investigations--to regard the Apocalypse as written in the current language familiar to the people of the

time, and not as expressed in a peculiar and artificial Christian language: the term "artificial" is required,

because, if the Christians used a kind of language different from that of the ordinary population, it must

have been artificial.

Nor are the thoughts --one might almost say, though the expression must not be misapplied or interpreted in

a way different from what is intended--nor are the thoughts of the Christian books alien from and unfamiliar

to the period when they were written. They stand in the closest relation to the period. They are made for it:

they suit it: they are determined by it.

We take the same view about all the books of the New Testament. They spring from the circumstances of

their period, whatever it was in each case; they are suited to its needs; in a way they think its thoughts, but

think them in a new form and on a higher plane; they answer the questions which men were putting, and the

answers are expressed in the language which was used and understood at the time. Hence, in the first place,

their respective dates can be assigned with confidence, provided we understand the history and familiarise

ourselves with the thoughts and ways of the successive periods. No one, who is capable of appreciating the

tone and thought of different periods, could place the composition of any of the books of the New

Testament in the time of the Antonines, unless he were imperfectly informed of the character and spirit of

that period; and the fact that some modern scholars have placed them (or some of them) in that period

merely shows with what light-hearted haste some writers have proceeded to decide on difficult questions of

literary history without the preliminary training and the acquisition of knowledge imperatively required

before a fair judgment could be pronounced.

From this close relation of the Christian books to the time in which they originated, arises, e.g., the

marvellously close resemblance between the language used about the birth of the divine Augustus and the

language used about the birth of Christ. In the words current in the Eastern Provinces, especially in the

great and highly educated and "progressive" cities of Asia, shortly before the Christian era, the day of the

birth of the (Imperial) God was the beginning of all things; it inaugurated for the world the glad tidings that

came through him; through him there was peace on earth and sea: the Providence, which orders every part

of human life, brought Augustus into the world, and filled him with the virtue to do good to men: he was the

Saviour of the race of men, and so on. Some of these expressions became, so to say, stereotyped for the

Emperors in general, especially the title "Saviour of the race of men," and phrases about doing good to

mankind; others we re more peculiarly the property of Augustus.

All this was not merely the language of courtly panegyric. It was in a way thoroughly sincere, with all the

sincerity that the people of that overdeveloped and precocious time, with their artificial, highly stimulated,

rather feverish intellect, were capable of feeling. But the very resemblance--so startling, apparently, to those

who are suddenly confronted with a good example of it --is the best and entirely sufficient proof that the idea

and narrative of the b irth of Christ could not be a growth of mythology at a later time, even during the period

about AD 60-100, but sprang from the conditions and thoughts, and expressed itself in the words, of the

period to which it professes to belong. It is to a great extent on this and similar evidence that the present

writer has based his confident and unhesitating opinion as to the time of origin of the New Testament

books, ever since he began to understand the spirit and language of the period. Before he began to

appreciate them, he accepted the then fashionable view that they were second century works.

But so far removed are some scholars from recognising the true bearing of these facts, and the true relation

of the New Testament to the life and thought of its own time, that probably the fashionable line of argument

will soon be that the narrative of the Gospels was a mere imitation of the popular belief about the birth of

Augustus, and necessarily took its origin during the time when that popular belief was strong, viz., during

the last thirty years of his reign. The belief died with him, and would cease to influence thought within a few

years after his death: he was a god only for his lifetime (though a pretence was made of worshipping all the

deceased Emperors who were properly deified by decree of the Senate): even in old age it is doubtful if he

continued to make the same impression on his people, but as soon as he died a new god took his place. New