If subsequent inquiries should bring to our knowledge, one
after another, letters written by some of the principal agents in the
business, upon the business, and during the time of their activity and
concern in it, assuming all along and recognising the original story,
agitating the questions that arose out of it, pressing the obligations
which resulted from it, giving advice and directions to these who acted
upon it; I conceive that we should find, in every one of these, a still
further support to the conclusion we had formed. At present, the weight
of this successive confirmation is, in a great measure; unperceived by
us. The evidence does not appear to us what it is; for, being from our
infancy accustomed to regard the New Testament as one book, we see in it
only one testimony. The whole occurs to us as a single evidence; and its
different parts not as distinct attestations, but as different portions
only of the same. Yet in this conception of the subject we are certainly
mistaken; for the very discrepancies among the several documents which
form our volume prove, if all other proof were wanting, that in their
original composition they were separate, and most of them independent
productions.
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