APPENDIX A. Page 4. On the Diversity of Christian Evidences. THE Evidences of Christianity are not only numerous, but dissimilar, and independent. "If man's contrivance, or if the favour of accident, could have given to Christianity any of its apparent testimonies, either its miracles or its prophe cies, its morals or its propagation, or, if I may so speak, its Founder, there would be no reason to believe, nor even to imagine, that all these appearances of great credibility could be united together by any such causes. If a successful craft could have contrived its public miracles, or so much as the pretence of them, it required another reach of craft and new resources to provide and adapt its prophecies to the same object. Further, it demanded not only a different art but a totally opposite character, to conceive and propagate its admirable morals. Again, the achievement of its propagation, in defiance of the powers and terrors of the world, implied a new energy of personal genius, and other qualities of action than any occurring in the work before. Lastly, the model of the Life of its Founder, in the very description of it, is a work of so much originality and wisdom as could be the offspring only of consummate powers of invention....But the hypothesis sinks under its incredibility. For each of these suppositions of contrivance being arbitrary, as it certainly is, and unsupported, the climax of them is an extravagance. And if the imbecility of Art is foiled in the hypothesis, the combinations of Accident are too vain to be thought of...." "The whole compass and system of the Christian Evidence unquestionably has nothing like it, nor approaching to it, in the annals of the world. It is a phenomenon standing alone. I assert this on the concession of those who have exalted it, beside their intention, by the impotent comparison by which they have sought to slander and traduce it. For what has been done? Its miracles have been forced into a sort of parallel with some wild unauthenticated relations in the cloudy romance of a Pagan sophist (in the case of Apollonius Tyaneus); or with the vague and insulated pretences of a better history (in the case of Vespasian); or the mask of a detected and defeated imposture among a Roman Catholic sect. Its prophecies have undergone the violence of a similar comparison with the oracles of Heathenism, long ago put to silence, or the legends of a more recent superstition. Its divine morals have been represented as little better than might be derived from the philosophy of a Grecian or Eastern teacher, Socrates or Confucius. Its wonderful progress and propagation, carried without any of the instruments of human power, and in opposition to them, have been matched with the success of the Mahometan heresy effected by the power of the sword. Thus all ages and countries and creeds have been explored with an industry even greater than the success, to furnish the separate materials of such comparisons as the objectors have been able to produce: while the conspicuous and uncontested fact that Christianity unites within itself the signs and indications which no other system, philosophic or religious, does, nor pretended to do, leaves it in possession of a character which repels the indignity of all comparison by the distant and incommensurate pretensions of the things attempted to be put in resemblance with it." Davison On Prophecy, PF. 31, 32. "The conspiring probabilities of a subject run together into a perfect conviction." Ibid. p. 28. APPENDIX B. Page 133. Confucius. THE recent valuable work of Dr Legge, on the Life and Teachings of Confucius, contains a translation of the Analects, and enables us to form some conception of the great K'ung Foo-tsze. A few extracts will shew how modest were his own claims compared with those which his followers and worshippers have set up for him. "The sage and the man of perfect virtue-how dare I rank myself with them? It may be simply said of me that I strive to become such without satiety, and teach others without weariness." Analects, VII. 33. "In letters I am perhaps equal to other men; but the character of the perfect man, carrying out in his conduct what he professes, is what I have not yet attained to." Ibid. 32. He deliberately placed himself below many of the old sages of China. "A transmitter," he said, "and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients, I venture to compare myself with our old P'ang." He avoided the subjects of God and Immortality, and this is why his influence has been unfavourable to the growth of religion in China. "He sacrificed to the dead as if they were present; he sacrificed to the spirits as if the spirits were present." Ibid. III. 12. His general method was to evade the entire subject, e.g., "Ke Loo asked about serving the spirits of the dead, and |