If it had
occurred fifty years ago, any man or woman of sixty-five would perfectly
remember the change. If it had occurred within the last hundred years,
any person of sixty-five could bear testimony to the fact that, when he
first began to be instructed in the nature of the Church Services he was
told by his elders that up to a time which they could perfectly
recollect certain selections from Scripture had been read in Church, but
that at such a period during their lifetime a change had been brought
about after certain public debates, and that it received such or such
opposition and was not at once universally adopted, which change was the
reading in public of the present selection. It is clear then, that if
all public documents were destroyed, yet any two men, who could scarcely
be called old men, would be able to transmit with perfect certainty the
record of any change in the public reading of Scripture during the last
one hundred years.
But, supposing that instead of a change in the mere selections from the
Gospels, the very Gospels themselves had been changed, could such a
thing have occurred unnoticed, and the memory of it be so absolutely
forgotten that neither history nor tradition preserved the smallest hint
of it at the end of a short century?
Now this, and far more than this, is what the author of "Supernatural
Religion" asks his readers to believe throughout his whole work.
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