of divine origin and unquestionable authenticity were put forward on behalf of the sacred books of any other sect which Christians agree in condemning they would be accepted as aught else than fiction. Take, for example, Matthew's story of the great convulsion of nature at the crucifixion, when the earth is said to have been shaken bodies of the Saints to have risen from their

and many

MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.

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graves and appeared unto many. Such a story could scarcely have been told in the hearing of any one whether Jew or Roman, who had been a contemporary of Jesus; and it has no place in Roman or Jewish history. Again, as to the slaughter of all the male infants of Judea, in order that the youthful Christ might be destroyed, commonly called the Massacre of the Innocents, what corroborative evidence have we of any such act of atrocity having been committed by Herod? If Herod was chargeable with such an act of barbarity, it cannot be doubted that Josephus would have made some mention of it. But his very silence is the best evidence we could have to the contrary. He fills thirty-seven chapters with the history of Herod, and has treated minutely of all the principal cruelties for which he is responsible; but of this special massacre he makes no mention. Philo, also, who lived at the time, and the Rabbins who were assiduous to blacken Herod's memory, give not the slightest hint of so monstrous a decree. Indeed we find that the three Evangelists, Mark, Luke, and John, agree with the historians of those times, in their total silence on this subject. It is, however, a curious and most noteworthy coincidence, that in the sacred writings of the Hindoos there is a similar story related of the tyrant Kanga, in connection with the birth of the Hindoo god, Crishna. Sir William Jones bears testimony to the remarkable similarity that exists between Crishna's life and actions and the life and actions of Jesus, declaring expressly that it is impossible to deny it. He says that Crishna's name and the general traditions concerning him were extant long anterior to the birth of Jesus, and probably anterior also to the time of Homer. The celebrated poem Bhagavat, which contains

an