The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If you see a spacious and beautiful house, you could not be induced to believe, even though you could not see its master, that is was built by mice and weasels.&nbsp; [Likewise] even man’s intelligence must lead us to infer the existence of a mind … of surpassing ability, and in fact divine.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When we see something moved by machinery, like an orrery or clock or many other such things, we do not doubt these contrivances are the work of reason; when therefore we behold the whole compass of the heaven moving with revolutions of marvelous velocity and executing with perfect regularity the annual changes of the seasons with absolute safety and security for all things, how can we doubt that all this is effected not merely by reason, but by a reason that is transcendent and divine?</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Were all the planets as swift as Mercury, or as slow as Saturn or his satellites; or were there several velocities otherwise much greater or less than they are, as they might have been, had they arose from any other cause than their gravities; or had the distances from the centers about which they move been greater or less than they are, with the same velocities; or had the quantity of matter in the sun, or in Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth, and, by consequence, their gravitating power, had been greater or less that it is; the primary planets could not have revolved about the sun, nor the secondary ones about Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth, in concentric circles, as they do, but would have moved in hyperbolas, or parabolas, or in ellipses very eccentric.&nbsp; To make the system, therefore, with all its motions, required a cause which understood and compared together the quantities of matter of the several bodies of the sun and planets, and the gravitating powers resulting from thence; the several distances of the primary planets from the sun, and the secondary ones from Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth; and the velocities with which these planets could revolve about those quantities of matter in the central bodies; and to compare and adjust all these things together, in so great a variety of bodies, argues that cause to be, not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">stone</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">, and were asked how the stone came there.&nbsp; I might possibly answer, that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer.&nbsp; But suppose I had found a </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">watch</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> upon the ground … I should hardly think of the answer I had before given … Yet why should this answer not serve for the watch as well as the stone …?&nbsp; For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive — what we could not discover in the stone — that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Least of all do I accept his [Lewis’] reasoning, which is so pathetic as to defy description and which takes his two false alternatives as exclusive antitheses, and then uses them to fashion a crude non sequitur.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">References to Jesus outside the New Testament tend to confirm what we read in the gospels, but they don’t really tell us anything </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">new</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> … What this means is that despite all the hoopla, the documents contained in the New Testament are our primary sources for the life of Jesus.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Even were we to suppose that no prior prophetic witnesses existed pertaining to Christ and the Church, what person would not be immediately impelled to believe that the divine splendor had burst forth upon humanity, when he sees how false gods are now abandoned and their images smashed, their temples destroyed or put to another use, and the empty rituals for so long part of human habit discontinued, while the one true God is invoked by the whole human race?&nbsp; And all this took place through one man who was mocked, arrested, bound, scourged, beaten, insulted, crucified, scorned and put to death!</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The evidence of our Savior’s mission from heaven is so great, in the multitude of miracles that he did, before all sorts of people, that what he delivered cannot but be received as the oracles of God, and unquestionable verity.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition … it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things …&nbsp;</em></p>