The very sobriety of his own preface ought to put us on our guard against attaching to St. Luke’s history such weight, for example, as we attach to the history of Thucydides. He says, it is true, that he had “traced the course of all things accurately from the first, _i.e._ from the commencement of Christ’s life:” but this amounts to much less than the statement of Thucydides, who tells us that he had personally inquired from those who knew the facts, besides having seen some of the facts himself (Thuc. i. 22). He does not say that “the eye-witnesses and ministers of the word” had given _him_ any special information: on the contrary he mentions himself only as one of many who had received “traditions” from eye-witnesses, and he implies that a good many of the existing narratives, _based upon these very traditions_, were at least so far unsatisfactory that they did not dispense with an additional narrative from him. The emphasis which St. Luke lays on the fact that he has traced things “from the first,” and that he writes “in order,”—combined with the mention of “many” predecessors who have “taken in hand” the work which he intends to do over again—makes it almost certain that some of these Evangelists had omitted all account of our Lord’s birth; others had not regarded chronological order; others had not written “accurately.” All these deficiencies indicate a great and general difficulty in obtaining exact information; and the mere honesty of a new attempt, under circumstance so disadvantageous, cannot justify us in attaching a very high authority to a tradition in this new Gospel, of a miraculous character, and in a style that appears to be not St. Luke’s own, referring to an incident supposed to have occurred upwards of sixty years before. This digression about St. Luke’s Gospel will not be without its use if it leads you to perceive that history, and experience, and criticism, while they tend to make us believe more, tend also to make us know less, about Christ’s life and doctrine; I mean, that we find we know a little less about the historical facts of Christ’s life than we supposed we knew, while we are led to believe a great deal more in the divine depth and wisdom of His ideas.