his cousin. What will it profit us to consult what remains of the Roman annals to see if Augustus really did order a census of all the peoples of the earth when Mary was pregnant with Jesus, Quirinus governor of Syria, and Herod king of Judæa? Quirinus, whom Luke calls Cyrenius, was (the learned say) not governor in the time of Herod, but of Archelaus, ten years later; and Augustus never ordered a census of the Roman Empire.
We are told that the Epistle to the Hehrews, attributed to Paul, was not written by Paul; that neither Revelation nor the Gospel of John was written by John; that the first chapter of this gospel was evidently written by a Greek Platonist; that the book could not possibly come from a Jew; and that no Jew could ever have made Jesus say: "I give you a new commandment : that you love each other." This commandment, they say, was certainly not new. It is given expressly, and in even stronger terms, in the laws of Leviticus: "Thou shalt love thy God above all things, and thy neighbour as thyself." Such a man as Jesus Christ—a man learned in the law, who confounded the doctors at the age of twelve, and was ever speaking of the law—could not be ignorant of the law; and his beloved disciple could not possibly have charged him with so palpable a mistake.
Let us not be troubled, my brethren. Let us remember that Jesus spoke a dialect, half Syrian and half Phœnician, that was hardly intelligible to Greeks; that we have the Gospel of John only in Greek; that this gospel was written more than fifty years after the death of Jesus; that the copyists
