EXTRACT OF A NOTICE OF PROFESSOR GREENLEAF ON THE FOUR GOSPELS, OCTOBER 24, 1846, IN “THE NEW YORK OBSERVER.”

The Author is a lawyer, very learned in his profession, acute, critical and used to raising and meeting practical doubts. Author of a treatise on the law of evidence, which has already become a classic in the hands of the profession which he adorns, and teaches in one of the Law Seminaries which do honour to our country in the eyes of Europe, he brings rare qualifications for the task he assumes. That he [pg iv] should, with the understanding and from the heart, accept the Gospel as the truth, avow it as his Hope, and seek to discharge a duty to his fellow-men by laying before them the grounds on which he founds this acceptance and this hope, are cheering circumstances to the Christian, and present strong appeals to the indifferent.

To his profession, to the lawyers of the country, however, this work makes a strong appeal. They are a very secular profession. Their business is almost wholly conversant with material interests. Their time is absorbed in controversies, of passion, or of interest. Acute, critical, and disputatious, they apparently present a field unpropitious for the acceptance of a religion, spiritual, disinterested, and insisting on perfect holiness. Still, they necessarily need to know and must enforce the rules of finding truth and justice; the principles for ascertaining truth and dispensing justice are the great subjects of all their discussions, so far as they are discussions of any general principle. From this cause it is, that this profession has numbered among its members, in every age, Christians of great eminence, and in our own day and country, we cannot turn to the eminent men of this profession in any large community, without the satisfaction of finding our Faith embraced by those whose habits of practical as well as speculative investigation render them evidently the best able to appreciate its claims and to detect any imperfections in its proof.

So we trust it always may be; and we are assured that the best models of the mode of investigating matters of legal controversy as the proof of facts, are writings on the evidences. Paley's treatise and that of Chalmers, on the oral testimony in favour of Christ's mission, Paley's examination of the writings of the apostle Paul, are, we are assured, the best models extant for forming the habit of examining oral and documentary evidence. These are subjects on which it is of vital importance, in a secular view, that a lawyer's habits should be right: in a spiritual view the importance is unspeakable. Mr. Greenleaf has doubtless felt this truth, and has also felt that his position would give to his labours some authority with his brethren and with the public. He has given himself honourably to the labour, and spread its results before the world.

It is long since Infidelity has found its advocates among the truly learned. Among the guesses and speculations of a small portion of unsanctified medical men, she still finds now and then a champion. Historians and philosophers have long since discussed her pretensions. And now from the Jurists and Lawyers, the practical masters of this kind of investigation, works are appearing, whereby not only an earnest reception of the Gospel is manifested, but the mode and means of action and of credit by which all human affairs are governed.

We lose in respect to our own investigations on this subject by its very sacredness. We have an idle dread, that it is not open to free investigation: to severe practical tests. We need to be invited, to be pressed to examine this subject freely. Dr. Chalmers in one department of this inquiry has led the way. Mr. Greenleaf in another has also presented an example. And it will not be competent, after these men have thus investigated and taught the rules and laws of investigation, for any man who is not willing to arrogate superior claims to learning and ability, to turn aside superciliously from an examination of the Gospels.

Such are our views of this work, which we commend to all: to the legal profession, from the character of its topics and the rank of its author: to men desirous of knowledge, in every rank in life, because of its presenting this subject under such a treatment as every-day practical questions are treated with. [pg v] It does not touch the intrinsic evidences of the Gospel: those which to the believer are, after all, the highest proofs. But it is to be remembered, that these are proofs which are not satisfactory until an examination of the outward evidences has led men to the conviction, that the Gospels cannot be false.

FROM THE “NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.”

Professor Greenleaf on the Gospels, and Strauss' “Life of Jesus.”—Of course we place the titles of these two books together only by way of contrast. They relate, it is true, to the same general subject; but it is hard to conceive of two works more unlike in their scope, character, and purpose. The object of the one is to prove, and of the other to disprove, the Christian religion. The one is the production of an able and profound lawyer, a man who has grown grey in the halls of justice and the schools of jurisprudence,—a writer of the highest authority on legal subjects, whose life has been spent in weighing testimony and sifting evidence, and whose published opinions on the rules of evidence are received as authoritative in all the English and American tribunals,—for fourteen years the highly respected colleague of the late Mr. Justice Story, and now the honoured head of the most distinguished and prosperous school of English law in the world. The other is the work of a German professor and speculatist, also profoundly learned in his way,—an ingenious and erring framer of theories of the most striking character, almost unheard of till his brain either conceived them or gave them currency, though relating to topics with which men have been familiar for eighteen centuries,—a subtle controversialist, whose work, as he himself avows, is deeply tinged with the most strongly marked peculiarities of the philosophy and theology of his countrymen. We presume the most ardent admirer of Dr. Strauss will not object to our characterising the two works as excellent specimens, the one of clear and shrewd English common sense, the other of German erudition, laborious diligence, and fertility in original speculation. And if the subject of inquiry were one that involved his own temporal and immediate interests, and it were necessary to determine which of these two writers would give the wiser and safer counsel, or the more trustworthy opinion, we suppose the same person would agree with us in making the choice.