could only be held by men who had filled the office of consul. By these coins the accuracy of St. Luke is satisfactorily confirmed.

This accuracy is still more conspicuous in the application of the same title to Gallio, (Acts xviii. 12.); but in this case the proof of it does not depend upon coins. Achaia, as we learn from Dion Cassius, was at first assigned to the senate. From Tacitus we find that having been much oppressed by its senatorial rulers, it was transferred to the emperor, in the time of Tiberius. Under Claudius, Suetonius tell us, it once more reverted to the senate, A. D. 44, and Dion says the same. Nero made the Achaians a free people, that is, no governor was set over them, either by the senate or the emperor. This is recorded by Pliny and Pausanias. But Suetonius relates that under Vespasian it once again became a Roman province. Now the time at which Paul was brought before Gallio must have been A. D. 52 or 53. We do not know in what year of Nero's reign freedom was given to Achaia, but Nero himself did not succeed Claudius till the latter part of the year 54; it was therefore during the interval when Achaia was a proconsular province, that Paul was at Corinth, and amidst the complicated changes of government which followed in such rapid succession, our historian is strictly correct in the title he uses.

Returning to our illustrations from medals: St. Luke, in another part of the book last quoted, speaks of Philippi, the chief, or first city of that part of Macedonia, and a colony. (Acts xvi. 12.) This passage has much perplexed the commentators, for there is reason to believe that Thessalonica, and not Philippi, was the chief city of the district when Luke wrote, Amphipolis having formerly been so. The writer might possibly mean that Philippi was the first city of Macedonia which Paul and his companions came to, after leaving Neapolis, where they had landed. But it seems far from improbable that a slight alteration in the Greek text, so as to make it agree with the Syriac Version, and Chrysostom's reading of the passage, would give the true meaning, a city of the first Macedonia, for there are extant many medals, mostly of silver, bearing the inscription, THE FIRST MACEDONIA, as well as one of the second, and one of the fourth Macedonia. None of the third have yet been discovered; but those I have mentioned suffice to show that

Macedonia was divided, at least, into four parts, (as from other sources we know it sometimes was into six,) and that each division was distinguished from the rest by its number, rather than by any local denomination, drawn from the cities, or other peculiarities of the district itself. St. Luke, therefore, if the proposed emendation be correct, meant to describe Philippi as a city of the subdivision known as the first Macedonia. There are, moreover, other coins speaking of Philippi as a colony, (the term applied by the Romans to those cities which enjoyed the advantages of Roman citizenship,) and among them one whose legend is COL. AUG. JUL. PHILIP. in full, Colonia Augustia Julia Philippi, intimating that the dignity in question had been bestowed by Julius Cæsar, and confirmed or augmented by Augustus. But except on these coins, the circumstance is noticed by no other writer than St. Luke; whose accuracy, in matters so easily confounded, is thus again brought out by a method as unexceptionable as it is satisfactory and clear. We may add that among the ruins of Thyatira there exists an inscription with the words, OI BAPEIE, (the dyers,) whence we learn that the trade of dyeing was carried on in the city where mention is made of Lydia, “a dealer in purple"; (Acts xvi. 14.) a coincidence of some considerable value.

I omit, en masse, a host of additional particulars; for it is not easy to exhaust the subject now before us, If the student be disposed to prosecute the inquiry, he will find ample materials collected to his hand in the pages of Lardner, Paley, Horne, and others: or if his talent, taste, and opportunities permit it, he may consult original authors, and select for himself the passages bearing on our Scripture narrative. The full force of the argument can only be perceived from the examination of a much larger number of particular instances than my limits will admit of. But its nature will be sufficiently apparent from the few which I have selected, and from these, I think, it will at once be seen that no impostor, writing at random, could possibly have hit on comprehensive and well sustained coincidences of the kind above exemplified. For we have a series of perpetually fluctuating changes, complicated still more by the many petty districts into which the country was divided, extending over a period of about sixty years, and scarce

ly any of them recorded by our writers in direct terms:yet the correctness of every allusion to each of them, so far as we posses the means of testing them, is fully verified, and some of them are only to be explained, by the writings of contemporary historians, whose enmity to Christianity precludes the possibility of collusion.

It is equally clear that no impostor, writing with Josephus before him, would have ventured on such bold apparent contradictions. His credit with men in general would have been too primary an object to allow him rashly to stake it on a manœuvre so precarious; and he would be the last to court a reputation, based only on the vague hope that some skilful advocate would have the sagacity to discover, and be at the pains to point out, these hidden, and if feigned, far-fetched coincidences. But admit that our authors wrote when the events were fresh, and names and allusions were not liable to be mistaken, and what we observe is exactly what we might naturally expect. Artifice was not needed; and it does not appear. The facts spoke for themselves, and required no gloss. The writers fearlessly venture on this or the other political regulation, as they find it, regardless of any consideration as to how it tallies with what they have said before. Without any care to explain seeming inconsistencies, they leave the narrative to vindicate itself, There is no display of an acquired skill in the tangled history of the period; or of their acquaintance with the works of other authors; and the absence of all solicitude, whether openly, or under an adroit disguise, to call the reader's attention to any thing of this kind, or to avoid misrepresentations, carries with it an air of simple honesty too ingenuous to be mistaken. The degree of proof deducible from considerations such as these, would most assuredly be regarded as more than enough to sustain the credibility of any author, ancient or modern; and I scarcely think it will be denied, that the accuracy which distinguishes our books, is to be accounted for, only on the supposition that the writers lived when they are said to have lived and written; were personally acquainted with the countries which they profess to have visited, were actors in the scenes they describe; and were conscious, or rather never staid to reason with themselves as to whether they were conscious, of integrity and truth in every word they wrote.

WE are now prepared to encounter objections based on the discrepancies which, it has been admitted, do exist, in some few instances, between the writers of the New Testament and secular historians. I shall first advert to mere omissions; and then take up the question of discrepancies properly so-called.

Perhaps it would be safe to affirm that no one writer has ever said all that his subject might justly have been made to embrace, even if he have done so much as take in all it ought to comprehend. Each author has his own peculiar object in view, each has laid down for himself some general outline, some definite bounds, which may exclude much that is of general interest, and might be worthy of a place in any literary production. The vastness of almost every subject, the limits prescribed by the circumstances of the writer, the cost of publication, or the taste of the reader, not to mention the many accidents of memory, arrangement, and a thousand other contingences, shut out much that may have been intended, or prepared; and put a practical check upon the expansive tendency of every work intended for general reading. It is not therefore just to demand that every public event, or every allusion to laws and customs, or territorial divisions, shall be explained by the general writers of the period. We must remember, moreover, with reference to events referred to in our Scriptures, but not noticed by other writers, that much which was written in ancient times relating to the period embraced by the New Testament history is lost; and that what we have is not all contemporary history. Livy wrote only to the commencement of Augustus' reign, and Tacitus from that of Tiberius; the interval is filled by Velleius Paterculus, Florus, Plutarch, and others who lived long after the times of which they wrote, and from such materials as they could command. This will at once account for many omissions which would be supplied by more complete sources of information, and might probably explain or set aside some of the few existing difficulties. That no combination of authorities would be found against our books, we cannot take upon ourselves positively to assert; but we are warranted, after the strong case which has been made out in behalf of the sacred penmen, in assuming that such an event is in the highest degree improbable. At all events, under existing circumstances, mere omission, unless it were in

something which would be a leading event to secular historians, so far from being a contradiction, is only what is almost inevitable.

I say, a leading event to secular historians, because in examining either an omission, or a real or apparent discrepancy, it is essential to attend closely to the design, as well as to the character, of the writers we confront. Setting aside the bungling confusion, to say no worse, into which a slovenly or hasty compiler may be betrayed, we shall find Eutropius grouping together incidents in which Plutarch would discern points of difference enough to call for a distribution into many classes. A sentence, or a word, may be all the reference which Cicero or Quinctilian makes to an important fact, detailed in several pages of Livy or Tacitus; and Polybius may leave to be solved by a painful comparison of scattered passages, a geographical problem which is satisfactorily dismissed in a few words by Pomponius Mela, or by Strabo. Again, itis of some moment to consider whether the incident under investigation be introduced on purpose, and by way of direct discussion, or casually and hastily, as an object remote from the writers immediate design, and faintly sketched in, without much thought or care bestowed upon the justness of its outline. The degree and sources of information likely to be accessible to each author, will also form important ingredients in putting together the grounds on which to exercise our judgment; thus, if Josephus and Tacitus differ, as they do sometimes, in their account of the Jewish War, from whatever quarter the latter gleaned his intelligence, inasmuch he was not an eye-witness, and did not write till thirty years after the event; after what has been said of Josephus in a former page, we cannot do wrong in assigning the palm of superior accuracy to him; superlatively eminent as Tacitus unquestionably is in every matter of which he treats.

On the other hand, if we may expect that some incidents mentioned or alluded to in the New Testament will be overlooked by general writers, much more may we expect that many particulars recorded by general writers will be omitted in the New Testament; for while the subject of the one class of writers led them to the direct mention of public men, and public events, the other was composing memoirs of men of the humblest rank, in no way concerned in the government of their country. A biographer has, except in a comparatively few cases, very little to do with public affairs,

R