has been preserved to us, that it renders such as is here presented in the body of these papers of very great interest and importance. Especially do we need historical testimony of this sort in the great controversy that today may be called the greatest question of the age—whence is Jesus? And in the solution of this, no respectable testimony on one side or the other of this problem should be discarded. It is no longer a question as to whether testimony of an historical character is needed by the advocates of Christianity.

The time is already present when it must be shown that Jesus Christ is an historic person. The life of Jesus is the center of the religious controversies that agitate our age, and the great question that demands solution is whence is the man Jesus? Is he an historical person, or is he not? The settlement of this question, says the eminent Tischendorf, is decisive of the question whether the Church shall or shall not live—the most momentous of all questions which the Church has to encounter. To rob him of his historic greatness, and yet to think to retain the Christian faith and the Christian Church, is a futile attempt, a vain mockery, says the same eminent critic and writer.

It becomes, therefore, the duty of all Christians, and especially of our clergymen, theological students and professors, to furnish themselves from the armory of history with the weapons that alone can be employed in the overthrow of that unbelief upheld by a well organised movement, which today threatens to convert theological science into sophistry, and so give powerful support to the antichristian spirit of our time. This must be done by rigid inquiry in the field of historic research, rather than by any other direction or through any other means. Jesus did not scruple to stand before kings and governors nor scribes or doctors. His apostles did not fear to plead before the elders, priests, kings, governors or emperors. Their advocacy was fearless because invulnerable in its claims, whether in an humble Jewish synagogue or in the halls of philosophy at Jerusalem or in Rome. They spoke well attested facts; they bore incontestable testimony to those facts, and this alone made them invincible and invulnerable.

Can we do the same today? Are we invincible and invulnerable?—historically, I mean. Can we stand before such a tribunal as the Roman Senate and the Emperor, as stood Justin